magpie's shiny things

Transportation

A lit­tle some­thing for my TopGear fan friends. Where’s Waldo got
noth­ing on this.

Fiat Abarth, sigh. One of my first expe­ri­ences with sleep­er was a
lit­tle Fiat 850 that ran like a scald­ed cat. Here’s what they are
doing now. Wanna ral­ly?

More extreme trans­port. In this case mov­ing the 200,000 pound antennas
for the ALMA array in Chile.

—————–

Science

Since I already men­tioned ALMA. Have a look around the offi­cial site.
Extreme astron­o­my. (And a bonus video of the above huge transporters.)

The search for the leg­endary “dark mat­ter” has a new tool. A
scin­til­lat­ing bolome­ter. A weird lit­tle steam-punky look­ing cylinder
with a blue light crys­tal. Obligatory Golden Compass references
pro­vid­ed in the report.

—————

Society

Premium does­n’t mean much any more. To wit the reac­tions to the feel
and pric­ing of Sony’s PSP Go. John Biggs does a good job of
sum­ma­riz­ing the sit­u­a­tion and choos­es a pre­mi­um pic­ture to illustrate.

—————–

Art, Images, Architecture

Facebook is get­ting new digs in Palo Alto. Can archi­tec­ture be
con­sid­ered child­ish? Ugh.

Lester Young meets William Steig. I will spend the next hour hunt­ing up an mp3 of this album. And then use the art­work as wallpaper.

A fence with the icon­ic image from the first Sci-Fi film La Voyage
dans la Lune. Art, sci­ence, metal!

Weston Teruya draws frag­ment­ed, iso­lat­ed images of, well stuff. Oddly calm­ing.

Tagged as Lowbrow/Comic Surrealism. Eh?

Real (dead) bugs + small machine parts = awe­some­ness. Check out the
small won­ders at Insect Labs.

Or, on a larg­er scale, the awe­some­ness of giant bal­loon creature
cos­tumes. Mediocre time-lapse mak­ing of video. Turn off your speakers.

don’t get eat­en by the troll under the bridge.

Transportation

I go away for a cou­ple of days and the world pops out all these amaz­ing bikes.

WrenchMonkees has been fea­tured here a bunch recent­ly. Danish design
is not gen­er­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with fab bikes — but here you are:

Cute SR500 by Speed Junkie. (Caution this is SFW, oth­er things on this
site are NSFW — you have been warned.)

On a mar­ket­ing blog. Delivery piz­za by bike — with a count­down timer
on the top box.

From Bike EXIF. A good game of name that bike. A nice look­ing ride.
(The URL gives it away — sorry.)

A new two-wheel land speed record. I’ll post addi­tion­al info as it shows up.

—————–
Technology

Apple makes me cranky again. The Apple Software Updater puts weird
stuff on my Windows machine. Nice to know I was­n’t imag­in­ing it.

————–
Art and Images

Esquire Magazine had some incred­i­ble tal­ent work­ing for it from the
30s through the 60s. Here’s a col­lec­tion of cov­ers that dis­play a
range of styles and tech­niques. SFW

Take a card­board box. Unfold it. Make a char­ac­ter out of the shapes
you find. Fast and offhand.

Typography geek alert. An exam­i­na­tion of the dif­fer­ences in letter
form between Helvetica and Arial. To get you think­ing about the
sub­tleties of shape.

Art based on the Missed Connections cat­e­go­ry on Craig’s List. This
time sweet pas­tel draw­ings of imag­ined scenarios.

Old books and illus­tra­tions used to make sym­bol­ic birds that become
kites. A series of 100. I like Sputnik. You may pre­fer one of the
oth­ers. Charming.

off to the salt mines, the lot of you.

hap­py Monday

Transportation

Going fast a long time ago… A 1912 Bugatti rac­er is up for auction.

Going fast today — on two wheels. Information about Denis Manning’s
next attempt to recap­ture the 2‑wheel pis­ton pow­ered speed record.
With bonus cov­er­age of his son’s bike that may just take the 50cc two
wheel record.

Playing fast (and loose) in anoth­er way. Out gub­ber­mint is “lend­ing”
Fisker half a bil­lion to make a sporty elec­tric. Because we have to
play fair and Tesla already got it’s birth­day prezzie. Why aren’t we
loan­ing mon­ey to the mak­er of a mini-van or a sprint­er style delivery
van?
————–

Science

The Big Picture brings us 26 pho­tos of the awe inspir­ing red dust
storm in Sydney. Oz has always been a lit­tle strange but this is
otherworldly.

Stick fig­ure guide to AES. Just what it says. Clear, amus­ing, and educational.

“Some damned print­er car­tridge” com­pa­ny put out a series of graphics
that claim to show you what it would take to print the Internet.
Accuracy — I have no idea. Graphics — rockin’

If you don’t want to waste the reams of paper that it would take to
print the inter­net, how about these one page cook­books? The chinese
menu — 1 from col­umn a, 1 from col­umn b, 1 from col­umn c idea applied
to a vari­ety of dish­es. Mostly Indian. Very tasty. (His advice on high
alti­tude pres­sure cook­ing for groups is worth a book­mark as well.)

—————–

Technology

SGI ris­es like a phoenix… Oh nev­er mind — here’s a mas­sive amount of
com­put­ing pow­er in a desk­top box for under 10K. Do Want.

I’m not sure why Gizmodo has got a lock on the MSFT Courier news but
here’s the first install­ment in the descrip­tion of the “book­let”
portable device from the depths of Redmond. So this is what Mr. Allard
has been up to. Do Want, even more than the SGI loot above.

—————

Art, Images, Illustration

Who needs world trav­el to make love­ly land­scape art? Bill Guffey sits
at home and roams the world via Google Maps Street View. A naive and
unaf­fect­ed style make these lit­tle gems.

Making a lit­tle land­scape at the base­board lev­el. Or fright­en­ing the
cat. 100+ sticky-backed ant sil­hou­ettes. Lordy do I have to say it
again today? Do Want.

If you’ve always won­dered what hap­pens to all those hub­caps left
for­lorn­ly by the side of the road, won­der no longer. The best of them
end up in the hands of Ptolemy Elrington and get made into these
fab­u­lous crea­tures. Ultimate garage art. (Jay Leno type clean and tidy
garage.)

Pub signs are cool. The Murphy house needs a pub sign. Here are some
ideas to get the cre­ative types started.

——————

Out the Door

We’re enjoy­ing the last glo­ri­ous hot days of sum­mer. Here’s to the CBs!

hap­py humpday

Transportation

Replicas are one way to move bikes in a reces­sion. Spies fans can hop
a plane to the UK for this one.

A new trend in adver­tis­ing, iPhone apps. Used some­what effec­tive­ly to
adver­tise the new VW Scirocco.I have no idea if you get the Wagner
sound track to go with the game but it’s a dri­vable Nurburgring for
the iPhone.  (And you all were won­der­ing why I’d give in.…)

I prob­a­bly won’t shell out the cash for Gran Turismo 5, but I know
enough peo­ple who will that I should get at least one chance to drive
the in-game M‑B SLS AMG gull­wing.

On a more respon­si­ble note. Making pub­lic trans­porta­tion more
inter­est­ing with cool bus stops. Why so much fruit?

—————-

Technology

Projector TV and remote sen­sor tech meets pool table. Visuals that
react to the balls in play. Expensively installed in the Esquire
Ultimate Bachelor Pad, which gives you some idea of the amount of
class attached to the graph­ics being pro­ject­ed. SFW

——————

Culture

Last Friday was Parking Day. Some pics from around the coun­try. I am
as baf­fled as the poster as to what the pyra­mid of bowl­ing balls was
try­ing to indicate.

—————

Art, Images, and Illustration

Low 3‑D is a use­ful term for not-quite sculp­tures that hang on a wall.
Meredith Dittmar’s box­es are invit­ing. (Click through to her website
for more chal­leng­ing images.)

Detailed, sub­ver­sive black & white line draw­ings framed in letter
forms. Oleg Medvedev is from, and com­ments on, Moscow.

More black & white from east­ern Europe. Elena Asima’s anthro­po­mor­phic
ani­mals have the feel of hal­lu­ci­na­to­ry etchings.

This is more of a com­ment on street artist wanna-bes than the
ubiq­ui­tous IKEA flat pack. Banksy par­o­dies him­self, his fellow
artists, and their sud­den (?) legitimacy.

Tooting his own horn but not unrea­son­ably, Brett Polok shows us a few
of his lat­est paint­ings. Comic books, sten­cils, graf­fi­ti. There’s a
lot of sim­i­lar out recent­ly. This is the way it should be done.

—————————
The Coming Alien Invasion

The New Yorker gives us our com­ing alien over­lords. They think our TV
sucks too. Oh and they don’t want our pre­cious… gravel.

mean­while I shall return to the cru­cial con­sid­er­a­tion of exact­ly what
shade of pur­ple to had added to my hair this time…

Transport

2010 — Ducati brings us a Hypermotard. (Which BTW is a completely
sil­ly made up word.) Is this pic­ture for real? Or did they just grab
what­ev­er looked kin­da like…

On a small­er scale — here’s a run­ning repli­ca of the Honda 50.
(lim­it­ed edi­tion of course.) Still cute as heck.

For our youngest read­ers. (Surely we can build one of these.) The
coolest rock­ing horse ever.

Broken bikes suck. Hanging around wait­ing for the sag-wagon is boring.
Just ask these guys.

————–

Technology

A rip­tide of data flows through the live on-air cov­er­age of most
sports today, Sandbox8 gives us a look behind the scenes at how
hun­dreds of vol­un­teers and a cou­ple of pro­fes­sion­als put togeth­er the
stats cov­er­age for a PGA event. Golf nutz — I’ll nev­er under­stand ’em.

A much more scenic use of imag­ing tech­nol­o­gy brings us pic­tures of
glac­i­ers from space. Damn we live on a pret­ty planet.

An aging pop­u­la­tion has health care in Japan stretched thin. A nursing
short­age makes rou­tine care par­tic­u­lar­ly dif­fi­cult. One answer is to
sup­ple­ment skilled care with robots to han­dle the heavy lift­ing (if
you will.) I’m find­ing the increas­ing empha­sis on replac­ing human
inter­ac­tion with robot­ic assis­tance unsettling.

Riba is cute and cud­dly and can lift a 135 pound patient.

Regina is not cud­dly and cute but can lift much heav­ier patients.
Up to 440 pounds.

A trans­former bed that can elim­i­nate the need to lift patients
alto­geth­er. (This one is hopeful.)

Another cute robot. This one leads the elder­ly in a series of exercises.

OTOH robots may save the adult enter­tain­ment indus­try. (Really?) SFW

——————-

Images

Enough with the zom­bie machines — how about some zom­bie peanuts?

Curiosity kills the cat — in nine quirky ways. SFW

How to get a pho­to­graph of a bat tak­ing a drink from a pond. It’s hard.

I had night­mares about maraud­ing bears last night. Maybe I’ll download
one of these sets of ani­mal illus­tra­tions as desk­top wallpaper.
Abstract sur­faces and nice colors.

Or maybe I’ll just go straight to this pac­man destroys your city
car­toon wall­pa­per. The artist describes it as cheer­ful chaos.

Remake/Remodel is Warren Ellis’ chal­lenge to car­toon­ist to take an old
for­got­ten com­ic char­ac­ter and re-imagine them for the 21st century.
Recently he’s called out Black Orchid. Here are three fab­u­lous entries.
SFW. (Click through to the forum thread at your own peril.)

hap­py bloody mon­day crew,