shiny things in messy little piles

Tag: NASA

Morning Linkage (Feb 7)

Transportation

I know a lot of 2 stroke fans. Most of them area lit­tle less than sane. All of them would do this in a heart beat. Just to have some­thing for run­ning around on the back roads.  JAWA 350 mods. (Video is loud.)

WTF? Trans­former bike for those who han­ker for both a cafe rac­er and a cruis­er but have lim­it­ed garage space. Video demon­strates the hydraulic change over. With seat height, rake, trail, wheel base (duh) and ground clear­ance all chang­ing to pro­duce two bikes. The V‑Rod based Veon by Krug­ger. It’s also not the ugli­est thing in the world. Close but not the ugliest.

Pret­ty girls on bikes. A lit­tle some­thing to bring cheer into your Monday.

Science

NASA makes the best dig­i­tal toys. Extreme Plant Makeover. Mess about with the Earth by chang­ing it’s size, dis­tance from the sun, type of sun, and age. It’s awful­ly easy to make a bar­ren waste land or fog­gy sog­gy giant. Plan­et hacking!

Art, Images, and Design

A reminder that art is not with­out its odd mys­ter­ies and ongo­ing tiffs. We all know Raphael’s self-portrait. The guy with the perky nose and a dis­tant look sit­ting in front of a brown wall, unstruc­tured hat? But did you know that there’s a sec­ond paint­ing? Hid­ing in a vault, almost iden­ti­cal, and pos­si­bly as real as the one hang­ing in Uffizi? Nice lit­tle plot for a novel.

Bet­ty Boop, Mick­ey Mouse, and Kew­pie dolls, all mad­ly out of con­text in 1930’s Japan­ese post­cards. There are also skele­tons, and danc­ing cats. Our cul­tur­al mas­cots must have seemed impos­si­bly odd to the cre­ators of these.

Fer­ris Plock. Pieces cre­at­ed while in res­i­dence. Styled after ori­en­tal wood block prints and hang­ing scrolls but with mod­ern anom­alies — the croc­o­dile wears Keds.

Animation and Moving Images

One Wing Fly aka Y & M Nathan, Look under com­mer­cial work, there is a whole series of adverts that place a woman (real­ly beau­ti­ful) on a floor and have her “walk” through scenes. Poor­ly explained by me — utter­ly charm­ing in per­son. (Real­ly, good enough to war­rant a link into a flash-based site.)

Now off you go, it’s a busy week ahead.

Morning Linkage (Jan 28)

Transportation

Steam to return to the Salt. An update on the efforts of Cyclone Pow­er Tech to recap­ture the land­speed record for a steam engine. Quixot­ic and wonderful.

Ducati has acquired Eliz­a­beth Raab’s Ducati pho­tographs which match sev­er­al of the icon­ic Ducatis with the form of a nude woman in an explo­ration of shape and sur­faces. Skip the words and go straight to the gallery. They’re love­ly, if a bit trite, and very NSFW.

Undis­cov­ered gem. Trishikh Das­gup­ta shoots the recre­ation of his bike Sil­verblaze. An R‑E Bul­let Machis­mo 500.

Science

Gov­ern­ment spon­sored space porn. Not quite. Remix­es and mash-ups of NASA footage by folks with a bad case of space lust. Some seri­ous­ly space cow­boy good­ness here.

Art, Images, and Design

The inane lyrics of Lady Gaga make a per­fect­ly mar­velous Dr. Seuss-ian non­sense chil­dren’s book. With
vin­tage graph­ics in black and white with blue.

Today’s if I had one-shot-a-week-like-that I’d so hap­py pho­to­graph. The umbrel­la per­fects the image. Max Fomin is some­where in Spain but writ­ing in Russian.

Olaf Hajek’s Antoinettes. A dark, earthy vision of nat­ur­al excess. Many oth­er fine things as well.

Animation and Moving Images

Paint, and sound. Add a cou­ple of cam­eras, and a turn table with a fierce rota­tion, et vio­la, a nifty ad cam­paign for print­ers. It’s so sim­ple and it’s so stunning.

These are so sweet, and so awe­some and so just right. The cut-out ani­ma­tions for the film of Le Petit Nico­las. (1:57, nice music)

Morning Linkage (Nov 4)

Transportation

I am utter­ly uncon­vinced that I want to see Green Hor­net in Jan­u­ary. The trail­ers made me cringe. On the oth­er hand this video extolling the won­ders of Black Beau­ty, the Crown Vic based auto­mo­tive star of the film may change my mind. Bonus is that there’s footage of the art of film­ing chase scenes here. (video — loud music. 2:51)

Church of Chop­pers brings us pic­tures of a Sun­day of dirt/mud rac­ing spon­sored by the Black­heads MC in Fin­land. Prov­ing that bikes and mud are fun on any con­ti­nent. (anoth­er tip-off from one of the fab mag­pie spotters.)

One for the orange kool-aid crowd. Cyril Despres rides the new KTM 450 on his pri­vate test track in the Pyre­nees moun­tains. The man has his own test track in the moun­tains. Good god.

I like this BMW R60 striped back to the essentials.

Sweet lit­tle Triumph.

Technology and Science

Real time video manip­u­la­tion. It’s now pos­si­ble to make some­thing dis­ap­pear from the CCTV mon­i­tor are it’s hap­pen­ing. Cool…and a lit­tle frightening.

I apol­o­gize in advance for the num­ber of point­less Lego posts. But damn, frog dis­sec­tion.

Soooo geeky. Here’s a PDF of the “Space Shut­tle Weath­er Launch Com­mit Cri­te­ria and KSC End of Mis­sion Weath­er Land­ing Cri­te­ria” Yup, exact­ly what it sounds like. Fas­ci­nat­ing look into the minu­tia of get­ting big things off the ground and into space. (BTW NASA has sev­er­al inter­est­ing twit­ter accounts. Things like this show up.)

Art, Images, and Design

This quick pen­cil sketch that been fol­low­ing me around all day.

Arche­ol­o­gy meets street-art. Um, no that’s not quite right. The arche­o­log­i­cal inter­est is decades away. Street-art meets pop-up gallery? Nope. Pop-ups are tem­po­rary. An aban­doned sub­way project is hard­ly tem­po­rary. Well any­way, under New York there’s a big space that has been filled with the work of many of the best street artists. Under­bel­ly. It was opened to a select few recent­ly. And now has been closed up again.

I’m an ani­ma­tion fan. I spend a lot of time crawl­ing around the web look­ing for rare bits and pieces. A lot of what I like and find isn’t pro­duced in the US. I get a lot of leads to links that serve up to a notice read­ing “This video is not avail­able in your region.” How far behind the real­i­ty of glob­al cul­ture are we here? And is it only going to get worse?

Animation

A month or so ago I wrote a note to myself about a link: “Some­one has got to stop these peo­ple. Once again a fab­u­lous piece of ani­ma­tion might nev­er see the light of day because it was cre­at­ed with­out obtain­ing the rights to the music. Enjoy this trail­er for the imag­i­na­tive Hen­drix inspired The Expe­ri­ence and hope that the cre­ators can come up with the scratch to license Voodoo Child so that we can see the rest.” But today when I want­ed to post the item I rechecked the link and it seems that they did secure rights. So I’m a lit­tle slow to get this post­ed and you reap the ben­e­fit of see­ing the full video of the roller coast­er trib­ute to the man. (Video. Music. 8:06)

Go do some­thing sur­pris­ing, it will make me happy.

Morning Linkage (Sep 7)

Transportation

Ducati Street­fight­er + Fin­ish­ing Touch 4U (ugli­est name in cus­toms?) = yum­my paint and just right details.

IED stu­dents do con­cept designs for Ducati. 10 designs were sub­mit­ted to Ducati and one pro­duced as a full-scale mock-up. You might find some­thing you like here.

A gallery of gar­ish and hard to take seri­ous­ly PR mate­ri­als for the Suzu­ki GSX-R50 GAG4.

Science

It’s the start of hur­ri­cane sea­son. NASA puts a lot of peo­ple and equip­ment into the air to track and ana­lyze hur­ri­canes. Earl was the first hur­ri­cane to be record­ed from NASA’s new drone, Glob­al Hawk. The arti­cle also includes graph­ics and a link to NASA’s twit­ter where the sci­en­tists fly­ing into and out of Earl on the DC‑8 made some com­ments. NASA’s twit­ter stream is fun in general.

Art, Images, and Design

Okay — that’s cool. The rolling shut­ter arti­fact put to good use. The prop isn’t sup­posed to look that is it? Need more rolling shut­ter? Flickr offers a tag.

Robert Spencer paint­ed the less idyl­lic side of life along the Delaware Riv­er in the 1910’s and 1920’s. Unlike most of his con­tem­po­raries who focused on the pret­ty and rur­al, Spencer was fas­ci­nat­ed by the fac­to­ries, riv­er traf­fic and dai­ly life of the under class.

Always Audrey.

off you go…