shiny things in messy little piles

Tag: data

Morning Linkage (Jun 14)

Bikes and Swap Meets.

From the mid­dle of nowhere France, Mike Wern­er reports on the week­end mar­ket at Cany-Barville. Indoor and out­door dis­play space, piles of junk, and one very cute beach scene. You won’t rec­og­nize a lot of the vehi­cles but it does­n’t mat­ter. These lit­tle trea­sures are fine. Can any­one iden­ti­fy the red and black bike in the 3rd and 4th pictures?

So while I was look­ing for some­thing that would help to ID a cou­ple of the items in the pre­vi­ous gallery I came across this report from the 2007 Her­shey, PA swap meet. And now I want a Sim­plex Ser­vi­cy­cle, 6th pho­to down. Or how about a 1952 moped that runs on diesel? 2nd pho­to down.

Infrastructure and Illustrated Cities

And back to for­eign shores. How do you han­dle mov­ing motor traf­fic from a coun­try that dri­ves on the right (Chi­na) to an island that dri­ves on the left (Hong Kong.) Not to men­tion a com­plex set of bor­der cross­ing pro­to­cols. You can attempt to hide the mechan­ics of the process or you cel­e­brate the com­plex­i­ty. NL Archi­tects designed a loop­ing road dot­ted with arti­fi­cial islands and tons of sub­lime. Cau­tion huge wash­es of archi­tec­ture and urban design speak.

Some­what jum­bled — hasty com­pi­la­tion? Tak­ing crime data from the city of San Fran­sis­co and run­ning it through a map and some 3‑D soft­ware gets these topo­graph­ic look­ing maps show­ing crime as a ter­rain of peaks and valleys.

Imaginary Places

I know I’ve seen this work before but I can’t find any evi­dence that I’ve shared it with you all. A 4 year project, A Cas­tle on the Ocean has lights, trains, and all the gin­ger­bread cas­tle bits any princess could want. And a Fer­ris Wheel. Wataru Itou.

Flash put to good use. The world of Syfy chan­nel’s mini-series, Tin­man. BTW Tin­man is now stream­able on Net­flix. Flash — Sound.

Art, Images, and Printers

Take one pho­tog­ra­ph­er — not afraid of water, add some nifty cam­era gear, and a real tal­ent for push­ing post pro­cess­ing to the lim­its and you get this set of pho­tographs from Clark Lit­tle’s new book “The Shore­break Art of Clark Little”

Ignore the art school speak and just look. Espe­cial­ly study the work­ing draw­ings and pro­to­type videos. Joon Y. Moon has cre­at­ed an world of light and shad­ow that moves, grows, and goes qui­es­cent as the user manip­u­lates blocks on a surface.

Hard work­ing Lego peo­ple. Or what you always want­ed to tell your kids was going on inside the print­er.

Morning Linkage (Mar 9)

Transportation

I love the tail treat­ment on this Tri­umph. Such a sweet, round butt.

The post title says it all “Enjoy Some Gra­tu­itous Clas­sic Lotus Porn.” Pics from the Lotus archives. (SFW)

A bad jump start once cost me a ECU/BCU pair for a Mer­cedes. If the surge sup­pres­sor in these smart jumper cables works I’d be will­ing to pay a whole lot more than $35.

Just a note — Top­Speed has been removed from my read­er. Their refusal to include links to sources and the web­sites of orga­ni­za­tions they report on has final­ly dri­ven me over the edge. Nom­i­na­tions for good sources of motor indus­try news sought. I’d like some­thing that cov­ers cars and bikes, busi­ness, and cur­rent prod­ucts rather than vin­tage and custom.

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Science

Crea­ture Cast update.  Dr. Phil Pugh talks about the first time he got to see siphonophores from a sub­ma­rine. He had stud­ied these fas­ci­nat­ing, clone-based organ­isms for years with­out hav­ing the chance to see one intact. Mes­mer­iz­ing video too. (Audio Narration)

Huge data sets and mas­sive com­put­ing pow­er seem like they should allow sci­en­tists to find more and more sig­nif­i­cant cor­re­la­tions and depen­den­cies. The oppo­site may be true. More data and more ways of slic­ing it increas­es the chance that results are noth­ing more than ran­dom noise.

More data to play with, Google brings more data sets to Pub­lic Data Explor­er. Let’s all try to remem­ber that the plur­al of sta­tis­tics is not information.

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Art, Images, and Design

The 50’s are often con­sid­ered the gold­en age of com­mer­cial illus­tra­tion. From the time the author first noticed a hand­ful of images with the sig­na­ture Lucia to a cor­re­spon­dence with one of her col­leagues, this look at Lucia Lern­er’s career in Chica­go is a won­der­ful intro­duc­tion to this world and a rather unusu­al member.
Olaf Hajek. I don’t know what these images were made to sell but this series of five “the new secret lan­guage of sym­bols” sells me.(mildly NSFW)

Anoth­er excel­lent pho­tog­ra­ph­er with a huge Flickr stream. Batintherain is Andrea de Poda of Pesaro, Italy. A gen­tle­man with a fab­u­lous eye for architecture.

I put this here most­ly so that you can share my won­der at Cory’s descrip­tion of the hulk­ing naval(?) object in the photo.

good luck with that…