Morning Linkage (Sep 8)

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)

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)

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.

Morning Linkage (Sep 2)

Transportation

From the cute to the creepy, with whis­tle stops at it-goes-faster-when-you-paint-it-like-this and dude-you-were-so-high. Scooter paint.

SFW, but pure sexy nonethe­less. Just put it on the screen. Everything will be okay. More views of the Holden Efijy if you pre­fer some­thing less fer­al. There are some rather lush inte­ri­or shots.

From the cat­e­go­ry of: British TV we’ve nev­er seen. Heartbeat, is a soapy look­ing 60’s nos­tal­gia show. The bike rid­den by local police­man is a Francis Barnett Cruiser. Nah, I’d nev­er heard of it either. It’s pret­ty cool.

Food

I love marsh­mal­lows. I love caf­feine. I prob­a­bly should not have any of these.

I want my lunch to be this cool. And cute. And clever.

Art, Images, and Design

This turquoise wall with its met­al trac­ery is part of Kunsthofpassage in Dresden — it’s been called a Rube Goldberg and some­thing from Dr. Seuss’s days as a plumber. An amaz­ing series of gut­ters and down­spouts. Video of gut­ters and down­spouts in Kunsthofpassage in the rain. (German narration.)

Laurie Lipton’s extra­or­di­nary machines take the claus­tro­pho­bia induced by mul­ti­ply­ing wid­gets, gad­gets, and their assort­ed wiring and brings them to a whole new lev­el of men­ace. Graphite on paper at one of L.A.‘s coolest gal­leries. The Illusion of Control Tower. The full set from her exhib­it at La Luz de Jesus. Click on each item for a good look.

Animation

Sweet 1950’s junior-high sci­ence class style ani­ma­tion. Graboids. AKA Landsharks. Aversion to rain makes them rare in here in puge­topo­lis. (5:00)

alrighty then, off you go and don’t for­get your lunch boxes.

Morning Linkage (Sep 1)

Transportation

It’s not a bad look­ing bike — at all. H‑D pitch­es to the young­sters. No blondes allowed?

A bit of French his­to­ry, a pret­ty lady on a bike, and a Comiot tricycle.

Ralph Steadman illus­trates Hunter Thompson on a Ducati. Perfect match.

The GSX 1100 des­ig­na­tion has been with us for a very long time. This item from the 80’s is one of the rea­sons why.

Science

From WSU. Why the nice guys get vot­ed off the island. Proper title of the paper: “The Desire to Expel Unselfish Members from the Group”. Humans are so weird.

Gaming

Point and click adven­ture games are always pop­u­lar with the “I don’t wan­na shoot more stuff” crowd. Mostly they’re based on var­i­ous poly­gon ren­der­ing engines. But Cockroach is build­ing some thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Clay and actu­al mod­el mak­ing are used to cre­ate stop-motion sequences for The Dream Machine. A haunt­ed apart­ment com­plex… and a game for grown ups. You can play a demo or sign up for the beta test of chap­ter one here.

Art, Images, and Design

I have a new com­ic in the RSS read­er. Try this one with the fly­ing car.

Humans make unin­ten­tion­al art by their actions. A col­lec­tion of pho­tographs of all of the con­tra­band brought in to the USA via Kennedy International Airport from Nov 16 to Nov 20, 2009.

Food, visu­al puns, and nice­ly done let­ter­press work. Letterform does a series of sweet greet­ing cards.

Animation

We wel­come our mys­te­ri­ous cat-head over­lords? Um, demon­ic, ted­dy bears? I have no idea but it’s fun and goes well with too many lattes. (Video 0:57)

snack time!