Morning Linkage (Mar 2)

Transportation

The F1 safe­ty car. M‑B SLS AMG. My very favorite alpha­bet soup car. The rear light­ing is par­tic­u­lar­ly stylish.

Vintagent pro­vides anoth­er fas­ci­nat­ing sto­ry from yes­ter­year. A 1967 “pro­duc­tion” bike class at the Isle of Man TT led to the cre­ation of a spe­cial Velocette Thruxton. Tales of it’s suc­cess­es and failures.

Loverly. In-car and side-of-the-road video of a prac­tice dri­ve for the 100 Acre Wood ral­ly. This is why they do it.

Funny British “Watch for Motorcyclists” ad. Humor and a reminder. Plus per­haps the ulti­mate hel­met acces­so­ry, neon.

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Tools

A nice vari­a­tion on the multi-tool. I like rounder shapes for pock­et objects.

I love my rotary cut­ters for cut­ting both fab­ric and paper. I have sev­er­al includ­ing a cou­ple of the pret­ty flower pat­terned spe­cial edi­tions. Now the rotary cut­ter prin­ci­ple has been applied to emer­gency equip­ment. A bet­ter way to cut through lay­er of den­im, tex­tile, or leather.

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Science

A real­is­tic recon­struc­tion of a snake prey­ing on a rep­tile. Unremarkable except for the fact that the snake is 11 feet long and the rep­tile is an infant Titanosaur. Nice pho­tos of the orig­i­nals fos­sils as well as the reconstruction.

Tiny-saurs. Build-it-yourself mini mod­els, less than $20 for the deluxe kits.They also do cus­tom work if any­one is look­ing for the ulti­mate trade show swag.

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Art, Images and Design

Animation — sort of. Aardman presents Home Sheep Home. Infuriatingly sim­ple brows­er based game for lovers of Shaun the Sheep. Hate, hate, hate. I suck at video games.

Flickr user A Journey Around My Skull is always a good source for new things to look at. These illus­tra­tions from Iranian chil­dren’s books are at the same time famil­iar and alien. Many seem to be folk­tales. This image of two rich­ly dressed char­ac­ters with flow­ers for heads sets the tone. There are many equal­ly fine images through out the set.

These are scary and weird and full of vague­ly obscene pigs pro­vid­ing moral guid­ance(?). In oth­er words, ter­rif­ic. Scott Hassell.  Mostly pen and ink. (NSFW)

Bird obsessed Jungil Hong was trained in ceram­ics at RISD but is best known for her collages.

More tomor­row…

Morning Linkage (Mar 1)

Transportation

Nimbus, a Danish motor­cy­cle designed by a vac­u­um clean­er mogul. The
strap steel frame is unique and a lot pret­ti­er than you’d think.
Here’s a nice­ly restored exam­ple by Soren.

Chumming the waters. Two sets of num­bers com­par­ing the cur­rent batch
big dual-purpose tour­ers. Let the debates begin, erm con­tin­ue. One
orga­nized by bike, one orga­nized by fea­ture.

LED head­light trim has become an indi­ca­tor of cool on cars. Audi’s got
some cute ones that look like (under) eye­brows. Here’s the same look
on a bike. Sorry, I don’t believe they are actu­al­ly avail­able, yet.

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Society and Culture

Could Wal-mart be the answer to reviv­ing local agri­cul­ture? Or is this
just anoth­er exam­ple of putting green spin on the cor­po­rate good? From
Atlantic mag­a­zine, a look into Wal-mart’s new Heritage Agriculture
program.

A new drink­ing game. Describe the list­ed spe­cials at Miss Knicker’s
Garden of Delights. Ink dipped quill? (SFW)

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Art, Images, and Design

Furnishing for the very small house. Scroll down for two of the
coolest bunk bed designs ever.

Wood cut illus­tra­tions by a self-professed anar­chist illustrator.
Cool, calm, col­lect­ed feel­ing, espe­cial­ly the Guardian Poetry  series.
Click on Illustrations in the header.

Two pho­tographs of a young Russian boy wear­ing radio head­phones. One
with his kit­ten. Wistful, haunt­ing. (SFW)

Jonathan Bartlett. Recent work is translu­cent water­col­or wash­es on
yel­low­ing paper. slight­ly off-kilter sur­re­al sto­ries. Be care­ful, the
CGUnit web site can have vague­ly nsfw images in the side­bars. J.
Bartlett’s site is safe. (NSFW)

Black ink brush work and cal­lig­ra­phy on a ledger page. Paris coffee
house Le Select, book read­ing patron.

Dog’s love cars. Eagerly wait­ing for a ride to the beach. Click for bigger.

Starting the week right

Morning Linkage (Feb 26)

Transportation

Three wheels. The DOT calls it a motor­cy­cle. The man­u­fac­tur­er calls a T‑Rex. I call it covetable.

I don’t know what it means for the stereo­typ­i­cal ‘here comes the bad guys’ cues in movie sound tracks but for peo­ple liv­ing under the traf­fic copter pat­tern it means qui­eter com­mute times. Eurocopter intro­duces the Blue Edge rotor blade and Blue Pulse sys­tem which can cut blade noise by 3 to 4 deci­bels. Which does­n’t seem like it should help much but the in-cockpit record­ing are sub­stan­tial­ly dif­fer­ent in vol­ume and in quality.

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Science

This pho­to a glac­i­er weep­ing red ooze is stun­ning enough for inclu­sion in the link­age. But when you read the descrip­tion of what the ooze is and how this par­tic­u­lar pri­mor­dial ooze has been iso­lat­ed for 2 mil­lion years… Atlas Obscura has infor­ma­tion and lots of pictures.

Information is Beautiful has a good visu­al today. A bub­ble race chart of dietary sup­ple­ments and which have sol­id sup­port­ing evi­dence for effi­ca­cy and which don’t. Be sure to read the expla­na­tion of the chart and click on the Show Me tab on the right.

Increasingly spe­cial­ized iPhone apps are appear­ing. Stuff that’s a lot more use­ful that cap­tion­ing your snap­shots with thought bal­loons. This stetho­scope add on for exam­ple. Digital diag­no­sis in your hand.

Not real­ly sci­ence but vague­ly web relat­ed. There are tons of web­sites out there that earn their keep by gen­er­at­ing link backs. In order to opti­mize your chances of grab­bing that cov­et­ed TechCrunch cita­tion I give you “Link Bait Generator” I had a good lit­tle gig­gle by enter­ing ‑moto press- in the box. Try a few of your own.

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Art, Images, and Design

One com­menter accus­es this image of Aiguille de Midi of being over­ly Photoshopped, but I per­son­al­ly like the washed out vin­tage post card feel . No I am not going up there.

Hours of amuse­ment await you in this NBC col­lec­tion of weird news pho­tos. Occasional gore and one giant, pink, cher­ry blos­som laden phal­lus. (NSFW)

The abil­i­ty to draw eludes me, the abil­i­ty to draw like Paul Lung eludes almost every­one. The ani­mal por­traits in par­tic­u­lar will make you blink. Fur in such incred­i­ble detail.

Close to my heart — book arts. A col­lec­tion of fab­u­lous bind­ings. From embossed images of peonies to sil­ver and gem encrust­ed breviaries.

and that’s it for anoth­er week. see you Monday my freaky lit­tle darlings.

Morning Linkage (Feb 25)

Transportation

This is the cutest scoot­er. Ever. Red and yel­low, and it has tail fins
— and a rudder.

The Ghezzi-Brian web­site is pret­ty bro­ken and this par­tic­u­lar Furia
ver­sion of the V11 seems to have dis­ap­peared from it’s galleries.
S’okay this black ver­sion shown at TopSpeed looks bet­ter than the red
one on G‑B’s sites.

I know that a num­ber of you take advan­tage of Bike Bandit’s impres­sive
on-line col­lec­tion of parts fich­es. For the fan­bois there’s now an
iPhone app. That’s right, you can now look up and order parts right
from the break down lane on the free­way. It works pret­ty darn well and
it’s free.

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Science and Society

The Smithsonian reports on the exca­va­tions at  Gobekli Tepe and what
the find­ings might mean for the the­o­ries about the tran­si­tion from
hunter/gather soci­eties to agri­cul­tur­al societies.
“… these new find­ings sug­gest a nov­el the­o­ry of civilization.
Scholars have long believed that only after peo­ple learned to farm and
live in set­tled com­mu­ni­ties did they have the time, orga­ni­za­tion and
resources to con­struct tem­ples and sup­port com­pli­cat­ed social
struc­tures. But Schmidt argues it was the oth­er way around: the
exten­sive, coor­di­nat­ed effort to build the mono­liths lit­er­al­ly laid
the ground­work for the devel­op­ment of com­plex soci­eties.…” Read
more:

Do you remem­ber the movie “Valley Girls” and how we all made fun of
the odd­i­ty of adding the ques­tion­ing inflec­tion to each and every
sen­tence? The plague has spread into every nook and cran­ny and we are
now a nation that sounds as if we aren’t sure where we parked our
selves. Taylor Mali wrote a poem about it and Ronnie Bruce made some
type dance for it.

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Music

I’m get­ting kick out of lis­ten­ing to these 3 and half minute duels
between John Kessler and John Maynard as they pit their col­lec­tion of
obscure and whacky vinyl against the clock, a theme, and each oth­er. Record Bin Roulette.

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Art, Images, and Design

Weapons design for the cubi­cle slave/warrior. When the Zombies come
I’m bar­ri­cad­ing myself in the stock room at Staples.

Paper and stop motion ani­ma­tion. Yay! Like the G wag­on as well. (Video
with sound)

The line between live action and ani­ma­tion in big bud­get movies is
con­tin­u­ing to blur and purists are up in arms. James Cameron insists
Avatar isn’t ani­ma­tion despite the enor­mous num­ber of ani­ma­tors who
worked on his film. This is nice sum­ma­ry of the ker­fluffle with links
to Cameron’s state­ments and a well rea­soned response by Kristin
Thompson.

Blocky bod­ied, bendy armed, charm­ing, robots and oth­er crit­ters. The
near­ly anony­mous Exit man.

hang in there my dears, only one more day to go.

Morning Linkage (Feb 24)

Transportation

Yesterday it was bum­ble­bee fairy tales. This morn­ing it’s a bum­ble­bee hacked hack. Ural. Citroen engine. Really.

Aprilia’s print ads have a dis­tinct fla­vor about them, no mat­ter which part of the line up they are show­ing you. (NSFW butt cheeks)
Enclosed motor­cy­cle park­ing con­tain­er. Would you pay to be able to lock up your bike like this? The only down side I can see is that the 3 vehi­cles in one park­ing space advan­tage of rid­ing is elim­i­nat­ed by the bulk of the con­tain­er. Also avail­able for pri­vate pur­chase for your garage­less house.

Girl shaped moto gear is avail­able. Sort of. Mostly it’s guy gear recut and not designed from the ground up. Except maybe this grrl shaped chest pro­tec­tor. Tactical corsets indeed. (NSFW — black plas­tic girl shaped stuff)

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Science

3 videos of neu­rons at work. Awesome to think that all this stuff is going on inside my head. Keep the mutant com­ments to yourselves.

National Science Foundation  2009 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. A video in which some of the win­ners talk about their sci­ence and the illus­tra­tion there of. Also links to big­ger ver­sion of all the winners.

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Art, Images, and Design

Fritz Hoffman’s pho­tographs con­trast­ing the new and the old in Shanghai. For Nat’l Geographic. Flavorless mod­ernism does not age well, Shanghai will come to regret it’s push to elim­i­nate the old every­day parts of it’s city

Jason Holley’s paint­ings have appeared on the cov­ers of many well know mag­a­zines includ­ing, New Republic and Rolling Stone. He also writes well about each paint­ing and it’s role in cre­at­ing the theme of the issue. His anti-ode to Okra for the Texas Monthly echos my own hatred of that veg. Far left, fourth row.

Very, very obscene, slight­ly dis­turb­ing, lyri­cal­ly grace­ful, and a sly poke at the PC-filled world of BDSM. Bound a type face for spe­cial projects. By Gatis Cirulis. Don’t miss the sketch book pages at the bot­tom of the post. (NSWF)

that’s enough slack­ing for one day.