Archive for April, 2011
Grass tile
Making of the Branca chair
I especially like the custom claming jigs.
Dilapitated former Soviet monuments
Dilapitated monuments in the former Soviet Union, marking battles during WWII; they seem alien, though maybe that’s from reading too much sci-fi lately.
Via: Crack Two
Spam = experimental musicology
Some spam I received today from “Brtittaney Tuxergebirge”:
Subject: “thief boom biddy bye bye”
vandalic i put my glock to your dome and you started to cry
http://www.facebook.com/hukacdana.zoochlorella
revolt she thought she’d sweep the old church house, o-o-o-o!
A little digging shows that the first line is a from a Cypress Hill song, the second line is the spam (no surprise it does NOT link to a Facebook page), and the last line is from an old Appalacian folk song called “Skin and Bones“.
Note: the link for “Skin and Bones” includes an amazing MIDI version of the song – actually quite great.
Wow.
Sea as hard-drive
Description from Alistair Reynolds’ “Revelation Space” of the “The Jugglers”, a sea of microbial organisms.
What was known – and again not properly understood – was that the Jugglers had the capacity to store and retrieve information, acting like a single, planet-wide neural net. This information was stored on many levels, from the gross connectivity patterns of surface-floating tendrils, down to the free-floating strands of RNA. It was impossible to say whether each world contained many Jugglers or merely one arbitrarily extended individual, for the islands themselves were linked by organic bridges. They were world-sized living repositories of information; vast informational sponges [pg 105].
Reynolds goes on to describe “microscopic tendrils” that could penetrate anything that entered the ocean, decode its structure, and re-imprint that structure later on another, disimilar organism.
Ralph Steiner’s “Mechanical Principles”
Tool wear temperature gradient
Very strange, very awesome. By Wikipedia user Shipwear; click for full-sized image.
List of fictional elements, materials, isotopes and atomic particles
So yes, it turns out that Wikipedia has a (quite comprehensive) list of fictional elements, materials, isotopes and atomic particles.
Who knew?
Smithson’s underground cinema
Robert Smithson’s proposal for an underground cinema; with a few $100k and I’d realize this here. Click image for full size.
Seized domain graphic
When Homeland Security seizes a website, they post the above image. As an interesting aside, Homeland Security uses the somewhat antiquated GIF format. Click image for full-sized version.
To see this “in the wild”, you can visit this site.
