magpie's shiny things

shiny things in messy little piles

Archives for July 2010

Morning Linkage (Jul 8)

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Riding into the sunshine.

Ride the hyper­bole express to a dingy Paris base­ment and col­lec­tion of aston­ish­ing vin­tage bikes.  Clicking on any one of the links leads to a lust pro­vok­ing gallery of the named bike. Including a Model 18 Norton, A Sunbeam Model 9, 1926 Ridge Special, and so many more.

Worse eclec­ti­cism than some of my posts. mish­mash of motos from the guy who climbed the fame lad­der with his 10 most dan­ger­ous roads in the world list.

Autotopia’s list of 12 desir­able sta­tion wag­ons. Littered with mod­ern bland­ness but a few gems - the Vista Cruiser, the Saab 95, and a fab Chevy Nomad.

… and an addi­tion that could eas­ily replace any of the mod­ern lux­ury car man­u­fac­turer boring-​mobiles in the orig­i­nal list. The Citroen DS Safari.

Science

Cryptoforestry and the Return of the Repressed. How could you write a bet­ter head­line? As any­one with a lit­tle bit of prop­erty can tell you, nature will out and the forests will return — to the odd­est places.

Marine biol­ogy. Giant crab moves out of a too small shell. Awesome clip.

Art, Images, and Design

Pianos have been appear­ing ran­domly in NYC. I’m always aston­ished at how many of the peo­ple play but I didn’t know. Play Me I’m Yours.

Urban Sketcher Tommy Kane drew one — of course.

Peskimo are best known for their vinyl toys. This year they’re doing the poster and sig­nage for the Mozilla Summit. Dollars to donuts these lit­tle direc­tional signs dis­ap­pear in an instant.

From Ellis Nadler via Journey Round My Skull to Coil House. The Cards of Wu. (I just wanted to write some­thing with more words cap­i­tal­ized than lower case.)

Charming, but to eyes raised on the edi­tions of Tolkein’s books with his own illus­tra­tions  these  illus­tra­tions from the Russian edi­tion of the Hobbit are off kil­ter. Bonus video at the end of a children’s show based on the books — you’ll rec­og­nize the scenes. Gollum is wicked good.

soakin’ in the heat, lovin’ it.

Morning Linkage (Jul 7)

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The Art/​Science of Getting There

The quad goes fully enclosed to make a highly mobile fire­fight­ing plat­form. The Amatoya is con­sid­er­ably big­ger than you’re going to assume when you first look at the pic­tures. Lots of inter­est­ing tech employed, like aero­gel insu­lated win­dows.  (thx tou­can)
http://​www​.yankode​sign​.com/​2​0​0​9​/​1​1​/​2​6​/​t​h​e​-​s​t​o​r​y​-​o​f​-​a​m​a​toya/

Mitch Boehm holds forth on BikeEXIF on the Yamaha DT-​1. For many of you this is a nice reminder of the excite­ment the DT-​1 caused when it was released. For oth­ers it will be a look at might arguably be the ori­gin of the dual pur­pose bike and the sport of adven­ture tour­ing.

The offi­cial promo for 2011 Dakar.

Culture and Living

50’s Kabul — not what you think it will be like.

Air-​delivered city in a crate, the prod­uct of the merger of two vastly dif­fer­ent busi­nesses: expe­di­tion orga­niz­ing and con­struct. So many pos­si­bil­i­ties for com­merce and human­i­tar­ian aid.

Technology

Archival stor­age of dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion is ham­pered by the short lifes­pan of most record­ing tech­nolo­gies. Tamper-​proof col­lec­tion and stor­age of dig­i­tal infor­ma­tion is fraught with pit­falls. These WORM SD cards are a big step in solv­ing both prob­lems. Also a sim­pler answer to the Iron Butt no more Polaroid dilemma than the cur­rent dance of the SD cards. WORM — Write Once Read Many

Art, Images, and Design

Very ornate french chest, but yeah, I’d find a place for this in my house.

Cardboard steam punk. A card­board col­lec­tion of gears and levers. It doesn’t do much but it does it nicely.

Pretty, creepy. Pretty creepy. Japanese sur­re­al­ist painter Tetsuya Ishida makes the claus­tro­pho­bic side of Japanese cul­ture vis­i­ble.

Japanese mon­sters. I’ve done some­thing like this before? Worth hav­ing a look at some more then.

Animation

Animated paint chips. Commercials for Sherwin Williams use paint chips to make lit­tle scenes and inspire you to get out the brushes and rollers.

keep calm and carry on,

-lara–

–
It’s always some­thing.

Morning Linkage lives at http://​shiny​mag​pie​.net

Morning Linkage (Jul 6)

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Transportation

Oregon race­way park — extreme shifter cart. Though 800 pounds makes it some­thing other than a go-​cart IMO.
http://​www​.wired​.com/​a​u​t​o​p​i​a​/​2​0​1​0​/​0​6​/​p​a​l​a​t​o​v​-​m​o​t​o​r​s​p​o​r​t​s​-dp4/

More extreme. These cars (and bikes) look like car­toon char­ac­ters. In part because they spring from Japans otaku cul­ture.

Examples of boso­zoku bikes are a lit­tle harder to find but here’s a cou­ple. (Nice non boso-​Morowaki 600RR smack in the mid­dle of the thread.)

And for some­thing sooth­ing. Bernardet pro­duced a very com­mon and suc­cess­ful line of scoot­ers in France in the late 40s and the 50s. But from 1921 until 1940 they pro­duced rac­ing and street side­cars. Scroll down to see some wicked rac­ers.

Science

Science of pretty. How do but­ter­fly wings get their color?

More sci­ence of pretty. How do fire­flies light up?

A slightly dif­fer­ent view on the prob­lem of lag­ging sci­ence inno­va­tion in the US. It’s not the edu­ca­tion it’s the jobs.

Art, Images, and Design

Peter Taylor’s round lit­tle fel­lows with pat­terns and swirly pret­ties. Jolly. (NSFW bare car­toon butts)

Only the shadow knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men. The rest of us just assumed that the aver­age beach going kid has a bit of mon­ster in their heart.

Edmund Dulac illus­trated many books in the 30’s Here is a set of scans from Treasure Island. Soft clear col­ors and charm­ing images.

Perhaps you could also look at his illus­tra­tion for the Rubaiyat. Much darker and lush.

Animation

This is another one of those “how could I pos­si­bly write a bet­ter intro than Meredith wrote?” items. Czech children’s film — Kooky’s Return. I can’t. Just watch.

wel­come back to the real™ world

Morning Linkage (Jul 5)

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Transportation

Muscle car mad­ness doesn’t seem to be going away. If you can’t afford the ride of your teenage dreams, maybe this print “Plymouth” by Kareem Rizk will make up for it. A lit­tle.

What does it mean that the best look­ing cus­tom work on Japanese bikes is com­ing out of Europe and the best cus­tom work on American bikes is com­ing out of Japan? Another great Harley cus­tom, this one from Ace Motorcycles. The details, look at the head­light bracket, cap­ti­vate me.

A photo-​tag Ace Motorcycles on a Japanese site. Ace itself has no web­site but one of their fans has put a bunch of pics on his blog fortytwo. and trans­lated…

Science and Technology

Geo-​thermal heat­ing — not just for green build­ing. The first users of geot­her­mal heat­ing may have been dinosaurs look­ing for a way to keep very large eggs at a per­fect, con­stant tem­per­a­ture.

You know how you never have enough bowls for that chili party but the next week­end there’s not enough plates for the BBQ? Somehow own­ing 24 set­tings of din­ner­ware just for the occa­sional moment when you need that many soups plates, doesn’t seem prac­ti­cal. And where are you going to keep all that china? What if you had 40 flat discs in a cup­board that could turn into what-​ever size and shape of dish you need at the moment?

Bug-​eyed. 6 macro pho­tos of insect optics. Cool enough for wall-​paper or desk­top. It’s nice to see the species iden­ti­fied on pho­tos like these.

I hate bat­ter­ies. I hate putting bat­ter­ies in my gad­gets. I can’t see the dan­ged lit­tle draw­ings that tell me which end to put in first. But now I don’t have to look. Two bat­ter­ies, in any old way, will get the job done. Did some­one say Microsoft doesn’t do hard­ware well?

Art, Images, Illustration (and Food)

Not the most com­plex recipe I’ve seen on They Draw, They Cook. But one of the sweet­est, most sum­mery so far.

A tree museum. Really. Using hard­scape ele­ments to high­light the unique attrib­utes of spec­i­men trees. Nice photo cat­a­log of orna­men­tal trees as well. Too bad Switzerland is so far away.

Black wal­nut and weath­ered metal make an ele­gant if some­what oddly con­structed desk. It’s the com­bi­na­tion of the mate­ri­als that attracts me.

Animation

It’s a three-​day-​weekend Monday so you have no excuse not to sit down and watch each and every one of the the clips pro­vided in this trib­ute to Ray Harryhausen. The genius behind the sum­mer camp, rainy after­noon, enter­tain­ment of my youth.

Now go away and look at some­thing inter­est­ing.