Morning Linkage (Jan 6)

Transportation

Classic Gulf rac­ing liv­ery has always been one of my favorites. And a bob­ber isn’t a bad thing. So here we have an H‑D bob­ber in a very nice ren­di­tion of the Gulf liv­ery. Yeah, I’ll give that one shop space.

Some dear friends are of a cer­tain age, and this Kawasaki Z1 cus­tom will bring sighs of recog­ni­tion. And then awe, this is every­thing the Z1 could have been if mod­ern forks and brakes, as well as mod­ern man­u­fac­tur­ing stan­dards had been avail­able then.

The fun of pho­tograph­ing a 1951 Cooper Mk V, and a bit of the his­to­ry of the demon. Like so many oth­er rac­ers — it’s a string of bitza pro­to­types more than an actu­al “mod­el.” It’s also way too cute.

Science

I’ve seen these micro­scope images of snow flakes in a cou­ple of places. But nowhere are they as neat­ly tied to the uni­verse as here on Akira the Don’s site where they are intro­duced with “Every lit­tle girl has got the galaxy inside her/ fun­ny how we always told the very same tales.”

Tools

Things I did­n’t know… A box scraper real­ly was orig­i­nal­ly used to scrape box­es or rather to scrape the labels off of box­es so that they could be reused.

Art, Images, and Design

Bright, bold, and um, gooey? Matt Mignanelli. Way bet­ter than any of the “psy­che­del­ic” album cov­ers of our youth.

Thieves. More bikes and rid­ers done by the excel­lent French graph­ic artists at Silence TV. Clean lines, telling tonal val­ues, and miss­ing pieces.

Flat faced, elon­gat­ed crea­tures with scaly exte­ri­ors draw in black and white, Phlegm does a cou­ple of walls in Sheffield.

Happy mak­ing stor­age sys­tem. Bird hous­es on a pole for your kids room, erm, front hall.

Morning Linkage (Jan 5)

Transportation

If you’ve got 25 min­utes to kill and the desire for a new career in the excit­ing field of mil­i­tary avi­a­tion you might want to sit down with this video. Or maybe if you need at a look of the unfor­tu­nate his­to­ry of humor and pret­ty girls in train­ing films. 1943 Army Air Forces P‑47 Thunderbolt train­ing video. That real­ly is worth a watch for plane fiends. (Video 24:41)

For my SuperMoto lov­ing friends. The Black Pearl. But could you go out and get this one all dirty?

Pure, unadul­ter­at­ed yum. BSA Gold Star Daytona Special. Because some­time restora­tion is way more effec­tive than customizing.

Science

Must be some­thing about the hol­i­day hang­over but I can’t wrap my mind around any sort of seri­ous sci­ence news. Instead you get shit like this… io9 writ­ers and com­menters rule the world (again.) Why we need to do real, exper­i­men­tal sci­ence. Involves giraffes and water and no computers.

More help­ful­ly, and more seri­ous­ly. An insight­ful decon­struc­tion of the sub­tle aids that Google maps use to make their maps the most read­able maps on the web. (Arguably.)

Art, Images, and Design

Jim Flora did this Baba Yaga late in his life. Wonderful depic­tion of the wise old witch.

Tangentially, I was watch­ing a doc­u­men­tary recent­ly and saw a pic­ture of the cov­er of Charlie Parker’s Charlie Parker with Strings. Not my fav Bird album but the art work is way cool. So I went look­ing… David Stone Martin did tons of the cov­ers that I remem­ber from my child­hood. Including the one at the top of the post. (NSFW — artis­tic nudes)

Animation

Pop-up fairy tales in French. Not at all what you’re expecting.

Morning Linkage (Jan 4)

Transportation

KZ400 by Mad Crow in Barcelona. The head­light and tank details make it special.

There are many things to like about this Wrenchmonkees Ducati 750ss. The frame treat­ment, the col­ors, and the front clip.

I nev­er can quite seem to wrap my mind around the idea of a bike called a Virago. But the front end of this XV750 brings me pret­ty close to what I think it should be. On the oth­er hand, no Virago I’ve ever met had such a tee­ny inef­fec­tu­al rear end.

Science

What is the evo­lu­tion­ary pur­pose of tick­ling? An incred­i­bly impor­tant ques­tion whose answer remains a mys­tery. (And whose impor­tance is total­ly poo-poo’d by the spoil-sport commenters. )

Art, Images, and Design

The idea of deliv­er­ing teach­ing mate­ri­als as a sec­ondary use of the card­board box the food aid rice came in is … well I don’t know, either inspired or con­de­scend­ing. With some thought and effort this could work very well. More com­mer­cial­ly, Amazon should jump on this  — imag­ine a box to ship toys in that turns into a toy.

Scary octo­pus but not in the way you expect. A col­lec­tion of plas­tic bags and oth­er trash takes on new life mean­der­ing through the streets of Slovenia.

The char­ac­ter ani­ma­tions in first per­son shoot­ers make me wince every time I see one. But some of the vehi­cle and weapon designs are first-rate. Like these from Damnation. Several nice guns and a bonus of a bike and a trike at the end. Winter build project anyone?

Animation

Information is Beautiful is branch­ing out into ani­ma­tion as a tech­nique for the visu­al dis­play of infor­ma­tion. Here is a Tetris inspired retelling of the world’s spend­ing habits. Debtris. This first effort gets an A for being infor­ma­tive and a D for the sound track. Watch, but turn the speak­ers down.

Morning Linkage (Dec 20)

Transportation

KZ400, El Diablo by Mad Crow in Barcelona. The details on the head­light and tank make it special.

Hedton. A rare Hedlund engine crow­barred into a Norton(?) frame. Includes links to the Hedlund engine sto­ry and a flickr stream of Hedlund motos.

Odd-bits bicy­cle sculp­ture. A Monday morn­ing smile.

Science and Technology

Yeah, soci­ol­o­gy is a soft sci­ence but wth. Why a lim­it­ed lev­el of cor­rup­tion among offi­cials and law enforce­ment may be nec­es­sary to the cohe­sive­ness of society.

Something to mull over. this map of the world shows the heav­i­ly walled nation­al and inter­na­tion­al bor­ders. Are we walling off the rest of the world? And can you think of oth­er heav­i­ly for­ti­fied bor­ders and how do they fit into this map?

Art, Images, and Design

Thomas Allen brings pulp fic­tion paper­backs to life by mov­ing the sub­jects out of the flat plain of the cov­er. Artist bio.

A sam­ple of the work of Hermann Huppen — one of the rare breed of writer/illustrators in the world of comics. Some of the Jeremiah series fea­tured here are avail­able in English translation.

Animation

Headless Productions. Teaser for I’m a Monster. It’s going to be a first-rate fam­i­ly giggle.

Morning Linkage (Dec 17)

Transportation

It start­ed with see­ing the pho­to of a team of rac­ers in front of a BA Air Ferry on one of the ran­dom bike pic blogs. And went on from there until I came to this full report on the 1967 Zandvoort Sprint. Photos, videos, and lots of words.

Oh if only he had roughed up the front forks. Just a lit­tle. It would be a per­fect rat. Or near enough. XS650.

Initially mis­named but now cor­rect­ly iden­ti­fied. I just like that this Norton looks so hap­py to sit­ting out there wait­ing it’s turn.

Science

My world has just became a sig­nif­i­cant­ly bet­ter place. I now know that it has pale­o­mag­netists in it. Scientists who study the his­to­ry of the changes of the earth­’s mag­net­ic field. And now they’ve dis­cov­ered some unprece­dent­ed­ly rapid shifts that occurred about 3000 years ago. By study­ing the mag­net­ic sig­na­tures of heaps of slag left over from smelt­ing cop­per in the Middle East.

Order breaks down into dis­or­der in a very order­ly way. Video demon­strat­ing an aspect of non-linear physics.

Art, Images, and Design

Old hard dri­ves. New toys. And then there are the pic­tures of the lit­tle guys tak­ing the machines apart. Joy.

A reminder that the Space Needle was once new, and that graph­ic design in the ear­ly 60’s had some moments of brilliance.

Weekend DIY cam­era rigs for tak­ing high-speed, super close, mul­ti­ple expo­sures, or just look at the amaz­ing pictures. 

…he want­ed to cap­ture fly­ing insects, such as the hon­ey­bee above. “I have a prob­lem with killing them, plus they don’t fly when they’re dead,”

as well as but­ter­fly wing scales and mag­net­ic ferrofluids.

Animation

TeamCerf’s Meet Buck illus­trates the exis­ten­tial… um, shows fol­ly as… er, … it’s fun­ny, okay?