magpie's shiny things

Transportation

The Porsche Family Tree ad from a cou­ple of months ago was a fine show­ing of clas­sic cars. Here’s a Making of …video for your enjoy­ment. Shameless self pro­mo­tion at it’s finest. (sound — but nice sound)

In antic­i­pa­tion of Bonneville Speedweek, tal­ent­ed auto­mo­tive pho­tog­ra­ph­er Jerry Garns put up three shots from 2009.

BMW R69S Custom from Ritmo Sereno.

The Ritmo Sereno site trans­lat­ed from Japanese by the ever help­ful Google.

——————————–

Food, Society, and Technology

A fab­u­lous Annie Leibovitz pho­to­graph and a reminder that one of my favorite food writer has been unread for too long. MKF Fisher. Sadly not avail­able in the Kindle.

On a more mun­dane note, the ubiq­ui­tous and use­less ketchup pack­et has final­ly got­ten a redesign.

————————————

Art, Images, Design

More Jim Flora and the very good news that there will be prints.  Skittish horse is kind of sin­is­ter indeed.

With a style that is sim­i­lar­ly sim­ple in line and col­or choice, illus­tra­tor Jon Klassen gets a nice write up at Design Sponge.

The ring a day project. Doing some art every­day is a good prac­tice (zen) for any­one who wants to keep their brain tuned up and devel­op a skill. Designing a mak­ing a ring a day is project for jew­el­ers and metalsmiths.

Milky way trans­port map — a la London.

A lit­tle Valentine’s ani­ma­tion. Set in Paris. With nin­jas. Can it get better?
nin­ja love sto­ry — ani­ma­tion (paris)

Happy Monday my lit­tle hyper­ac­tive gerbils.

Transportation

Massive con­struc­tion under Grand Central Station in NYC. A slide show of images of tun­nel­ing for the new LIR con­nec­tions. Note — indi­vid­ual cap­tions are to the right of the images.

——————-

Science and technology

Hunter and preda­tor robots. Neural net­works and ran­dom muta­tions allow robots to evolve behav­iors.

——————-

Art, Images, Design

13 pic­tures from the Women’s Bureau archives of women doing war work. The National Archives is mak­ing good use of Flickr. The slide shows are enter­tain­ing and the infor­ma­tion about the indi­vid­ual images are well cat­a­loged and well pre­sent­ed. Best of both worlds.

It’s not in English (yet) but dang do I want it to be. Cartoon Cooking. Illustrated recipes and techniques.

Economy, sim­plic­i­ty, time­li­ness. More of life should be as fine­ly drawn as these line based por­traits done on the Tokyo trains.

A hand­ful of bril­liant open­ing cred­its for recent movies. (video — sound)

Another clas­sic chil­dren’s book. Aesop’s Fables with illus­tra­tions by Milo Winters.

We’ve almost made it. Just a lit­tle further.

Transportation

Lovely lit­tle bits of real art like water­col­or of a moped this are for sale in the park out­side Santo Domingo in Oaxaca. I buy them when I can.

Gravity bike. This is a sport?

Which leads to this Flickr set — FreakBikes. That’ll do.

———————-

Science

Underwater shots of Beluga whales at a sanc­tu­ary cre­at­ed by the University of St. Petersburg.

————————-

Culture and Society

Dwell mag­a­zine is mod­ern, hip, and puz­zling­ly stuffy. Adding cap­tions that could have come from equal­ly mod­ernist nov­els. Sly, wit­ty, smug.

————————-

Art, Design, Animation

Hugh D’Andrade makes wicked posters.

Including this fine image of a geeky girl mecha  for the 20th anniver­sary of the EFF.

Oddities cre­at­ed by col­lage. Victorian era ladies (and gents) spent hours cre­at­ing humor­ous images using paper, scis­sors, and paste. Children using frogs for rock­ing hors­es just about cov­ers it. More behind the “view more images” link.

Tommy and the Atom. The tale of two atoms, a boy, his fox, and an evil mad sci­en­tist bent on world dom­i­na­tion. Sweet old pro­pa­gan­da film fea­tur­ing the voice that remind­ed you to “look both ways before crossing”.

Making it through the week m’dears.

-lara-

–
Yesterday was the Apocalypse. Today we have a seri­ous problem.

Transportation

Every body loves a top 10. Okay, so how about a top 19? The 19 most com­plex and dan­ger­ous roads in the world. Complex ?= Dangerous.

Tamburini = Brutale ++. That said, there is absolute­ly no jus­ti­fi­ca­tion for pro­vid­ing a link to this pro­duc­tiv­i­ty sap­ping pho­to gallery. None.

The best col­lec­tion of WTF moto moments.

————————–

Technology

There is less than 100% agree­ment on what exact­ly Panotpitclick is measuring/revealing but the fal­la­cy of non-identifying infor­ma­tion is tak­ing anoth­er beat­ing. Your brows­er cus­tomiza­tions may make you track­able. My results on Jan 31, 2010. “Your brows­er fin­ger­print appears to be unique among the 443,644 test­ed so far.”

Ancient tech. The old­est known multi-tool. A Roman Army Knife, if you will.

———————–

Art and Design

Tommy Kane (was) a big shot in adver­tis­ing. Now he wants to be an illus­tra­tor again. I’ll start you out with one of his col­ored pen­cil sketch­es. The shop Zen Needlecraft has the mis­for­tune of hav­ing the rather unhap­py look­ing fish logo from the upstairs restau­rant right over the front door.

In 3‑D. Kinekt gear dri­ven rings, for your fin­ger. Watch the video.

Bill Watterson talks about his deci­sion to stop draw­ing Calvin and Hobbes.

English Laundry and Dan and Dave. It’s a bit much trendy for me but the music is good and the card flour­ish­es are just plain cool. (Video — Sound)

Off to be a girly-girl today, expect me to be all pink hearts and flow­ers and lit­tle smi­lies to dot my I’s for a cou­ple of days…

Transportation

Tamyia cat­a­logs of the 80’s and 90’s and 00’s. For the mod­el builders out there.

A hand­ful of the first “offi­cial” pic­tures of the Vyrus. Click for embiggen.

Another Triumph, this time a Rocket III built over by SE Service.
Click through for video with nar­ra­tion in German and not quite enough
actu­al bike footage to make it the fea­tured link.

———————

History

7 min­utes of video shot on San Fransisco’s Market Street in 1905. The
view toward the Ferry Building as it appeared before the great
earth­quake. (Sound — but nice music)

——————–

Science

National Geographic has pub­lished an elec­tron­ic ver­sion of the
com­plete National Geographic. In addi­tion the edi­tor’s have cho­sen 50
of their favorite cov­ers to fea­ture on the website.

Everybody loves robots. How about a smart phone controllable,
skate­board­ing, danc­ing, shuf­fling robot?

——————

Art Image and Design

Do you know about the Flickr Commons? A place for the GLAM crowd
(gal­leries, libraries, archives, and muse­ums) to put images for the
use and reuse of the public.

Hairy Green Eyeball brings you William Steig. The quin­tes­sen­tial New
Yorker cartoonist.

These hand blown glass robots are way too friend­ly look­ing to be
threat­en­ing. They have some real­ly cool snail friends lit­tle further
down the page.

Late last year I point­ed to some stills from this wit­ty, meandering,
ani­mat­ed look at some accounts of life on oth­er plan­ets. Mars and
beyond — Disney 1957. (sound, quick time — worth it)

Take your Monday a few min­utes at a time my dears,