magpie's shiny things

shiny things in messy little piles

Archives for May 2010

Morning Linkage (May 19)

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Transportation

Bridgestone pro­vides two videos that explain the tire pro­gram for MotoGP.  Lots of you all know this stuff but the vids make a good intro­duc­tion for the unini­ti­ated.

I love my Benz, but per­haps not enough to get me up in this Eurocoptor/​MB col­lab­o­ra­tion. Luxo traf­fic beater.

In 2011 the Dakar Rally will once again be held in South America. Rally dates and routes were released recently. Looks like a great tour through Chile and Argentina.

Science and Tech

This arti­cle on open soft­ware offers another inter­est­ing visu­al­iza­tion of the process of cre­at­ing soft­ware. Open soft­ware is some­times said to ‘evolve’ but does it? And  does that evo­lu­tion mimic the evo­lu­tion of bio­log­i­cal enti­ties? Informatists Marc Gerstein co-​wrote a study com­par­ing the net­worked infor­ma­tion trans­fers involved in the change processes of E. coli and Linux. Interesting con­clu­sions.

Another use for LEDs. Guitar picks. Seriously. A mini-​light show in your liv­ing room.

Password secu­rity is a right royal pain. Either you can remem­ber the dan­ged thing XOR it’s secure — rarely can you have both. And writ­ing your pass­words down on a cheat sheet is a big no-​no. Unless your cheat sheet is some­thing like this. It may take you a few min­utes to fig­ure out how this is sup­posed to work. But it’s both sim­ple and inge­nious.

Art, Images, and Design

Take some of the best street art being done today, add a pho­tog­ra­pher with an eye for line and color in his por­trait work and you have Gabriel Mendes’ Urban Puns. Bold, bright, and bit­ing. 8th image down NSFW.

My own, sim­ple as I can make it, web­site isn’t per­haps the best exam­ple to use for the geo-​citieizer but hey this is my list of links so I’ll use my web­site. (Results are some­what ran­dom. If you don’t think it’s too bad try the link again in another tab.) Try mess­ing with your own site by using the gen­er­a­tor.

Bonus bike and choco­late combo link today. “This motor­cy­cle runs on choco­late but needs to be parked in the deep-​freezer when tem­per­a­tures are not ade­quate.” nuff said.

Alexis Grotius’ sum­mer bike is pretty cool as well. Except that it’s creepy.

Morning Linkage (May 18)

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Transportation

I’m not sure why you’d con­vert a ’73 TX650 to a mono­shock rear but I’m mad for the paint scheme. Tres chic.

Okay, this is weird. A cus­tom shop in Italy that builds on mod­ern Royal Enfields. Italy, India, exotic? (Royal McQueen)

One of the nicest look­ing motard con­cepts I’ve seen (this week). Oberdan Bezzi does Bimota.

Society, Culture, and Literature

Therefore Repent! is a post-​rapture graphic novel. What if after the rap­ture the world con­tin­ues along it’s merry way, except that some­things are a lit­tle odd, like magic starts to work? And then there are the aveng­ing angels… The link is to the .pdf.  Alternative for­mats avail­able as well.  Where they’re talk­ing about the next novel in the series. By Jim Munro and Salgood Sam.

A hand­ful of draw­ings for inven­tions that we don’t know we need. Auto-​abandonment zones being the first of sev­eral good ideas.

Science, Technology, and Gadgets

Thank heaven for Wired sci­ence. Taking the inter­est­ing things stuck behind Nature’s pay-​wall and bring­ing them out for the rest of us to see.

Networks are gen­er­ally resilient, that’s why they develop. But what hap­pens if you net­work net­works? You get frag­ile. A recent report in Nature demon­strate this with exam­ples from the Italian power grid fail­ure and stock mar­kets crash in 1987.

Art, Images, and Design

A cam­era, some paper, and a pen­cil. Overlaid real­i­ties that act as x-​rays into the world we don’t quite live in.

A boat load of images of the Virgin or some­thing like her. Many taken from the cock-​odd world of fash­ion styling. The zom­bie expres­sion on the face of the sec­ond LaCroix bride would scare any man away from the altar. Blasphemy abounds, but don’t skip it. There are trea­sures like the images by Lorri Lipton and Ron English.

Sam Brewster rocks a cool style that hints at hav­ing used a lot of mark­ers grow­ing up. Commercial work that comes with a sense of humor built in. I swear that fish is gri­mac­ing.

off you go my freaky dar­lings.

Morning Linkage (May 17)

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Transportation

Photographers Guerry and Prat (no web­site yet) are mak­ing very spe­cial por­traits of very spe­cial bikes. This Vincent Rapid is swoon wor­thy.

Equally black and ele­gant look­ing is this ’68 CB450 K1 also shot by Guerry and Prat.

Rumor has it… and the prices have been announced. Buell race machines from $16,900. Also “Erik Buell Racing is report­ing that is has a few track­day bikes…” for $10,500 get yours now.

Tech and Gadgets

Code Swarm is a soft­ware project visu­al­iza­tion tool. Not a visu­al­iza­tion of the code, but of the team and it’s func­tion­ing as revealed by the activ­ity in the source code con­trol sys­tem.

It’s a lit­tle bit out of order, but here’s the code swarm view of the ilomilo game devel­op­ment project. If you look down in Art, Images, and Design you can find the trailer for the game.

Art, Images, and Design

Anamorphic pub­lic art isn’t new. But the sim­ple, brush-​stroke based lines used to cre­ate these illu­sions are so much less aggres­sive and threat­en­ing that the charm just oozes. Toronto sub­way sys­tem.

Ilomilo — a new xbox game for the pas­tel rompers set. But oh my the lovely graph­ics. I gotta agree with the gent on boing-​boing who said he wanted the floppy eared dog fish as a plushy toy. Trailer (Music)

Someones very sassy grandma. Vintage sum­mer photo.

happy zom­bie day…

Morning Linkage (May 14)

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Transportation

Wretched excess, the new Porsche 911.

Would you leave this under­stated beauty behind if you were mov­ing over­seas? I think not.

Looking a bit too much like Wolverine in squidly guise, hold­ing a white china tea cup, and rat­tling on. Road racer Guy Martin gives the BBC an inter­view and you get a snicker. (There’s a lovely easter egg in the video. Check the com­ments.)

Science

Yeah, we put some sharks in our aquar­ium. We don’t think they’ll eat a whole lot of the exhibit. Uh huh. Look at what ate the shark. Ignore the ‘scary’ nar­ra­tion, the images aren’t gross, just fas­ci­nat­ing. (homage to schneier)

Truly ran­dom num­bers are the holy grail of cryp­tog­ra­phy. Quantum physics may be the answer. Isn’t QP the answer to every­thing? So now there are 42 truly ran­dom num­bers. Maybe — or not. IO9 tries to explain how it works and why it mat­ters. Violation of Bell inequal­i­ties… My head hurts.

Art, Images, and Design

These are so silly and so cute. Masaku Hori ‘s lit­tle wait­ing dogs that hold your fruit.

Fab black and white dou­ble por­trait: Joe  Lewis and Josephine Baker.

Animation (Sorta)

Rule 34: If you can think of it there is porn of it on the ‘net. Better than Rule 34: Batman porno. Not the Dark Knight bat­man, the late 60’s campy TV ver­sion. Complete with cheesy car­toons bal­loons that say Pop and Pow. Stunningly, this trailer is SFW.

… and that’s the end your week with the mag­pie.

Morning Linkage (May 13)

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Transportation

The designs of Chris Vetter — urk, um, well…  Love him or hate him, this one is as extreme as they get. The Mystery KZ1000. (Hint fol­low the link to see what Vetter road to Quail.)

One for my guys. Marissa Miller, Harley-​Davidsons, pho­tos and video. She kinda bab­bles in the vid but no-​one is actu­ally lis­ten­ing to the audio any­way,

Cloud com­put­ing gone hor­ri­bly awry. Ford’s Tweeting Car Embarks on American Journey 2.0 The killing shot?

“Auto“matic Blog. You knew it would come to this — the car, @AJtheFiesta , will blog  or tweet from the road using info gleaned from var­i­ous vehi­cle data sen­sors and engine com­puter codes (stuff the car already has any­way). Zipping along a wind­ing road? The car might tweet that it’s hav­ing fun. Slogging through rush-​hour traf­fic with the wipers on? The car will let the world know it’s not at all happy. “Either way, we wanted to allow the car to become a blog­ger,” Giuli said.

Yes, I know it’s lazy to use a pull quote, but how could I have pos­si­bly writ­ten any­thing that would top that ?

Science

More clues about the lives and evo­lu­tion of those utterly cool feath­ered dinosaurs.

Just a gen­tle reminder from Mother Nature. We humans have no idea what’s going on in the oceans, None. Recently a grey whale was sighted off the coast of Israel. There haven’t been grey whales in the Atlantic ocean in over a cen­tury. Or so we thought.

Crows are very smart. Sam here is going to prove it to you. Using a tool, to get a tool, to get another tool, in order to pry the treat out of the box.

Art, Images, and Design

The answer to the ques­tion “Why do all those cute Japanese car­toon girls wear pink?” is in this dia­gram. As well the notion that blue is asso­ci­ated with trou­ble in Native America cul­tures and South America. Kinda explains my eye color…

Ric Ocasek — yes of the Cars — had his first ever gallery show of his draw­ings last month. Teahead Scraps presents 22 col­or­ful, doo­d­ely sketch pad won­ders. Prints avail­able.

Another stun­ning set of images from the NYT Lensblog. Little known to mod­ern pho­tog­ra­phy lovers, Fredrick W, Glasier doc­u­mented the world of the cir­cus in the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tury. View the slide show on a full screen. Well worth get­ting a fresh cup of cof­fee for.

onward and upwards my dears