Morning Linkage (Jan 4)

Transportation

KZ400 by Mad Crow in Barcelona. The head­light and tank details make it special.

There are many things to like about this Wrenchmonkees Ducati 750ss. The frame treat­ment, the col­ors, and the front clip.

I nev­er can quite seem to wrap my mind around the idea of a bike called a Virago. But the front end of this XV750 brings me pret­ty close to what I think it should be. On the oth­er hand, no Virago I’ve ever met had such a tee­ny inef­fec­tu­al rear end.

Science

What is the evo­lu­tion­ary pur­pose of tick­ling? An incred­i­bly impor­tant ques­tion whose answer remains a mys­tery. (And whose impor­tance is total­ly poo-poo’d by the spoil-sport commenters. )

Art, Images, and Design

The idea of deliv­er­ing teach­ing mate­ri­als as a sec­ondary use of the card­board box the food aid rice came in is … well I don’t know, either inspired or con­de­scend­ing. With some thought and effort this could work very well. More com­mer­cial­ly, Amazon should jump on this  — imag­ine a box to ship toys in that turns into a toy.

Scary octo­pus but not in the way you expect. A col­lec­tion of plas­tic bags and oth­er trash takes on new life mean­der­ing through the streets of Slovenia.

The char­ac­ter ani­ma­tions in first per­son shoot­ers make me wince every time I see one. But some of the vehi­cle and weapon designs are first-rate. Like these from Damnation. Several nice guns and a bonus of a bike and a trike at the end. Winter build project anyone?

Animation

Information is Beautiful is branch­ing out into ani­ma­tion as a tech­nique for the visu­al dis­play of infor­ma­tion. Here is a Tetris inspired retelling of the world’s spend­ing habits. Debtris. This first effort gets an A for being infor­ma­tive and a D for the sound track. Watch, but turn the speak­ers down.