Morning Linkage (Sep 3)

Transportation

A double-up. Axel Budde builds Moto Guzzi cafe bikes.
Scraper bikes. A cus­tom bicy­cle cul­ture in LA. Top notch video work too.
Okay — that thing I said the oth­er day? About chrome being evil? I’d like to make an excep­tion. A _single_ excep­tion. Using the dirt-simplest jet engine ever, the pulse jet, Robert Maddox makes chrome look good, sound good, and go good.

Science

Pictures from space tell us so much about our plan­et. The fun­ny thing is that in order to pro­vide quan­tifi­able col­or images of the ocean — a satel­lite has to turn around and look at the moon once in a while.  This com­pli­cates things a bit.
1700 CE to 2000 CE, 300 years that sub­stan­tial­ly remade the sur­face of the earth. These maps and graphs from ecol­o­gists Erle Ellis and Navin Ramankutty at the University of Maryland illus­trate the changes in the type and size of human habi­tats.

Art, Images, and Design

Purveyors of fine garage sale col­lectibles, Dinosaurs and Robots, intro­duces the Grid and the Wave and points you toward my new favorite geek­ing site. PACIN, the Packing, Art han­dling, and Crating Information Network. (BTW I’m pret­ty darn  sure that col­lectibles is *not* a word even if I did just use it, m’kay?)
You don’t have to watch all 7 and a half min­utes of the video but you’ll enjoy watch­ing Mear One paint a sev­er­al of the items for the Sketches of Babylon series. Full gallery of the paint­ings here.
Arnold Bocklin. A sin­gle sum­mer image. Such dark green in the trees beside this river.

Animation

Some days you just can’t get it right. Dad takes Jr and Sis to the play­ground. Mom comes along a bit lat­er. Simple line ani­ma­tion by Birdbox Studio.

Morning Linkage (Sep 2)

Transportation

From the cute to the creepy, with whis­tle stops at it-goes-faster-when-you-paint-it-like-this and dude-you-were-so-high. Scooter paint.

SFW, but pure sexy nonethe­less. Just put it on the screen. Everything will be okay. More views of the Holden Efijy if you pre­fer some­thing less fer­al. There are some rather lush inte­ri­or shots.

From the cat­e­go­ry of: British TV we’ve nev­er seen. Heartbeat, is a soapy look­ing 60’s nos­tal­gia show. The bike rid­den by local police­man is a Francis Barnett Cruiser. Nah, I’d nev­er heard of it either. It’s pret­ty cool.

Food

I love marsh­mal­lows. I love caf­feine. I prob­a­bly should not have any of these.

I want my lunch to be this cool. And cute. And clever.

Art, Images, and Design

This turquoise wall with its met­al trac­ery is part of Kunsthofpassage in Dresden — it’s been called a Rube Goldberg and some­thing from Dr. Seuss’s days as a plumber. An amaz­ing series of gut­ters and down­spouts. Video of gut­ters and down­spouts in Kunsthofpassage in the rain. (German narration.)

Laurie Lipton’s extra­or­di­nary machines take the claus­tro­pho­bia induced by mul­ti­ply­ing wid­gets, gad­gets, and their assort­ed wiring and brings them to a whole new lev­el of men­ace. Graphite on paper at one of L.A.‘s coolest gal­leries. The Illusion of Control Tower. The full set from her exhib­it at La Luz de Jesus. Click on each item for a good look.

Animation

Sweet 1950’s junior-high sci­ence class style ani­ma­tion. Graboids. AKA Landsharks. Aversion to rain makes them rare in here in puge­topo­lis. (5:00)

alrighty then, off you go and don’t for­get your lunch boxes.

Morning Linkage (Sep 1)

Transportation

It’s not a bad look­ing bike — at all. H‑D pitch­es to the young­sters. No blondes allowed?

A bit of French his­to­ry, a pret­ty lady on a bike, and a Comiot tricycle.

Ralph Steadman illus­trates Hunter Thompson on a Ducati. Perfect match.

The GSX 1100 des­ig­na­tion has been with us for a very long time. This item from the 80’s is one of the rea­sons why.

Science

From WSU. Why the nice guys get vot­ed off the island. Proper title of the paper: “The Desire to Expel Unselfish Members from the Group”. Humans are so weird.

Gaming

Point and click adven­ture games are always pop­u­lar with the “I don’t wan­na shoot more stuff” crowd. Mostly they’re based on var­i­ous poly­gon ren­der­ing engines. But Cockroach is build­ing some thing a lit­tle dif­fer­ent. Clay and actu­al mod­el mak­ing are used to cre­ate stop-motion sequences for The Dream Machine. A haunt­ed apart­ment com­plex… and a game for grown ups. You can play a demo or sign up for the beta test of chap­ter one here.

Art, Images, and Design

I have a new com­ic in the RSS read­er. Try this one with the fly­ing car.

Humans make unin­ten­tion­al art by their actions. A col­lec­tion of pho­tographs of all of the con­tra­band brought in to the USA via Kennedy International Airport from Nov 16 to Nov 20, 2009.

Food, visu­al puns, and nice­ly done let­ter­press work. Letterform does a series of sweet greet­ing cards.

Animation

We wel­come our mys­te­ri­ous cat-head over­lords? Um, demon­ic, ted­dy bears? I have no idea but it’s fun and goes well with too many lattes. (Video 0:57)

snack time!

Morning Linkage (Aug 30)

Transportation

The week­end’s over, but there’s a new week­end just around the cor­ner. Some of you are gonna need this. Hayes M1030 — bitchin’ off road machine. Multi-fuel, 2‑foot ford­ing depth, option­al IR dri­ving light! woohoo!

And one of these. Bufalino. Piaggio APE goes camper. Yuppers, I’ll take one.

Snicker. That’s some bal­last you got there. Frighteningly close to home for some of us hack own­ers. And more Stan Mott car and bike art. Bonus pho­tos at 2/3rds. Go Carts!

Science

Astronomer Seth Shostak pro­pos­es that we could increase our chances of find­ing intel­li­gent life in the stars by expand­ing the type of intel­li­gence we are look­ing for. Where should we look if we want to find alien arti­fi­cial intel­li­gence?

Slightly more earth bound news. Migration is a com­plex social func­tion; not just a mat­ter of every­one in the flock gets an urge for bright sun­ny beach­es come October.

Art, Images, and Design

Tumblingerstrasse? Tag Tag? Super Paper? Still does­n’t mean any­thing to you? How about Hot Wheels stop-motion ani­ma­tion and graffiti?

These do not look like tat­toos. But they are… I’m unde­cid­ed about them but I val­ue the reminder that ink on skin does­n’t have to con­form to a look. More of Amanda Wachob’s work (click on abstract)

Utterly point­less ani­mat­ed gif. But there’s a monkey…

Animation

Sad news from Japan, Satochi Kon has passed away.

He gave us many films but none so won­der­ful as Tokyo Godfathers. A look at three mis­fits who find a bun­dle on Christmas Eve. T.G. long ago replaced It’s a Wonderful Life as our Christmas movie of choice. Earthy, humor­ous, and real­is­ti­cal­ly hope­ful. (Available on disc from netflix.)
American ver­sion of the Tokyo Godfathers trail­er. Lame trail­er, good movie.

oh so Monday around here, I hope your locale is a lit­tle less inundated.

Morning Linkage (Aug 27)

Transportation

Engine porn. Full view of the gear dri­ven cams on an awe­some lit­tle Benelli.

Perfectly, post-apocalyptically Vespa.

Nice lines on this yel­low Honda cafe. The light driz­zling of water drops does not hurt the look of these shots.

Gaming and Culture

SEGA has a yakuza based game for play sta­tion. How good is it? Jake Adelstein asked 3 “guys” to have a look. Other than the red shirt…

Art, Images, and Design

Elsa Lanchester was the orig­i­nal Bride of Frankenstein. Madeline Khan will always be my favorite BoF, but you have lots of images to choose from in this round-up by Wicked Halo. NSFW — erot­ic mon­ster nudi­ty.

Animation

We’ve all done it; let our sense of dread over­whelm our com­mon sense, and been embar­rass­ed­ly cha­grined at our silli­ness in the end. Smoothly ani­mat­ed with soft sculp­tures and quirky card­board, Something Taken, Something Left Behind, reminds us that chil­dren aren’t the only ones giv­en to irra­tional cat­a­stro­phiz­ing. (Video, 10:14)

off you go into the rainy weekend…