Morning Linkage (May 25)

Transportation

Pure e‑powered hybrid sports car pron. Porsche 918. The 12 minute PR video. Ignore that crack about mod­er­ate dri­ving style.  You’re gonna need a smoke after this one.

First com­ment for the win. “German guy in Switzerland builds an American bike and gives it a Spanish name.: El marinero bor­ra­cho. Shovel head with gold leaf? it’s kin­da cool though.

Matte black, not-really an Indian but … swoon.

Science and Tech

Another stab at algae based fuels. This one mim­ic­k­ing the process of cre­at­ing oil from dinosaurs. Sort of.

Image mak­ing always finds a use for exist­ing tech­nolo­gies and push­es to find new one. In this demo reel, immer­sive media push­es it’s new imLive 360 expe­ri­ence. Pan around and catch the blast flash­es as you watch Texas Stadium come down around your ears. No music just explo­sions.

Art, Images, and Design

ID — nice design using human ges­ture to con­trol light­ing. A desk lamp worth having.

Okay, this is a lit­tle mind bog­gling. In 1883 the cir­cus came to Colchester VT . Posters were put up every where. Including one house where they were quick­ly cov­ered up with new sid­ing. And there they stood, until 1991 when the own­ers of the house decid­ed it was time to do some­thing about the decay­ing sid­ing. Off came the old sid­ing and what was seen? The cir­cus posters. Northeast Document Conservation Center’s web­site walks you through the process of tak­ing the posters down and pre­serv­ing them. As well as the cir­cus intrigue that their work revealed! Video slide show on site and  a link to the flickr set with commentary.

Christopher Walken — dead sexy.

off you go my freaky darlings,

Morning Linakge (May 24)

Transportation

There’s an app for that. Rolls-Royce lets you build a Ghost on your iPhone.

Corn and used cook­ing oil aren’t the only mate­ri­als suit­able for pro­cess­ing into fuels. Amtrak is test­ing, urm, what was left on the slaugh­ter house floor.

One of the great­est things about Boeing’s devel­op­ment of the 787 is how much of the process is being doc­u­ment­ed and broad­cast to the curi­ous mass­es. The cli­mat­ic test­ing has begun in Florida. It’s dan­ged cold in that hangar. And you need an elec­tric pen­cil sharpener.

Society and Culture

Boing-Boing pro­vides a review of a nifty book about vend­ing machines. Amazon car­ries the book. (Some of the sell alongs are distasteful.)

There are few things more grat­ing than a car alarm in the night. This lit­tle video of Nasty Canasta just might go a ways to mak­ing the next sleep­less night a lit­tle more bear­able. Innovative bur­lesque and NSFW.

Art, Images, and Design

I know she’s kind of mor­bid and a whole lot emo but I love the way Sarah Sharp jux­ta­pos­es images and words.

Economy of  line can be the most expres­sive tech­nique for sketch­ing. These three quick stud­ies by Jean-Marie Guivarc’h from the Bidon 2 Litres are fine exam­ples and hap­pi­ly also include two side­cars. If you’d like to see more of his work — most­ly auto­mo­tive look fur­ther.

This and the next five pic­tures were tak­en in an aban­doned build­ing in Lockport. The build­ing and the source of the bikes is IDesd in the com­ments. The HDR work is nice­ly restrained.

ooh, look, it’s anoth­er week starting…

Morning Linkage (May 21)

Transportation

Sweet lit­tle pho­to gallery of cars par­tic­i­pat­ing in a recre­ation of the Mille Miglia. Including the win­ning BMW 328.  Don’t miss the ulti­mate ped­al car.

And here’s a gallery of black & whites from the inau­gur­al MM won by the BMW fea­tured above.

More old stuff. 1915 Indian, 8 valve board­track rac­er. Running and unre­stored. All the mov­ing part­sare  hang­ing out in the open on this fire breath­ing dragon.

Pretty girls and bikes. It’s been going on a long time, as this 1951 por­trait of the win­ner of the  Miss California Motorcycle Beauty Contest show.

Science and Technology

An inter­est­ing muse on the nature of “curat­ed com­put­ing“and why the iPad is rel­e­vant to the future of infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy. Note that I said infor­ma­tion tech­nol­o­gy; the _author_ is call­ing it computing.

More good news. Google will begin allow­ing https con­nec­tions to google.com. Encrypted search­ing is now yours.I plan on using it.

Art, Images, and Design

Yeah I know there’s almost no excuse for post­ing some­thing this inane. But come on, pho­to­shopped dogs doing yoga. It just makes you smile.

Absolutely lus­cious travel posters. Advertising steamship lines in Japan at the turn of the (last) cen­tu­ry. Something here will inspire you for the day.

Friday Animation

Lost Howdy Doody car­toon. Howdy Doody and His Magic Hat. Found in the dank con­fines of the LoC. Brought to you by the fine folks at Dinosaurs and Robots.

and that’s the week…

Oh, and some­body get this fixed for me ‘kay?  (min­ions, not minkies, clear­ly there are idiots in shipping.…)

Morning Linkage (May 19)

Transportation

Bridgestone pro­vides two videos that explain the tire pro­gram for MotoGP.  Lots of you all know this stuff but the vids make a good intro­duc­tion for the uninitiated.

I love my Benz, but per­haps not enough to get me up in this Eurocoptor/MB col­lab­o­ra­tion. Luxo traf­fic beat­er.

In 2011 the Dakar Rally will once again be held in South America. Rally dates and routes were released recent­ly. Looks like a great tour through Chile and Argentina.

Science and Tech

This arti­cle on open soft­ware offers anoth­er inter­est­ing visu­al­iza­tion of the process of cre­at­ing soft­ware. Open soft­ware is some­times said to ‘evolve’ but does it? And  does that evo­lu­tion mim­ic the evo­lu­tion of bio­log­i­cal enti­ties? Informatists Marc Gerstein co-wrote a study com­par­ing the net­worked infor­ma­tion trans­fers involved in the change process­es of E. coli and Linux. Interesting conclusions.

Another use for LEDs. Guitar picks. Seriously. A mini-light show in your liv­ing room.

Password secu­ri­ty is a right roy­al pain. Either you can remem­ber the dan­ged thing XOR it’s secure — rarely can you have both. And writ­ing your pass­words down on a cheat sheet is a big no-no. Unless your cheat sheet is some­thing like this. It may take you a few min­utes to fig­ure out how this is sup­posed to work. But it’s both sim­ple and ingenious.

Art, Images, and Design

Take some of the best street art being done today, add a pho­tog­ra­ph­er with an eye for line and col­or in his por­trait work and you have Gabriel Mendes’ Urban Puns. Bold, bright, and bit­ing. 8th image down NSFW.

My own, sim­ple as I can make it, web­site isn’t per­haps the best exam­ple to use for the geo-citieizer but hey this is my list of links so I’ll use my web­site. (Results are some­what ran­dom. If you don’t think it’s too bad try the link again in anoth­er tab.) Try mess­ing with your own site by using the generator.

Bonus bike and choco­late com­bo link today. “This motor­cy­cle runs on choco­late but needs to be parked in the deep-freezer when tem­per­a­tures are not ade­quate.” nuff said.

Alexis Grotius’ sum­mer bike is pret­ty cool as well. Except that it’s creepy.

Morning Linkage (May 18)

Transportation

I’m not sure why you’d con­vert a ’73 TX650 to a mono­shock rear but I’m mad for the paint scheme. Tres chic.

Okay, this is weird. A cus­tom shop in Italy that builds on mod­ern Royal Enfields. Italy, India, exot­ic? (Royal McQueen)

One of the nicest look­ing motard con­cepts I’ve seen (this week). Oberdan Bezzi does Bimota.

Society, Culture, and Literature

Therefore Repent! is a post-rapture graph­ic nov­el. What if after the rap­ture the world con­tin­ues along it’s mer­ry way, except that some­things are a lit­tle odd, like mag­ic starts to work? And then there are the aveng­ing angels… The link is to the .pdf.  Alternative for­mats avail­able as well.  Where they’re talk­ing about the next nov­el in the series. By Jim Munro and Salgood Sam.

A hand­ful of draw­ings for inven­tions that we don’t know we need. Auto-abandonment zones being the first of sev­er­al good ideas.

Science, Technology, and Gadgets

Thank heav­en for Wired sci­ence. Taking the inter­est­ing things stuck behind Nature’s pay-wall and bring­ing them out for the rest of us to see.

Networks are gen­er­al­ly resilient, that’s why they devel­op. But what hap­pens if you net­work net­works? You get frag­ile. A recent report in Nature demon­strate this with exam­ples from the Italian pow­er grid fail­ure and stock mar­kets crash in 1987.

Art, Images, and Design

A cam­era, some paper, and a pen­cil. Overlaid real­i­ties that act as x‑rays into the world we don’t quite live in.

A boat load of images of the Virgin or some­thing like her. Many tak­en from the cock-odd world of fash­ion styling. The zom­bie expres­sion on the face of the sec­ond LaCroix bride would scare any man away from the altar. Blasphemy abounds, but don’t skip it. There are trea­sures like the images by Lorri Lipton and Ron English.

Sam Brewster rocks a cool style that hints at hav­ing used a lot of mark­ers grow­ing up. Commercial work that comes with a sense of humor built in. I swear that fish is grimacing.

off you go my freaky darlings.