How to draw anything (in 1 step)
Step 1. Draw a dog covering the thing you can’t draw.
Oh, sorry: Spoiler alert! There are examples at the link.
via kottke
Category Archives: Art
Crunch Time
Beware the time-eater: Cambridge University’s monstrous new clock
The monster momentarily stops the turning dial with its foot to mark the minutes, shown as blue LED lights shining through slots. It was originally conceived by Taylor as a literal interpretation of the grasshopper escapement invented by his hero, the Georgian clockmaker John Harrison whose fabulously accurate mechanisms solved the problem of establishing longitude at sea.
Another h/t to Caroline
Full Metal … Candle
Metal tube with a wick inside, sitting in a glass with oil in the bottom. Neat looking.
Not the Same as Gauche
Central to banknote designs are Guilloche patterns, which can be created mechanically with a geometric lathe, or more likely these days, mathematically. The mathematical process attracted me immediately as I don’t have a geometric lathe and nor do I have anywhere to put one. I do, however, have a computer, and at the point I first started playing with the designs (mid-2004) Illustrator and Photoshop had gained the ability to be scripted.
via Kottke
You Can Never Find One When You Need One
The guys from Eepy Bird are back. This time, it’s 280,951 sticky notes. That’s where they all went.
Stress Makes Them Bi
Birefringent. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
In my earlier discussion of polarization, I promised some photos of stress-induced birefringence.
If you have a polarizing filter, you can use an LCD as a polarized light source and view birefringent materials using it as a backdrop. Make the screen as white as possible, and rotate the polarizer until it blocks the light. Then place a birefringent material in front of the screen and look through the polarizer. Cheap clear plastic often will have stress-induced birefringence.
Which is what I did, and is why the background is black. The first photo is the plastic box in which the polarizers were packaged
These next two are the side and top views of a styrene drawer from a small storage cabinet, placed on top of an empty CD spindle.
Drinking Games: Physics vs. Aesthetics
Swissmiss asks, hey, what’s that in your drink?
Not recommended for those suffering from pica or ice-chewers who are absent-minded.
However, this is almost all marketing and little (ahem) solid physics.
Nordic Rock is mined from ancient Swedish pollution-free base rock. It is the purest way of cooling your drink – literally ‘on the rocks’. Stone does not melt, which means no unclean water in your glass. They are also reusable making them very eco-friendly. To use, simply place the stone ice cubes in the freezer for approximately one hour before use. For a normal glass, two or three Nordic Rocks will be fine. They give off their cold gradually and equally.
Not diluting the drink is a valid claim (technically chemistry, though). Cleanly or not, though — don’t you use clean water in ice cubes? Ewww.
“Eco-friendly?” How much water does it take to clean these, as compared to the amount of water in an ice cube?
“They give off their cold gradually and equally.” Reasonable claim, once you get past “cold” being a substance. But the advantage of water is that, because of the latent heat of fusion (334 J/g), your drink will stay at 0 ºC until the ice melts, while the drink with the stone cubes will warm up continually. And what’s the heat capacity? I’m not sure exactly what these are (don’t recall “base rock” being a designation), but I’ll assume they are similar to granite, whose heat capacity is about 2 J/cm3 K (helped by its higher density), similar to ice, while water is 4.18 J/cm3 K, and again there’s that huge amount of energy from the latent heat. Let’s say you have 10 cm3 of these stones at 0 ºC and an identical amount of ice. The stones will absorb just 400 or so J of energy in warming to 20ºC, while the ice will absorb 3000 J just in melting, and then 750 more in warming up. Thermodynamically, ice wins.
If you don’t like the dilution of ice cubes, you’re better off using water frozen inside of another container, as in the trick I offered a little while back.
Beastly Decorations
the world’s most bad-ass grotesques and gargoyles
Gargoyles divert water, while grotesques serve other functions or are solely ornamental. (This bit of pedantry had come up before, so I already knew this)
Some Pig
Charlotte can do more than spell. Spider Web Art
via Neatorama
Olym-pics
Beijing 2008 – It’s a wrap at The Big Picture (39 photos)
If you look at the high jump of Blanka Vlasic, you can see how it’s possible to do a high jump with your center-of-mass (focus on the physics) never rising above the bar, though I think in this jump it is higher, since she’s clearing the bar by a bit. But I would guess that her COM is below her torso.
And that last one is going in my desktop picture rotation.