Morning Linkage (Jan 20)

Transportation

If you rec­og­nize that these cutouts are more than sad­ly mod­ern abstracts then you can have them on your wall. If you had to look at the descrip­tion to fig­ure out what they are, you would be pos­ing and that’s not cool.

In my house you hear a lot about the mys­ti­cal per­fect Triumph — the Scrambler. Hell for Leather has a peek at a JoMo ver­sion that could make our garage/shop a lit­tle snugger.

The Johnson Motor Company is mak­ing a come back. (See the bike above) The web­site is still pret­ty rough but you can see a lit­tle his­to­ry and click around a bit by start­ing here.

On the oth­er hand you might just want to go for urban com­bat com­muter prac­ti­cal. Kettenkrad. Googling for more info and more pic­tures is left as an amus­ing exer­cise for the reader.

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Society

If you thought the BigMedia copy­right treaty boon­doogling twirps were only mess­ing with the US nego­ti­a­tions of copy­right treaties you were wrong. Leaked docs show EU inter­ests plan­ning to lean on Canada to “upgrade” it’s IP laws. Ugh.

The cost of copy­right infringe­ment fear. 25 episodes of the Jack Benny Show has been locat­ed in the CBS archives. They are old enough to be in the pub­lic domain. There are peo­ple will­ing to pay all the costs of hav­ing them con­vert­ed to dig­i­tal. Because CBS is afraid of being sued by own­ers of some lit­tle bit if music, they will nev­er see the light of day. If you have deep pock­ets you can’t be too careful.

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Science and Tech

Marine worms (and earth worms) do amaz­ing things in the lit­tle shal­low world they inhab­it. Another final project from Dr. Dunn’s lab explores the leg­gy, freaky marine worms and how they may have had a big role in cre­at­ing gyp­sum moun­tains. (Remember the crys­tal caves of Mexico from a cou­ple of weeks ago?) Mute for the first 48 sec­onds to get past a poor­ly cho­sen sound track but don’t skip the video por­tion. (Sound)

There’s a new class of tech­nol­o­gy being pushed at CES this year — the “smart­book”. Yeah, I know, WTF. About the size and capa­bil­i­ty of a net­book with the mobile con­nec­tiv­i­ty of a smart phone. Hence smart-book. Or some­thing. Ars gives us a look at two of the con­tenders. Take away — not quite ready for prime time, but I love the look and idea behind the Entourage Edge Dualbook.

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Art, Images, Concept Art

Hervé Groussin, for the odd­ly attired sharks at the top of the post (and for the machetes.) There’s an image of one of the sharks being lift­ed into a water tank lat­er in the set. Those two images lead to hours of try­ing to put togeth­er the sto­ry that links them.

Again with the sharks in con­cept art. After the last set, the scene here with the shark and fish looks like a pas­toral. Imaginative winged build­ings and bet­ter drag­ons than the usu­al slob­bers as well. Frank F. Hong

Jagged and col­or­ful, two roost­ers book­end a series of paint­ings fea­tur­ing the art of sumo wrestling. The young Italian Fabio Roncato paints like a sculptor.

Leaving you all with this insight­ful por­trait of Che in 1963.

Now wake up get back to work my dar­ling slackers.