shiny things in messy little piles

Tag: book design

Morning Linkage (Aug 25)

Transportation

Anoth­er tiny cus­tom CB100 out of SE Asia. This one from Deus Cang­gu in Bali.

Scott Fly­ing Squir­rel. Best bike name ever and inno­v­a­tive design too. Liq­uid cool­ing from the 1920’s. A cou­ple of oth­er Scott bikes here as well.

From Japan a TX650 cus­tom. The lines of the sub­tly brown tank are dreamy.

Doc­u­men­ta­tion of mon­u­men­tal moments in bad taste. Nick Glies makes a liv­ing pho­tograph­ing the insides (and out­sides) of pri­vate jets. Own­er­ship is, of course, not disclosed.

Technology

Tablets for Christ­mas this year. With the launch of the iPad this spring the tablet has reached the mid­dle amer­i­can radar. Best Buy is gear­ing up for the Xmas sea­son by pro­mot­ing the tablet as a per­fect gift.

Among the many con­tenders is like­ly to be this HTC slat­ed to run Google’s chrome.

Food

Cook­ing in a milk can? Steam cook­ing for messy, stew meals. Yum.

Art, Images, and Design

A quick and dirty overview of the art of Sci-Fi. Lau­ren Panepin­to who is the Art Direc­tor for Orbit Books shows you some exam­ples and explains why and how they go about entic­ing you to pick up and read. Lots of links to lots of artists. Be sure to check the com­ments for even more art and links.

From the Long Now blog, a fine exam­ple of Panepin­to’s two rules for great Sci-Fi art. Com­men­tary on this split soci­ety image?

In the late 1970’s Andy Levin spent his non-working hours pho­tograph­ing the every­man expe­ri­ence of Coney Island. The NYT’s Lens blog brings 18 of these fine black and white pho­tos back.

And now, many years lat­er, Levin returns to Coney Island and pub­lish­es Coney Island Baby. Col­or pho­tos of the same place, in a very dif­fer­ent time. (NSFW — one aggres­sive­ly nude image)

enjoy the heat — eat lunch out­side today

Morning Linkage (Aug 10)

Transportation

1960’s show cars on post­cards. Start with the Fire­ball 500. Total morn­ing waster on flickr.

Mov­ing more freight, but not on the inter­states. Marine High­ways, inter-modal freight, short sea ship­ping, and RoRos.

The world’s only Muzeti 250. (1983 GSX 250) Sweet lit­tle bike.

Clas­sic of the Day. AJS 18.

Science

Astron­o­my pic­ture. The eclipse shad­ow cone — I’ve nev­er seen this so clear­ly. No date?

Ordi­nary super­pow­ers. First off — I love the image that io9 chose to illus­trate this. Okay, so did you know that you can train your­self to rec­og­nize Haidinger’s Brush. This allows you to detect polar­ized light. Um, I’m not sure how this is actu­al­ly going to be use­ful to any­one, but hey, you nev­er know…

Per­son­al­i­ty isn’t as sim­ple as your high school guid­ance coun­selor told you when she gave the results of you Meyer-Briggs tests and sug­gest­ed that trade school was your best option. And any hope that there might be genet­ic basis for per­son­al­i­ty seems to have been squashed by these find­ings from Australia.

But most­ly the above arti­cle is a link to this piece in the New York­er about Wal­ter Mis­chel. The man behind the one marsh­mal­low now or two marsh­mal­lows lat­er exper­i­ments. And the follow-up work with the kinder­gart­ners who were his first subjects.

Art, Images, and Design

Pho­tog­ra­ph­er Mark Tuck­er is back from Ten­nessee and work­ing on the lat­est Jack Daniels commercials/ads. He’s pro­vid­ed some very nice pho­tographs and a cou­ple of “mak­ing of” video out­takes. If you watch the first video with the piglets turn the sound down — they squeal some­thing fierce.

Coralie Bickford-Smith is a book design­er for Pen­guins books. She is respon­si­ble for the jack­et and cloth bind­ings of the Pen­guin Clas­sics series. Some of the loveli­est books to be pro­duced late­ly. Be sure to look at her work for the Red Clas­sics Boys’ Adven­tures series as well.

Nice­ly done pic­tures from Tara Hunt’s pho­to stream of the New Zealand farm that served as the loca­tion for Hob­biton in the LoR movies. Door and win­dows are gone but the sheep have a place out of the rain.