Morning Linkage (Aug 19)

Transportation

I’m at it again with the tiny cus­toms. This non-NA mod­el Honda JX110 impress­es with a hand­made muf­fler.

At the oth­er extreme. large, low and very long. An Indian with a nod towards the bicy­cles of the 20’s.

The title says it all. Engine Porn. A well done pho­to of the RD33 engine put into such Soviet planes as the MiG29.

Science

The Earth and the moon, togeth­er. As seen look­ing back from the Messenger spacecraft.

Audio

What if GMO plants were used to cre­ate some­thing oth­er than food? Artist David Benque pro­pos­es mod­i­fi­ca­tion and selec­tive breed­ing to add cus­tom acoustics to a forest

More arti­fi­cial sounds — what hap­pens when you slow one of those ter­ri­ble songs by the boy phe­nom Justin Bieber by 800? You end up with some­thing that sounds like a Brian Eno air­port expe­ri­ence. But it’s weird­ly soothing.

Art, Images, and Design

Porto. A col­lec­tion of ran­dom images tak­en by Miss K and pub­lished by the street art blog Stick 2 Target.

Animation

Visual apho­risms. 3.5 seconds.

Dinner:  Keep calm and car­ry out

Morning Linkage (Aug 18)

- the messed up glass­es edition -

Transportation

First thing in the feed read­er this morn­ing was this beau­ty. I almost stopped there and called it a day. CB550, build direct­ed by Jeff Stephens.

Art, Images, and Design

A few brief com­ments on the book design of the sem­i­nal Design for the Real World. Aside from the funky 70’s cov­er, it might be time to revis­it this classic.

Christian Tribastone hung 6 of his sketch­es of Jamestown, NY on or near the places he had drawn. Excellent images in black and white on brown paper. He won­ders what will hap­pen to the draw­ings he left behind, so do I.

Sweet new print from Casey Roberts. Happiness.

that’s all I can see for now.

Morning Linkage (Aug 17)

Transportation

My dreams of roman­tic, retro get-aways always include a fly­ing boat. I thought I was SOL for this life­time. I am not. Dornier is bring­ing the fly­ing boat back into production.

Wood on a bicy­cle. Very nice set of han­dle­bars.

Southeast Asia and tiny bikes. The new world order in cus­toms. So many of the bikes fea­tured here begin with CB, but they rarely go on to fin­ish up with 100.

“Or Glory: 21st Century Rockers” a book of pho­tographs by Horst A. Friedrichs of mod­ern Rockers. (Publishes in September; avail­able for pre-order on Amazon now)

Science

Tidal tur­bines. Like wind­mills for gen­er­at­ing elec­tric­i­ty from the con­tin­u­ous motion of water. I’m sor­ry for link­ing to the NYT; the com­ments are so dull.

Culture

In 1974, Philippe Petit and a few com­pa­tri­ots slung a wire between the World Trade Centers and M. Petit walked it.  That sort of bal­ance and focus is unimag­in­able to most of us. Or is it? You can sign up for a work­shop to learn to walk on wire from the mas­ter. Details on your next oppor­tu­ni­ty when I can find them.

Art, Images, and Design

From Retro Age Vintage Fabrics. Upholstery fab­ric fea­tur­ing a design by Picasso of a lady on a horse. I can’t quite see­ing doing my sofa in this print… or maybe I can.

BTW if you like the aes­thet­ic of the pho­to­graph of the wood­en han­dle­bars on the bicy­cle there’s an entire tum­bler full of sim­i­lar­ly airy images.  Is this the pho­tog­ra­ph­er him/herself? Or some­one with a very good eye for a style curat­ing the net for us?

Chas Laborde was a French illus­tra­tor of the 1920’s and 1930’s. The blog Adventures in the Print Trade takes the oppor­tu­ni­ty of a new book about him to show a few of his illus­tra­tions of every­day life. I keep think­ing that I want to see a graph­ic nov­el of some­thing by Fitzgerald done this way.

Morning Linkage (Aug 16)

Transportation

That gasp you just heard, that was my sweet baboo when he saw this fine Norton in BRG.

Oshkosh Trucks, mak­ers of severe duty firetrucks. 0–50 in 35 sec­onds? That’s slooooow. But it has roof mount­ed water cannons.

H2 resto. If you know what this is you’re gonna be real­ly hap­py. If you don’t, well then ask…

Science and Cooking

If you have any young boys in the room you might want to send them out to play. At least until you fig­ure out a gen­tle way to explain this to them. The heart break­ing news from dino land is that there might not actu­al­ly be a tricer­atops. Uh huh. The three horned sav­age might actu­al­ly be the juve­nile form of the big­ger but some­what dull torosaurus.

O’Reilly is often the pub­lish­er of first resort for geek­i­ness. Now they are stretch­ing the bound­ary of what’s geeky. With recipes. A tech-ish review of Jeff Potter’s “Cooking for Geeks” by James Kalbach.

Art, Images, and Design

Linked to by sev­er­al friends on Facebook. Early col­or pho­tographs, many repro­duced from slides. Very effec­tive depic­tions of a time in American his­to­ry that most of us have only seen in black and white.

Looking at our­selves. The idea of doing a cou­ple of 50’s “look­ing toward the future” style ads for Facebook et al sounds like a lot of fun. Add in a lit­tle Russian per­spec­tive and you get some of the best sound­ing par­o­dies ever.

This past week­end was a good week­end; camp­ing, cook­ing, mete­or watch­ing, etc. Lawrence Cox has cap­tured the sense of adven­tur­ous free­dom bril­liant­ly in his illus­tra­tion of a run-away dog.

so off you go into your week,

Morning Linkage (Aug 10)

Transportation

1960’s show cars on post­cards. Start with the Fireball 500. Total morn­ing waster on flickr.

Moving more freight, but not on the inter­states. Marine Highways, inter-modal freight, short sea ship­ping, and RoRos.

The world’s only Muzeti 250. (1983 GSX 250) Sweet lit­tle bike.

Classic of the Day. AJS 18.

Science

Astronomy pic­ture. The eclipse shad­ow cone — I’ve nev­er seen this so clear­ly. No date?

Ordinary super­pow­ers. First off — I love the image that io9 chose to illus­trate this. Okay, so did you know that you can train your­self to rec­og­nize Haidinger’s Brush. This allows you to detect polar­ized light. Um, I’m not sure how this is actu­al­ly going to be use­ful to any­one, but hey, you nev­er know…

Personality isn’t as sim­ple as your high school guid­ance coun­selor told you when she gave the results of you Meyer-Briggs tests and sug­gest­ed that trade school was your best option. And any hope that there might be genet­ic basis for per­son­al­i­ty seems to have been squashed by these find­ings from Australia.

But most­ly the above arti­cle is a link to this piece in the New Yorker about Walter Mischel. The man behind the one marsh­mal­low now or two marsh­mal­lows lat­er exper­i­ments. And the follow-up work with the kinder­gart­ners who were his first subjects.

Art, Images, and Design

Photographer Mark Tucker is back from Tennessee and work­ing on the lat­est Jack Daniels commercials/ads. He’s pro­vid­ed some very nice pho­tographs and a cou­ple of “mak­ing of” video out­takes. If you watch the first video with the piglets turn the sound down — they squeal some­thing fierce.

Coralie Bickford-Smith is a book design­er for Penguins books. She is respon­si­ble for the jack­et and cloth bind­ings of the Penguin Classics series. Some of the loveli­est books to be pro­duced late­ly. Be sure to look at her work for the Red Classics Boys’ Adventures series as well.

Nicely done pic­tures from Tara Hunt’s pho­to stream of the New Zealand farm that served as the loca­tion for Hobbiton in the LoR movies. Door and win­dows are gone but the sheep have a place out of the rain.