|
| Click any image to enlarge |
Pinballs are machines that are loud and bombastic, with steel balls bouncing around, lights flashing and flippers flipping. For a modest amount of money they provide a hit of dopamine. Naturally their artwork is over the top as well, bright backlit colors, exaggerated graphics and plenty of blinking lights. Here is a small sample of that artwork.
A statistical analysis of human DNA has suggested that some 900,000 years ago something caused the human race to lose 98% of its population and dwindle down to around 1,300 individuals. This persisted for about 100,000 years before the population fully rebounded. There are researchers who question the legitimacy of the theory, still, it is an interesting proposition.
|
| Click any image to enlarge |
Jan Minarik (1862-1937) was a Czechoslovakian artist who is best remembered for his cityscapes featuring Prague. There is not much information about him, aside from the fact that he started by painting on porcelain before moving on to landscapes. I find his use of color to frequently be very vibrate.
|
| Jan Minarik |
A Ukrainian fellow takes a walk in the old city district of Surabaya on Java. Good video. There is a festival going on, and as a result a lot of chaos. Noise, shows, people milling about, and lot of cosplay. The people are also very friendly, a lot of them smile at the camera man, wave, and greet him.
At one point a group people taking a picture with a banner called him over to be in the photo. That reminded me of a story from my sailor days. We were on a port visit to Keelung in Taiwan. For a joke somebody called the captain and trolled him by claiming they were planning a race riot that night. That got the wardroom worked up and so they decided they had to do something to head off the mayhem.
I was on duty, so they assigned me to shore patrol with a black guy. I guess us harmoniously being together would snap everybody out of their prejudiced frenzy, or something. Well, we didn't want to do anything -- either get in the midst of a race riot or bother our shipmates at all -- so we basically hid the entire night.
At one point we were wandering around a hotel and opened a door to their meeting room. To our surprise a Chinese wedding reception was taking place in the room. Embarrassed, we tried to back out, but they were delighted to see us and rushed over to invite us in. They ended up stuffing us with food and drink. Yea, that wasn't exactly part of our shore patrol duties, but we were building rapport with the locals, right?
At any rate, at one point we ended up flanking the bride and groom as they took wedding pictures with us in them. To this day it amuses me that somewhere in Taiwan there is a wedding photo album with me inside of it. I wonder what stories they tell about that?
|
| Click any image to enlarge |
The Huang Qing Zhigong Tu is an 18th century Qing Dynasty work that details the various ethnic minorities and foreign tributaries. The Qing Dynasty extracted internal and external tributes, and this work documents the various groups they dealt with. As well as East Asian groups, Europeans were portrayed as also providing tribute and being in effect vassal states. Century of Humiliation, here we come.
The ethnography of the Huang Qing Zhigong Tu was probably influenced by Western ethnographies of the time. Prior to the advent of photography, painted or engraved images were the only way of portraying foreign people and dress. In fact, I wonder how much of a part photography played in modern art's turning away from representation to its more abstract and symbolic nature today.
A fellow named Bob builds a tracked personal vehicle. He calls it sort of a Segway, but it looks like sort of a scooter to me hence my post title. He doesn't show his design drawings, but he does cover his manufacturing methods and the steps he takes. Not everything works the way he envisioned, and so he does a lot of minor changes to get it all to work. The four videos cover the entire process of building, and then riding, the thing.
|
| Click any image to enlarge |
Like waterfalls, fire is hard to paint because its nature is that it is never static, rather it is ever changing. That is the fascination of sitting by a campfire. Still, artists have taken their brushes to it and tried to capture it essence. Below are campfires, hearths, wildfires, house fires, and even a dumpster fire. Enjoy.
This video discusses the problems and considerations of airport runway design and structure. The difference of the weight, due to fuel, of an airplane taking off and landing had never occurred to me. It is an interesting video.
|
| Click any image to enlarge |
Philip Norman (1842–1931) was an English artist who focused on old London, to document it before it disappeared. His paintings were frequently accompanied by historical information about the buildings. His palette is rather muted as he is primarily interested in detailing the old buildings.
|
| Philip Norman |
1977 Ohio State University's Big Ear radio telescope picked up a very unusual signal that has come to be known as the WOW signal. It was extremely strong for cosmic radiation. Further, it was narrow band. Normal cosmic radiation is broadband, that is spread over several frequences, but the WOW signal was confined to a very narrow band.
It has long puzzled astronomers because there is no known source for such a signal. Terrestrial interference was considered and discarded, and other natural possibilities have also not held up.
Naturally an alien source has been a favorite of many. I'm not sure about that, I've watched enough 1950s sci-fi movies to know that aliens are always warning humans to knock-it-off before we create a super weapon that blows up the universe. It could be a declaration of war before they come to Earth to stomp us flatter than a pancake to save the cosmos. You never know.
Anyway, this video purports to have explain a natural cause for the WOW signal. They claim that it clears it all up, but we've heard that before.
|
| Click any image to enlarge |
The Codex Laud, sometimes called the book of Death, is an Aztec illuminated religious book. Its creation predates the arrival of the Spanish. Its main theme is death and the afterlife. It features Aztec deities and is a calendar that lays out the rituals of their religion.
Its gods are unknown to us, and its imagery opaque, so it comes across to us as only being violent and bloodthirsty. Then again, that is usually the territory of hellfire.
The above video discusses the satirist Lucian of Samosata's work A True Story. In it, his protagonists get caught up in a whirlwind and get carried to the moon, where they get involved in a war between the Moon and the Sun over Venus.
Because it takes place in outer space, a lot of people call it the first science fiction story. I don't think that is accurate. I think he is actually lampooning old-timey travel books which had a tendency to add all sort of fanciful nonsense to the tales to boost interest and sales.
He also threw barbs at his contemporaries. One of his lines is "Plato was not there. It is said that he was living in an imaginary city under the constitution and laws that he himself wrote." So, it fits much more under the label of travel-writing satire and general lampoonery than science fiction. Still, it is interesting.
By the way, there are no women on the moon, so maybe it is actually a tragedy.
|
| Click any image to enlarge |
My regular readers may recall that on my last vacation/fishing trip I had planned to do some whale hunting. Alas, my scheme was foiled by the TSA when they refused to allow me to board the airplane with my harpoon. Stupid bureaucrats. This post, in honor of my dream, shows artwork depicting whale hunts. Oh, what might have been.
From Moby Dick:
Now, with the subordinate phantoms, what wonder remained soon waned away; for in a whaler wonders soon wane. Besides, now and then such unaccountable odds and ends of strange nations come up from the unknown nooks and ash-holes of the earth to man these floating outlaws of whalers; and the ships themselves often pick up such queer castaway creatures found tossing about the open sea on planks, bits of wreck, oars, whale-boats, canoes, blown-off Japanese junks, and what not; that Beelzebub himself might climb up the side and step down into the cabin to chat with the captain, and it would not create any unsubduable excitement in the forecastle.
