magpie's shiny things

shiny things in messy little piles

Month: September 2010 (Page 2 of 3)

Morning Linakge (Sep 10)

September 10, 2010 /

Three sets of pho­tographs today.

From Chile — a set by Big Pic­ture of the scene of the col­lapse of the San Jose cop­per and gold mine. Humanity.

What we eat — if we’re on the ground in a com­bat zone. MRE’s of the nations. Click each pack­age for a look at the con­tents. Com­fort food is very cul­tur­al. (the relat­ed essay is behind the reg­is­ter wall. it’s worth a throw away email address.)

Nation­al Geo­graph­ic will pre­miere a new spe­cial “Night of the Lion” on Sept 13th — in the UK — sigh. all sorts of cool pho­to­graph­ic tech­nol­o­gy was used to catch lions doing what lions do at night. (Video clips and pho­to galleries.)

And that’s it for a week or so. There will be dai­ly blog­gage at Ms. Shoes blog. The usu­al trip reports with pho­tos and gal­leries. Links will be post­ed here.

Take good care of your­selves while I’m gone ;-)

Morning Linkage (Sep 9)

September 9, 2010 /

Transportation

Rumors abound. And now there are pic­tures. The US Gran Prix cir­cuit in Austin TX.

A 1943 WLC (that’s a Harley-Davidson) has been sit­ting since 1950 wait­ing for some guy’s grand­son. Now it’s out of the base­ment in the hands of James of Jamesville Cus­toms. Hope­ful­ly for a straight for­ward min­i­mal restora­tion. It’s so love­ly just the way it is.

Yeah, real­ly. Where is the CB1100? Now that’s a per­fect­ly plain bike that I’d give house space.

Two dash­ing fel­lows and a trail­er of bikes. Jack and Frank Chiswell raced speed­ways in Britain in the 1930’s. Googling will get you bits and pieces of their history.

Food

We all know it’s all about the draw­ings on They Draw, They Cook. Two nice­ly illus­trat­ed recipes for fall dish­es. Lentils and sausage by Jonathan Hawk­er… and a mush­room and pea risot­to by Weef.

Art, Images, and Design

Clichéd peas­ant girls. Hun­gar­i­an painter Oszkar Glatz depicts ide­al­ized young­sters. His palette is wonderful.

Mov­able archi­tec­ture, rit­u­al build­ings, and camp­ing. From Sau­di Aram­co World, an essay on the tent cities of Cen­tral Asia. Most of the images are click­able for larg­er views.

I point­ed you all to Male­on­n’s circus-themed, fairy­tale images about a year ago. There’s anoth­er fine set of sur­re­al pho­tographs called Sec­ond Hand Tang Poem, reviewed by Wurzel­tod. Also avail­able in larg­er size in a flash gallery:

Animation

A lit­tle music to enhance your day. Make a Blues Song. A per­fect use of Flash to dri­ve a lit­tle browser-based app. Com­pose a blues song and hear it played just for you (or share your creation.)

until tomor­row then my dears,

Morning Linkage (Sep 8)

September 8, 2010 /

Transportation

Stun­ning indeed. I love the red cra­dle frame and the squat mush­roomy tank. Tri­umph.

You will, no doubt, have an opin­ion. I think the mechan­i­cals are inter­est­ing and the paint abominable.

Some­times a sim­ple clean up and sort a few details job turns into a real remake/remodel. Espe­cial­ly when the “run­ning” part of the advert was, well, opti­mistic. Some­times that remake turns out to be way more spe­cial than a sim­ple spruc­ing up could ever have been. A 1957 BSA B31 becomes a Club­man Gold­star Replica.

Unset­tling views of a beam that need­ed repair on the Taco­ma Nar­rows Bridge. I hat­ed dri­ving over it before. I may nev­er cross is again. (WS-DOT con­tin­ues to pub­lish inter­est­ing stuff on its blog and on flickr .)

Science

Sunspots are the celes­tial weath­er machines that dri­ve our atmos­phere (hyper­bole alert.) The Big Bear Solar Obser­va­to­ry cap­tured the best-so-far real light image of a sunspot recent­ly. It’s like a black hole in the sun. Very cool. There’s more inter­est­ing stuff at the obser­va­to­ry’s web­site includ­ing lots of raw data. I haven’t a clue what to do with the data but I want to applaud that it’s there, freely avail­able to any­one who cares to use it.

Art, Images, and Design

Anoth­er delight­ful lit­tle build­ing. This one per­fect for a bib­lio­phile with a tiny bit of a back yard. The Read­ing Nest would have been a per­fect hide away for the 13-year-old me. The Read­ing Nest is pre­fab and you can see pho­tos of one being trucked in and placed on site on the web­site of the architects.

Good­ly Crea­ture by Leah Palmer Preiss. A vin­tage feel and form but a mod­ern imag­i­nary ani­mal. Details of the Good­ly Crea­ture’s cre­ation on her blog, Curi­ous Art Lab.

Pop-ups, fairy tales, and an ani­mat­ed trail­er for a book. What could be bet­ter? Il Etait Une Fois, to be pub­lished in Novem­ber, illus­trates a hand­ful of fairy tales with com­plex pop-ups of cru­cial scenes. I par­tic­u­lar­ly like the play­ing card army from Alice in Won­der­land. Leave the sound on while watch­ing the video if you can. (Video)

it’s mid-week dar­lings, hang in there,

Morning Linkage (Sep 7)

September 7, 2010 /

Transportation

Ducati Street­fight­er + Fin­ish­ing Touch 4U (ugli­est name in cus­toms?) = yum­my paint and just right details.

IED stu­dents do con­cept designs for Ducati. 10 designs were sub­mit­ted to Ducati and one pro­duced as a full-scale mock-up. You might find some­thing you like here.

A gallery of gar­ish and hard to take seri­ous­ly PR mate­ri­als for the Suzu­ki GSX-R50 GAG4.

Science

It’s the start of hur­ri­cane sea­son. NASA puts a lot of peo­ple and equip­ment into the air to track and ana­lyze hur­ri­canes. Earl was the first hur­ri­cane to be record­ed from NASA’s new drone, Glob­al Hawk. The arti­cle also includes graph­ics and a link to NASA’s twit­ter where the sci­en­tists fly­ing into and out of Earl on the DC‑8 made some com­ments. NASA’s twit­ter stream is fun in general.

Art, Images, and Design

Okay — that’s cool. The rolling shut­ter arti­fact put to good use. The prop isn’t sup­posed to look that is it? Need more rolling shut­ter? Flickr offers a tag.

Robert Spencer paint­ed the less idyl­lic side of life along the Delaware Riv­er in the 1910’s and 1920’s. Unlike most of his con­tem­po­raries who focused on the pret­ty and rur­al, Spencer was fas­ci­nat­ed by the fac­to­ries, riv­er traf­fic and dai­ly life of the under class.

Always Audrey.

off you go…

Morning Linkage (Sep 3)

September 3, 2010 /

Transportation

A double-up. Axel Bud­de builds Moto Guzzi cafe bikes.
Scraper bikes. A cus­tom bicy­cle cul­ture in LA. Top notch video work too.
Okay — that thing I said the oth­er day? About chrome being evil? I’d like to make an excep­tion. A _single_ excep­tion. Using the dirt-simplest jet engine ever, the pulse jet, Robert Mad­dox makes chrome look good, sound good, and go good.

Science

Pic­tures from space tell us so much about our plan­et. The fun­ny thing is that in order to pro­vide quan­tifi­able col­or images of the ocean — a satel­lite has to turn around and look at the moon once in a while.  This com­pli­cates things a bit.
1700 CE to 2000 CE, 300 years that sub­stan­tial­ly remade the sur­face of the earth. These maps and graphs from ecol­o­gists Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankut­ty at the Uni­ver­si­ty of Mary­land illus­trate the changes in the type and size of human habi­tats.

Art, Images, and Design

Pur­vey­ors of fine garage sale col­lectibles, Dinosaurs and Robots, intro­duces the Grid and the Wave and points you toward my new favorite geek­ing site. PACIN, the Pack­ing, Art han­dling, and Crat­ing Infor­ma­tion Net­work. (BTW I’m pret­ty darn  sure that col­lectibles is *not* a word even if I did just use it, m’kay?)
You don’t have to watch all 7 and a half min­utes of the video but you’ll enjoy watch­ing Mear One paint a sev­er­al of the items for the Sketch­es of Baby­lon series. Full gallery of the paint­ings here.
Arnold Bock­lin. A sin­gle sum­mer image. Such dark green in the trees beside this river.

Animation

Some days you just can’t get it right. Dad takes Jr and Sis to the play­ground. Mom comes along a bit lat­er. Sim­ple line ani­ma­tion by Bird­box Studio.
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