Morning Linkage (Jan 18)

Transportation

Eco-driving, the
social­ly accept­able in-car video game, where you do your best to make the lit­tle leaf as green as grass. If stud­ies con­tin­ue to prove that instan­ta­neous dis­play of mileage infor­ma­tion prompts dri­vers to tune their dri­ving style to max­i­mize mpg, you may be see­ing more and more of these dis­plays on your dash. Speaking of auto-data
tech­nol­o­gy, the boys at Cult of MAC are clear­ly not gear heads but they kind of get the point of the OBD-II read­er that Griffin has announced for the iPhone. I just won­der if the soft­ware (app) will be use­ful to the gear heads or only a dri­ve nice­ly pret­ty please app to make the eco-driving crowd coo. 

The Griffin site claims that the CarTrip read­er will allow code check and reset. I’ll be get­ting one to test on the airbag fault light on the Rover. (Grrr.)

To atone for all the geeky green-weenie crap above, I give you: The high­lights of the 2010 British Super Bike Championship. 4 min­utes of thrills, chills, and a cou­ple of spills. (Forgive me?) 

Science and Society

30 years of National Geographic pic­tures by Bruce Dale. 9 min­utes of video and a ter­ri­ble pun­ning joke. 

We as a soci­ety are always rewrit­ing our past. It’s inevitable and in large part uncon­scious. But to what extent can we jus­ti­fy delib­er­ate­ly mess­ing about with the images of the past? Did the USPS real­ly need to remove the cig­a­rette from Robert Johnson’s mouth? 

Art, Images, and Design

Walnut is love­ly. And the dark col­or goes per­fect­ly with cof­fee. Scrap lum­ber becomes some­thing use­ful and beautiful. 

An anony­mous small token of grat­i­tude and gen­eros­i­ty. Compliments on tear-off tabs. PDF to print. Bring your own sta­ple gun. 

Oooh, the roman­tic allure of the aban­doned sub­way sta­tion. The City Hall Station in NYC was opened in 1904 and closed to use in 1945. Until recent­ly the only way to get a glimpse at what is arguably the pret­ti­est of the NYC sub­way sta­tions was to sneak in. Not any­more. A recent rule change means that you can now sit tight on the Number 6 as it makes it loop through the old station.

Animation

Megan Tupper, a recent grad of the University of Wales, has a fine sense of char­ac­ter and the com­ic impli­ca­tions of every­day life. Keys. The truth about cats. (Video 3:26)

Morning Linkage (Jan 17)

Transportation

Contemplating the changes in the cul­ture of rac­ing and rule mak­ing. Reims in ’54 the return of the Mercedes and a grid full of indi­vid­u­al­is­tic machines.

Really I spoil you all. I should be look­ing these bikes up and dol­ing them out one at a time. But what the hel­lz. A bonan­za bou­quet of old (real­ly old) bikes at the Bonham’s Las Vegas auc­tion. Munch Mammut, an H‑D Peashooter from a mine in Western Australia, and my fav the Indian Camelback.

Science

Jogging, not just hat­ed exer­cise but per­haps an adap­tive evo­lu­tion­ary advan­tage? Something called endurance hunt­ing may have been an impor­tant fac­tor in the suc­cess of our ances­tors. Oh hell, pass the fries.

I’m going to lose big kar­ma points for post­ing this but… cats con­fused about what’s up and what’s down in weight­less­ness. On video.

Art, Images, and Design

Paper — cut and lay­ered by Britteny Lee. Her ani­mals always have way too much personality.

Impulsive kiss­es. Given on a street cor­ner. Painted on a street cor­ner. C215 and, prob­a­bly, his girl Alice.

Betraying a sense of the del­i­ca­cy of the divide between humans and their fel­lows that is far more sophis­ti­cat­ed than you expect from a 21 year old. Russian artist Eugene Soloviev cre­ates stripped-down float­ing landscapes.

Animation

Street art, meets stop-motion, meets flip-book. 294 walls, 4 cities, 3000 kilo­me­ters. Think about what that means. Think about how the vid ends. By the Turkish group, Sokak Savasa Karsi.  (Video 1:30 — music)

hap­py Monday y’all

Morning Linkage (Jan 13)

Transportation

Night Market. Or what to do with a box truck on a Saturday night in San Fransisco. Wheels have always been our tick­et to the lim­i­nal places.

The first per­son who does the math and points out to me that $2995 in 1962 dol­lars is … hey wait a minute. That’s only $22K in 2010. I want my Porsche Speedster!

This should be so wrong, but I love it. A ‘67 Triumph Tiger. Custom and orange. And any­one who is will­ing to cus­tom machine his own brass…

Cool Tools

Hot knives are a sta­ple with the prop, decor, and fan­ta­sy object build­ing types. It’s the only way to cut Styrofoam, foam rub­ber, and a hand­ful of oth­er mate­ri­als. But most hot cut­ters use a straight wire so get­ting any sort of con­tour is a long, fid­dly job. Not any more. Bendable wire to the res­cue. A Proxxon hot wire cut­ter will make that next set of drag­on scales a cinch!

Art, Images, and Design

This intri­cate­ly detailed and some­what fan­ci­ful cross sec­tion of the Kowloon walled city was drawn by a Japanese team just before the city was lev­eled in 1993. And some fol­low up in the com­ments on doobybrain.

To cre­ate a map of a place from mem­o­ry is to your soul. Maps Drawn from Memory is was the name a Flickr pool and Visual News grabbed a hand­ful of the best and offered them up with link to the Google maps of the actu­al loca­tions. If you care about real­i­ty. Which you won’t when you’ve seen the much more human ver­sions of places that live in the artist’s head. (SFW)

The Flickr pool has been changed to from “Maps Drawn from Memory” to sim­ply “From Memory” and is, sad­ly, no longer sole­ly about maps. (And is now NSFW)

A pho­tog­ra­pher’s body of work. The images she cre­ates from the time she first picks up a cam­era until her death can be the most illu­mi­nat­ing record of a life, and the time and place that it was lived. John Maloof found and pur­chased the near­ly com­plete works of one woman, Vivian Maier, who lived, worked, and pho­tographed in Chicago from the 1950s through the 1990s. Here are just a hand­ful of her images. I sus­pect there will be con­tro­ver­sy in the com­ing months as the full sto­ry of the dis­cov­ery, pur­chase, and lan­guish­ing of these pic­tures comes out. But you need to have a first look at them now, while they are still new and intrigu­ing. More of Vivian Maier’s photos.

Animation

Claiming to be the world’s small­est stop-motion ani­ma­tion, cre­at­ed by Aardman and shot using a Nokia 8 and the field med­ical Cellscope tech­nol­o­gy (yes, that’s a cell phone used as a micro­scope) — Dot. Also a mak­ing of video, and a time-lapse of the shoot­ing rig. The phone, the mag­ni­fy­ing lens, the 3‑d print­er… oh hel­lz this is the best gig­gle I’ve has all day.

Morning Linkage (Jan 12)

Transportation

A Hermann visu­al from one of the Jeremiah books. Post-apocalyptic moto.

Hacky-sack wheels for a lit­tle moon rover. Too cute.

I should­n’t like this bike. I real­ly should­n’t but… all that elec­tric blue and sense­less pro­por­tions. Yippee. Honda 305 Dream.

To make up for that — from the same web­site, the very next entry is this love­ly bob­ber based on the Danish mark Nimbus.

Science (and Food and Advice)

Finally a GMO food that the food­ies can get behind. Engineering bet­ter choco­late. Srlsy.

Good advice at that.

Art, Images, and Design

Funny? Sad? Clever? Visual puns of Brett Weber. The moon’s trou­ble with his gold­fish is both the fun­ni­est and the saddest.

I am com­plete­ly enam­ored of the idea of “dis­or­der­ing” the struc­ture of paper, using a tat­too gun.

These huge images cre­at­ed on lay­ered panes of glass are fas­ci­nat­ing but per­haps not in a friend­ly way. Xia Xiaowan draws with col­ored pen­cil on glass plates that are then lay­ered up in floor racks. The chang­ing per­spec­tive as you walk around the piece lends an even creepi­er aura to some already pret­ty dis­turb­ing pieces. (Possible NSFW — grotesqueries.)

Animation

From PES — The Deep. Old tools under­sea life. Wait ’til you see the angler fish.

(Much more PES. )

Morning Linkage (Jan 11)

Transportation

1930 Norton CS1 TT, the very best kind of fam­i­ly heir­loom. Marcel Schoen inher­it­ed it from his uncle who was a bit of a Norton nut and had pur­chased the bike in 1959 from some­one who was using it a dai­ly com­muter. Lots more details and some nice old­er pho­tos. Note that cur­rent own­er is a sil­ver­smith and there’s a Norton Manx mod­el exe­cut­ed in ster­ling at the bot­tom of the post.

The man who sits next to me at break­fast wants to make one of these for him­self. Anyone caught aid­ing and abet­ting this insan­i­ty will be… um, scolded.

You knew it was just a mat­ter of time. Cops on silent bikes…

Science

I love string, and yarn, and thread, and wire, and … Except when it gets tan­gled. No, that’s not true. I love untan­gling things. Odd but there it is. But I nev­er knew that there were enzymes whose job it is to rush around inside our cells and untan­gle the strands of DNA. Too cool.

Art, Images, and Design

Photography of aban­doned America cities has made the big time news recent­ly. Modern explor­ers of the urban decay have been fill­ing Flickr with their work. Visual News has a nice set of images with links back to the pho­to­streams of the creators.

Hal Rasmusson will teach you to draw pret­ty girls. Utterly cute and safe for work.

This is here just so I can find it again lat­er when I need it. Amazing pen­cil draw­ing of flow­ers, leaves, and oth­er plant bits. And, oh, and Jacob Dahlstrup drew a skull.

Moving Image

Very ear­ly (1913) stop motion ani­ma­tion. A Christmas play about Father Christmas and the insects — sur­re­al is the best way to describe it. Nicely restored and updat­ed with a soundtrack.