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.

Morning Linkage (Jan 10)

Transportation

One of the things I love about the back­yard and small shop bike builders is how will­ing they are to share what they’ve done. A ran­dom pic of an orange bike post­ed on a cafe rac­er site brings the pre­vi­ous­ly anony­mous builder out of the wood­work with some CAD draw­ings and build pic­tures and hints of anoth­er bike in the works. (But damn — all that orange.)
http://www.returnofthecaferacers.com/2010/12/return-of-citrus-cafe-racer.html

A look at the work of Dean Jefferies and his role in the Hollywood car cul­ture of the 60’s. For Mustang lovers, Jefferies has a hand in the phan­tom fleet of ear­ly Shelbys.

Science

I did not know that Brazil pro­duces one-third of the cof­fee on the plan­et. Other inter­est­ing cof­fee facts lurk in this graphic.

Cappuccino Coast is the name that res­i­dents of Cape Town and envi­rons give to the rare phe­nom­e­na that turns the ocean swells into a thick brown­ish sea foam. This set of pic­tures makes the descrip­tion seem entire­ly right.

Art, Images, and Design

Take the dumpy kid and one of the weird birds from UP add a lit­tle St. George, shake well. Chad King gets the mix right in this quick one-off. Quick? That’s a speed paint­ing? Okay so the rest of us suck just a lit­tle more this morning.

His “real” work is smoother and tighter, and pleas­ing­ly puz­zling.

Imaginary Transportation

Fairy tale trans­porta­tion for girls. Inspiration.

Further inspi­ra­tion for fly­ing girls.

Animation

Lego live action/stop motion short. The cheesi­est mus­tache ever and a won­der­ful wall of lit­tle doors into oth­er peo­ple’s lives. Giggly fun.

out the door and knock ’em dead