magpie's shiny things

Transportation

Love the bike, love the pic­ture. Follow the link at the bot­tom for the full gallery — music warn­ing on the link.

For 2010, the Thruxton SE. I’m going to fig­ure out how to get the black cas­es on the one in the shop.

Trains and side­cars. Yay.

More trains. A Life gallery of box car logos. I grew up next to the tracks and remem­ber see­ing a lot of these, but not all of them.
http://www.life.com/image/50488757/in-gallery/37482/life-on-the-rails-boxcar-logos

What was Popular Mechanics think­ing? Some of the more ridicu­lous trans­porta­tion ideas float­ed by PopMech and Modern Mechanics. What, you don’t read the woot blog?

That damned cat is every­where. Hello Kitty flies. I just want an air­line meal that looks that close to edible.

I feel oblig­at­ed to report on this. Heels on Wheels. Sounds great — shoes and bikes. Dull.

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Science and Tech

Building Blog has a fas­ci­nat­ing illus­trat­ed inter­view on under­ground stor­age of nuclear mate­ri­als. Non-political for the most part, full of geeky geol­o­gy, build­ing tech, and gen­er­al sci­en­tif­ic good­ness.

From under­ground to the upper reach­es. Alien ori­gins of cer­tain gas­es hint at out­er space being as impor­tant as inner space in form­ing earth­’s atmosphere .

Speaking of space, Google opens up a suite of tools to use with satel­lite imagery to track changes on earth.

Eric Schmidt thinks you can avoid pri­va­cy prob­lems by not doing things that you’d be embar­rassed to have made public.(Okay that’s a lit­tle shal­low as an analy­sis of his state­ments.)  Bruce Schneier points out that pri­va­cy mat­ters not because you might have to explain to your boss why you drew a mus­tache on the Mona Lisa but because pri­va­cy is the anti­dote to tyran­ny.

I’ve always won­dered exact­ly how bad­ly fubared the eco­nom­ic mod­el for cell phone sales in the US is. Here’s a set of data points for the iPhone. Interesting. The cel­lu­lar com­mu­ni­ca­tions busi­ness mod­el should implode in about 30 minutes.

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Art, Images, Animation

Amanda Visell’s char­ac­ters make me smile. Check out the rab­bits. And there are pen­guins. Real pen­guins, fur­ther down the page.

Andy Kehoe is from Pittsburgh and now lives in Portland. This inter­view talks about his work for “The World Unseen and Those In Between” show­ing at Thinkspace, and his very cool stu­dio space.

Brandon Graham turns 33 and pro­vides us with a mas­sive, jum­bled post of his work. (NSFW for lan­guage and lingerie)

Today’s ani­ma­tion. Freaking beau­ti­ful images, adorable sto­ries. Click the Music Off link in the low­er left cor­ner. (Music/Christmas)

Stills from the ani­ma­tion with no music here.

Happy Friday,

Transportation

I adore the rear fend­er on this Bonneville cus­tom. New builder too, hmmm.

Mad Max, 1979. I only kind of got the bike thing back then; I wanted
the black inter­cep­tor. Lots of peo­ple loved the bikes. Especially
Goose’s police bike, liked it enough to build repli­cas. Lots of them.
A sum­ma­ry and a bunch of pointers.

A word of warn­ing for those liv­ing a lit­tle south of the hooved rat
zone. Anyone here hit a pen­guin?

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Design

Exploiting the exist­ing nature of your mate­ri­als is a hall­mark of
con­sid­ered design. Here wine bar­rels are recy­cled into stools. Not at
all what you’re expecting.

NMS. Nature Matching System. A pub­lic art project and a palette based
on pro­duce. Food through anoth­er lens. There’s not a col­or here that
would­n’t be nice on your walls.

I’ve post­ed the occa­sion­al point­er to cool ship­ping con­tain­er reuses.
WebUrbanist has a round up of 20 such. Hours of brows­ing and
daydreaming.

Sugar is good! Just ask Mary. Watusi, favorite word of the day.

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Art, Image, Illustration

How can run­ning out of gas be so roman­tic? Jonathan Viner’s lovely
Noble Pursuit. (It’s worth click­ing through to his full — flash -
portfolio.)

I’m going to spend more time look­ing at Patrick Hoelck’s por­traits.  A
selec­tion on Modern Met high­lights his use of dark, inky shad­ows.

The full set of por­traits and much, much more on his port­fo­lio site.

Letter press trad­ing cards. The seal is for marks­man­ship and the
goril­la is for sand rac­ing. It’s about a cat. (hint: card #7)

Off you go my dears, play nice­ly with one anoth­er today.

Transportation

American Motor Drome and the Wall of Death. And a woman named Sam who rides a ’31 Indian.

Hitting the pages of the WSJ means some­thing. In this case that motor­cy­cles have blipped the radar of the rich and love­ly. A cou­ple of nice pics and some commentary.

BMW goes with black and white graph­ics and a splash of red to pro­mote the S1000RR. The design­er has­n’t a clue. To wit: “We want­ed to avoid the typ­i­cal man­ga style, as it wasn’t aggres­sive enough to por­tray the per­son­al­i­ty of the S1000RR.” Not sure how such nice work could have come from some­one with such a lim­it­ed knowl­edge of the work of so many tal­ent­ed man­ga illustrators.

Kimi Raikkonen has one foot in the door of the WRC. ’nuff said.

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Society and Tech, Culture

The ACTA treaty is shap­ing up (in the dark…) to be a mon­u­men­tal dis­as­ter for artis­tic and tech­ni­cal inno­va­tion. No doubt the US big con­tent and their lack­eys the US gov­’t are right to fear sunlight.

And they’re doing it at the behest of scum like these record com­pa­nies who dai­ly rip off artists under the exist­ing sys­tem. Protecting whom?

If you found fun­ny tan­gles in your horse’s mane and tail recent­ly you might want to start a neigh­bor­hood witch hunt. But most­ly the My Little Pony pic is adorable.

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Images, Illustration Photography

Jean-Jacques Sempé pro­vid­ed cov­ers and car­toons for the New Yorker mag­a­zine dur­ing it’s glo­ry days. A gallery in Paris brings togeth­er 48 of them.

Lovely sketch and expla­na­tion of the infor­mal traf­fic code that allows so many cars to share so many nar­row roads and alleys in Korea.

A mar­velous­ly sur­re­al build­ing wall in Rotterdam by Brazilian Dalata

Benja Harney makes paper art for adver­tis­ing and edi­to­ri­als. These wings became part of a Hermes Christmas win­dow dis­play. Lots more work on his blog.

Another Hermes win­dow dis­play. A video image of an actress blows on the real scarf which gen­tly sways. The illu­sion is lovely.

I’m sav­ing up my quar­ters for a 50mm lens that I can crank all the way up (down?) to 1.4f, This col­lec­tion of images shows why I’ve got glass lust. (SFW)

Happy very chilly Monday my dears.

Transportation

Swoon.

Motocrosser with sad­dle bags? Really con­fus­ing, and cool at the same time . Watch the video, but turn the sound waaay down first.

Because I love you all so very much and you should all be as hap­py as the com­muters in this 1958 Disney vision of the future of trans­porta­tion. Really.

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Society

Tedders sent this one over. The back­lash against over parenting.

Modern pira­cy is a busi­ness. Now with it’s own man­aged risk invest­ment pools.

Rinderpest isn’t some­thing that has ever made the head­lines in the USA. A cat­tle dis­ease relat­ed to measles (weird huh?) kills wide­ly and quick­ly. Make that killed. Rinderpest is set to become only the sec­ond dis­ease to be erad­i­cat­ed by human effort.

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Design

Cool clock and the kit/instructions for mak­ing same.  Tell time with the shad­ows cre­at­ed by a cen­ter pin and LEDs. Come on y’all, Christmas break is com­ing up and you know you need projects.

More cool. Salt and pep­per shak­ers that will not bore you or make any­one squeee.

Story cards. Low tech sto­ry telling. Calvino’s Castle of Crossed Destinies for the 2+ crowd.

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Art and Images.

Last week was Thanksgiving and the Macy’s parade. Here are a cou­ple of quick sketch­es done the day before as the bal­loons were being prepped.

Will Einser, one of the great ones. Golden Age Comic Book Stories brings a col­lec­tion of “splash” pages to the front line.

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Nostaligia

Woolworth was nev­er real­ly cool. But they sure tried hard. The 1971 LP sale, as seen on TV.

Transportation

There’s a cou­ple too many tar­ty bits and he should have tak­en the pas­sen­ger pegs off, but this is my fav Bonneville treat­ment to date. There’s a good pic­ture, some info on the BellaCorse site (last entry), and a few more details scrounged up by MCN.

The ulti­mate in bike mount­ed cam­eras. This is how they get those close-up at-speed asphalt shots.

Tempest in a teapot or egre­gious theft of ideas? FIM now has it’s own elec­tric bike rac­ing series. Did they steal it from TTXGP?

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Technology — Security

Who is respon­si­ble for the safe­ty of your cred­it card data as it trav­els through the labyrinth from card swipe to your month­ly bill? Several restau­rants that lost a bun­dle of cash due to the inad­e­quate secu­ri­ty of their POS sys­tem would like the sys­tem cre­ators to be held respon­si­ble for their blunders.

The tel­cos, Sprint in par­tic­u­lar, are mak­ing it triv­ial for LEOs to look up your loca­tion data as pro­vid­ed by your cell phone. No war­rant required, no over­sight pro­vid­ed. It’s start­ing to hit some of the blogs and the top­ic may take off lat­er this week. This is the orig­i­nal research by Christopher Soghoian.

Missing limbs are being replaced by increas­ing­ly sophis­ti­cat­ed pros­thet­ics. A look at the past, present, and future tech­nol­o­gy of arti­fi­cial limbs. I think the pic­tures are beau­ti­ful, your tol­er­ance for images of com­bin­ing of human and machine may differ.

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Science

The British Royal Society released full scans of 60 sem­i­nal sci­en­tif­ic papers. Including the 1671: “A Letter of Mr. Isaac Newton, Professor of the Mathematicks in the University of Cambridge; Containing His New Theory about Light and Colors” and Edward Bullard’s 1965 “The Fit of the Continents Around the Atlantic” which pro­vid­ed a cru­cial boost to the the­o­ry of plate tec­ton­ics. Wired Science dis­cussed these and oth­ers and pro­vides a link to the full set.

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Art, Images, and Design

I will pay (in cook­ies) some­one to make me a good sized vec­tor ver­sion of the logo on this oth­er­wise hideous car.

These char­ac­ters and their ram­bling back sto­ry weird me out in a hap­py way.

These cheap chic graph­ics by Christine Celic for Mudslinger Coffee in Greenville NC are rockin’.

Yeah, I know you all hate twit­ter. But if you got­ta go there I sug­gest one of these clever avatars from Adam Korford. I’m torn between the Wild Things mon­ster and Linus with his blanket.

Turkish beer cans turned into fab sculp­tures includ­ing a moto.

Rusty robots. Detail shots and the place to buy.

Dracula cha-cha. I kid you not.

More tomor­row dearies.