shiny things in messy little piles

Tag: dinosaurs

Morning Linkage (Oct 7)

Transportation

You *can* go back in time. To your hap­py tod­dler days. With this grownup sized Radio Fly­er.

LIFE’s archives have yield­ed a num­ber of motor­cy­cle themed col­lec­tions. A friend recent­ly remind­ed me of the 1948 Day­tona set you’ve seen here before. There’s a new set of images. All but one of these Hel­l’s Angels images from 1965 were nev­er pub­lished. A reminder of a time when HA was more about bikes, rid­ing, and carous­ing than cor­po­rate struc­ture and meth dis­tri­b­u­tion deals.

New from Deus. Le Moulin Rouge. Sim­plic­i­ty. The front forks intrigue me. 2 gal­leries, use the scroll bar at the bot­tom to view.

Engineering, Construction

Legos. Brick­Con 2010. Pho­to overview. Lov­ing the dinosaurs.

Bldg­blog dis­cuss­es the doc­u­men­tary “The Soli­tary Life of Cranes” by Eva Weber who is also respon­si­ble for “City of Cranes.”  The life and out­look of the men who sit in the lit­tle cab at the top of the tallest objects in our cities — the con­struc­tion cranes.

Art, Images, and Design

Col­or wheels are an ubiq­ui­tous tool for design­ers but they did­n’t always exist. Imprint takes a look at the his­to­ry of illus­trat­ing col­or rela­tion­ships from line charts, to wheels, to spheres, to a fab­u­lous set of umbrel­las. (2 parts)

From Ani­malar­i­um, the most crea­ture like of Jacek Yerka’s soft­ly col­ored, dreamt of ani­mals. And more of his meta­mor­phic land­scapes.

If only my hair was still long enough to braid. The best girl in the world. Pip­pi.

be good to your­selves today,

Morning Linkage (Aug 16)

Transportation

That gasp you just heard, that was my sweet baboo when he saw this fine Nor­ton in BRG.

Oshkosh Trucks, mak­ers of severe duty firetrucks. 0–50 in 35 sec­onds? That’s slooooow. But it has roof mount­ed water cannons.

H2 resto. If you know what this is you’re gonna be real­ly hap­py. If you don’t, well then ask…

Science and Cooking

If you have any young boys in the room you might want to send them out to play. At least until you fig­ure out a gen­tle way to explain this to them. The heart break­ing news from dino land is that there might not actu­al­ly be a tricer­atops. Uh huh. The three horned sav­age might actu­al­ly be the juve­nile form of the big­ger but some­what dull torosaurus.

O’Reil­ly is often the pub­lish­er of first resort for geek­i­ness. Now they are stretch­ing the bound­ary of what’s geeky. With recipes. A tech-ish review of Jeff Pot­ter’s “Cook­ing for Geeks” by James Kalbach.

Art, Images, and Design

Linked to by sev­er­al friends on Face­book. Ear­ly col­or pho­tographs, many repro­duced from slides. Very effec­tive depic­tions of a time in Amer­i­can his­to­ry that most of us have only seen in black and white.

Look­ing at our­selves. The idea of doing a cou­ple of 50’s “look­ing toward the future” style ads for Face­book et al sounds like a lot of fun. Add in a lit­tle Russ­ian per­spec­tive and you get some of the best sound­ing par­o­dies ever.

This past week­end was a good week­end; camp­ing, cook­ing, mete­or watch­ing, etc. Lawrence Cox has cap­tured the sense of adven­tur­ous free­dom bril­liant­ly in his illus­tra­tion of a run-away dog.

so off you go into your week,

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 (May 13)

Transportation

The designs of Chris Vet­ter — urk, um, well…  Love him or hate him, this one is as extreme as they get. The Mys­tery KZ1000. (Hint fol­low the link to see what Vet­ter road to Quail.)

One for my guys. Maris­sa Miller, Harley-Davidsons, pho­tos and video. She kin­da bab­bles in the vid but no-one is actu­al­ly lis­ten­ing to the audio anyway,

Cloud com­put­ing gone hor­ri­bly awry. Ford’s Tweet­ing Car Embarks on Amer­i­can Jour­ney 2.0 The killing shot?

Auto“matic Blog. You knew it would come to this — the car, @AJtheFiesta , will blog  or tweet from the road using info gleaned from var­i­ous vehi­cle data sen­sors and engine com­put­er codes (stuff the car already has any­way). Zip­ping along a wind­ing road? The car might tweet that it’s hav­ing fun. Slog­ging through rush-hour traf­fic with the wipers on? The car will let the world know it’s not at all hap­py. “Either way, we want­ed to allow the car to become a blog­ger,” Giuli said.

Yes, I know it’s lazy to use a pull quote, but how could I have pos­si­bly writ­ten any­thing that would top that ?

Science

More clues about the lives and evo­lu­tion of those utter­ly cool feath­ered dinosaurs.

Just a gen­tle reminder from Moth­er Nature. We humans have no idea what’s going on in the oceans, None. Recent­ly a grey whale was sight­ed off the coast of Israel. There haven’t been grey whales in the Atlantic ocean in over a cen­tu­ry. Or so we thought.

Crows are very smart. Sam here is going to prove it to you. Using a tool, to get a tool, to get anoth­er tool, in order to pry the treat out of the box.

Art, Images, and Design

The answer to the ques­tion “Why do all those cute Japan­ese car­toon girls wear pink?” is in this dia­gram. As well the notion that blue is asso­ci­at­ed with trou­ble in Native Amer­i­ca cul­tures and South Amer­i­ca. Kin­da explains my eye color…

Ric Ocasek — yes of the Cars — had his first ever gallery show of his draw­ings last month. Tea­head Scraps presents 22 col­or­ful, doo­d­e­ly sketch pad won­ders. Prints available.

Anoth­er stun­ning set of images from the NYT Lens­blog. Lit­tle known to mod­ern pho­tog­ra­phy lovers, Fredrick W, Glasi­er doc­u­ment­ed the world of the cir­cus in the begin­ning of the 20th cen­tu­ry. View the slide show on a full screen. Well worth get­ting a fresh cup of cof­fee for.

onward and upwards my dears

Morning Linkage (Mar 2)

Transportation

The F1 safe­ty car. M‑B SLS AMG. My very favorite alpha­bet soup car. The rear light­ing is par­tic­u­lar­ly stylish.

Vin­ta­gent pro­vides anoth­er fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry from yes­ter­year. A 1967 “pro­duc­tion” bike class at the Isle of Man TT led to the cre­ation of a spe­cial Velo­cette Thrux­ton. Tales of it’s suc­cess­es and failures.

Lover­ly. In-car and side-of-the-road video of a prac­tice dri­ve for the 100 Acre Wood ral­ly. This is why they do it.

Fun­ny British “Watch for Motor­cy­clists” ad. Humor and a reminder. Plus per­haps the ulti­mate hel­met acces­so­ry, neon.

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Tools

A nice vari­a­tion on the multi-tool. I like rounder shapes for pock­et objects.

I love my rotary cut­ters for cut­ting both fab­ric and paper. I have sev­er­al includ­ing a cou­ple of the pret­ty flower pat­terned spe­cial edi­tions. Now the rotary cut­ter prin­ci­ple has been applied to emer­gency equip­ment. A bet­ter way to cut through lay­er of den­im, tex­tile, or leather.

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Science

A real­is­tic recon­struc­tion of a snake prey­ing on a rep­tile. Unre­mark­able except for the fact that the snake is 11 feet long and the rep­tile is an infant Titanosaur. Nice pho­tos of the orig­i­nals fos­sils as well as the reconstruction.

Tiny-saurs. Build-it-yourself mini mod­els, less than $20 for the deluxe kits.They also do cus­tom work if any­one is look­ing for the ulti­mate trade show swag.

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Art, Images and Design

Ani­ma­tion — sort of. Aard­man presents Home Sheep Home. Infu­ri­at­ing­ly sim­ple brows­er based game for lovers of Shaun the Sheep. Hate, hate, hate. I suck at video games.

Flickr user A Jour­ney Around My Skull is always a good source for new things to look at. These illus­tra­tions from Iran­ian chil­dren’s books are at the same time famil­iar and alien. Many seem to be folk­tales. This image of two rich­ly dressed char­ac­ters with flow­ers for heads sets the tone. There are many equal­ly fine images through out the set.

These are scary and weird and full of vague­ly obscene pigs pro­vid­ing moral guid­ance(?). In oth­er words, ter­rif­ic. Scott Has­sell.  Most­ly pen and ink. (NSFW)

Bird obsessed Jungil Hong was trained in ceram­ics at RISD but is best known for her collages.

More tomor­row…