Morning Linkage (Jul 8)

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)

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)

The Story Of Amatoya

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://shinymagpie.net

Morning Linkage (Jul 6)

Transportation

Oregon race­way park — extreme shifter cart. Though 800 pounds makes it some­thing oth­er than a go-cart IMO.
http://www.wired.com/autopia/2010/06/palatov-motorsports-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)

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.

Morning Linkage (Jun 30)

Transportation and Engineering

Some of these future of trans­porta­tion ideas from Japan, pub­lished in 1936, are nov­el riffs on the com­mon themes. But the two-color illus­tra­tions fea­tur­ing red and a love­ly inky blue-black and spiffy, speedy white wisps are so won­der­ful.

The cru­cial dif­fer­ence between math and engi­neer­ing is decibels.

Art, Design and Architecture

A nifty beer bot­tle meant to have a sec­ond life as build­ing material.

Playing with your food has nev­er been quite this sat­is­fy­ing. John Baldessari has built a dig­i­tal DIY still life kit using the ele­ments of Abraham van Beyeren’s orig­i­nal 17th cen­tu­ry paint­ing. Originally an instal­la­tion at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, the expe­ri­ence is now avail­able on the web (or your iPhone)

Animation

Clay-mation,  sort of  — the title char­ac­ter is a blob of blue clay. Answering the age-old ques­tion what’s the dif­fer­ence between a bank pres­i­dent and a porn star. For all it’s blob­by­ness this is (NSFW.)

What this is doing on a site ded­i­cat­ed to nature pho­tos I do not know. But it’s a total­ly clever ani­mat­ed com­bi­na­tion of memes. Tetris, park­our, duck hunt­ing, and that weird build­ing game. (SFW)

Okay — time to rebuild the office fur­ni­ture (again)