Tertiarymatt

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иди к черту. = go to hell.
Я должна сплюнуть. = I need to spit.

Hello my dears!

No new page of Family Man this week…because I’m drawing two weeks of guest strips over at PvP! The storyline is fun and accessible even if you’ve never read the strip; it features a diabolical cat infiltrating the mysteries of…THE DOG PARK. The story will run for another week, so you can start by clicking on the first strip below and follow along!

The next page of Family Man is already well underway, so I’ll be back next week with a new page. See you kids then!

 

[This is an invited post by John Postill. John is a Vice-Chancellor’s Senior Research Fellow at RMIT University, in Melbourne. He is currently writing a book titled Hacker, Lawyer, Journalist, Spy: Freedom Technologists and Political Change in an Age of Protest. He blogs at media/anthropology.]

Two and a half years ago, TIME magazine declared 2011 to be The Year of the Protester. From the Arab Spring or Spain’s indignados to the Occupy movement, this was undoubtedly a year of political upheaval around the world.

But 2011 was also an important year for a new global vanguard of tech-minded citizens determined to bring about political change, often in connection with national crises. Let us call these citizens, at least for the time being, freedom technologists.

Consider, for instance, the loose network of freedom technologists who spearheaded the Tunisian uprising. On 28 November 2010, after long years of struggle under one of the world’s harshest regimes, the lawyer and blogger Riadh Guerfali created the site TuniLeaks. A WikiLeaks spin-off, this site released US diplomatic cables that were highly embarrassing to Ben Ali’s autocratic regime. These leaks helped to prepare the protest ground. The trigger came through the actions of another freedom technologist, veteran activist Ali Bouazizi, who recorded on his smartphone the self-immolation of his cousin Mohamed, a street vendor. He then shared the video via Facebook, where it was picked up by journalists from Al Jazeera – barred from entering Tunisia – and broadcast to the whole nation (and the rest of the Arab world). Al Jazeera’s freedom technologists relied on blogs and social media to bypass the official restrictions and report on the fast-moving events on the ground. When the government censored Facebook, the transnational online group Anonymous launched Operation Tunisia, carrying attacks against government websites via dial-up connections provided by Tunisian citizens.

In nearby Spain, where I was doing anthropological fieldwork with internet activists when it all kicked off in May 2011, the imprint of freedom technologists on the nascent protests was also strongly in evidence. After Spain’s political class passed an unpopular digital copyright bill under US pressure in early 2011, the digital rights lawyer Carlos Sanchez Almeida and other net freedom fighters responded by creating #NoLesVotes, a new platform that urged Spanish citizens not to vote for any of the major parties. Shortly afterwards, tech-minded activists such as Gala Pin, Simona Levi, Javier Toret and others formed Democracia Real Ya, an umbrella group calling for peaceful marches across Spain on 15 May 2011 to demand ‘real democracy now’. Inspired by the occupation of Tahrir square, a small number of protesters, including the hacker collective Isaac Hacksimov, decided to set up camp at Madrid’s main square, Puerta del Sol. This action was soon replicated across Spain. As in Tunisia, tech-savvy journalists played their part in the fledgling movement. Joseba Elola, a reporter with the centre-left daily El Pais and WikiLeaks admirer, described ‘young people conscious of their civil liberties who have risen to head a protest in search of a great change’. A few months earlier, Elola had secured a place for El Pais in the global release of WikiLeaks’ US diplomatic cables following a secret meeting with Julian Assange in London ¹.

A preliminary sketch

The energy and sacrifice of ordinary young protesters is undeniable, especially in the more repressive regimes, but it would be unfair to leave freedom technologists such as Elola, Pin, Bouazizi or Guerfali out of the protest picture. The Tunisian and Spanish experiences – along with those of countries as diverse as Egypt, Iceland, the United States, Malaysia, Mexico, Turkey or Brazil – allow us to draw a first sketch of these new political actors. As my stories suggest, freedom technologists are not the naïve ‘techno-utopians’ found in a certain strand of internet punditry, poor deluded souls who believe there can be technical fixes to complex societal ills ². Most are, in fact, sophisticated people who are well aware of how difficult it is to translate technological ingenuity into lasting social gains. In other words, they are techno-pragmatists (with a healthy dose of idealism).

Whilst some freedom technologists are techies, others are non-techies – with some rare individuals being both, e.g. news reporters who are also gifted programmers. Among their ranks we find computer geeks and hackers, as well as bloggers, journalists, lawyers, politicians, artists, sociologists, even anthropologists. Many of them couldn’t write a line of code to save their lives.

Contrary to media portrayals of young ‘digital natives’ leading the protests, freedom technologists range widely in age, most of them sitting somewhere along an ample 20-50 age spectrum. Both women and men are well represented, as are people of all ethnic, racial and religious backgrounds (yet with a high proportion of secularists). As in all fields of endeavour, some seek the limelight where others are happy to remain invisible ³.

Although their outlook is global, most freedom technologists are ‘rooted cosmopolitans’ ⁴ who both for practical and emotional reasons will limit themselves to one or two national struggles, usually in their own countries of origin or residence.

We should not think of them as ‘techno-libertarians’⁵, for ideologically they are highly diverse, too, ranging from radical anarchists through left-liberals to free-market libertarians. Depending on their skills and on the causes they espouse, some will focus on information freedom, others on developing free encryption software for activists, still others on furthering individual freedoms, and so forth. What unites them is a strong anti-authoritarian streak, a profound mistrust of large governments and corporations, and the conviction that the fate of the internet and of human freedom are inextricably entwined ⁶.

When it comes to their class position, we find less diversity. Predictably, freedom technologists are mostly urban, educated, and middle-class. This explains their perennial search for bridging devices (images, slogans, narratives, apps, web platforms) that will align their techno-political goals with the hopes and aspirations of the general population. Examples of this quest include the broad-appeal narrative created around the Tunisian self-immolation video, the Spanish chant ‘We are not commodities in the hands of politicians and bankers’, or the global Occupy slogan ‘We are the 99%’.

New blog series

But perhaps I am giving freedom technologists too much credit. What exactly have they contributed to the new protest movements? With what consequences, if any, for real political change? What can we expect from them in future global and national crises? More importantly, what can the rest of us do to help? These are precisely the questions I will be asking in a new series of 42 blog posts over at my research blog, media/anthropology. This public scholarship marathon will run for a year, each post symbolically standing for one kilometre.

To reach the finishing line I will require a great amount of stamina, as well as a steady supply of feedback from readers via the blog, email, or some other channel. Please feel free to subscribe to the blog or to follow me on Twitter for regular updates on the series.

UPDATE: Further posts in this series can be found here.

Notes

Last week, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of Hobby Lobby; they are free to deny the insurance coverage of certain contraceptives for their employees. Blogs have written about how this is a loss for women’s rights and a victory for women’s rights, a win for religious freedom and a loss for the religious, a win for corporate personhood, a loss for the LGBTQIA community, and a loss for conservatives. Whichever the case may be, Hobby Lobby is at the very least a win for ethnophysiology.

In 2012, David Green, the founder of Hobby Lobby, wrote a column for USA Today in which he explains his company’s decision to file a lawsuit. He writes,

 A new government health care mandate says that our family business must provide what I believe are abortion-causing drugs as part of our health insurance. Being Christians, we don’t pay for drugs that might cause abortions. Which means that we don’t cover emergency contraception, the morning-after pill or the week-after pill. We believe doing so might end a life after the moment of conception, something that is contrary to our most important beliefs.

The Supreme Court’s opinion (PDF), issued a week ago, bears this out (p. 2):

The owners of the businesses have religious objections to abortion, and according to their religious beliefs the four contraceptive methods at issue are abortifacients. If the owners comply with the [Health and Human Services] mandate, they believe they will be facilitating abortions. . .

If the wording in Alito’s opinion doesn’t distinguish between their religious beliefs and the federal government (i.e. Health and Human Services), a footnote on page nine drives home the point:

The owners of the companies involved in these cases and other who believe life begins at conception regard these four methods [Plan B, ella, Mirena, and ParaGuard] as causing abortions, but federal regulations, which define pregnancy as beginning at implantation, see, e.g. 62 Fed. Reg. 8611 (1997); 45 CFR §46.202(f) (2013), do not so classify them.

Ethnophysiology (or ethno-a&p, as I verbalize it) is the way in which the human body and its functions are understood in a cultural context. Clearly, Christianity’s understanding of reproductive physiology – that life begins at conception, and therefore preventing the implantation of a fertilized egg is tantamount to abortion – is ethnophysiology. Following this, it’s no wonder that so many science bloggers and memes have targeted the Court and Hobby Lobby (Mother Jones, for example) for “disregarding the science.” As Jay Michaelson wrote, responding to the Court’s statement (above) concerning abortifacients, “That should be a statement of fact, not faith.  Either these pills cause abortions, or they don’t. Yet Justice Alito—himself a devout Catholic—says that this fact may be determined based on ‘religious beliefs.’” Dr. Jen Gunter, an OB/GYN, goes one step further, resisting the urge to dismiss the plaintiffs beliefs out-of-hand, as she illustrates that the four contraceptives in question don’t even cause abortions by Christian definitions.

Well, not exactly. Ethnophysiology, like most things culturally constructed, is malleable and often times, you don’t get to decide to what extent. In fact, as many postcolonial STS scholars argue (see Harding 2011), neither the monolithic body of knowledge that we call “science,” nor the process of knowledge production by the same name, are the authority of human knowledge. The reproductive physiology which we refer to as “science” is, itself, an ethnophysiology (and by extension, “facts” are ethnophilosophy). The flaw is in adding the ethno- prefix to something in order to Other it. This isn’t to say that the Court’s ruling is tolerable – women’s health and its direct effects on the nation’s social and economic well-being should trump all – but there are much better arguments to be had. Call David Green, five-ninths of the Supreme Court, and the Christian understanding of human reproduction misogynistic if you want, but to say that they eschew intelligence, logic, and reason because they use the word “abortion” differently is just ethnocentric.

(Bonus Question: Is corporate personhood a form of animism?)

Harding, Sandra G. 2011. The postcolonial science and technology studies reader. Durham: Duke University Press.

Further Reading:

Brewis, Alexandra. 1993. Reproductive ethnophysiology and contraceptive use in a rural Micronesian population. Providence, R.I.: Population Studies and Training Center, Brown University. 

De Bessa, Gina Hunter. 2006. “Ethnophysiology and contraceptive use among low-income women in urban Brazil”. Health Care for Women International. 26 (6): 428-452. 

Rashid, S. 2001. “Indigenous Understanding of the Workings of the Body and Contraceptive Use amongst Rural Women in Bangladesh”. South Asian Anthropologist. 1: 57-70.

Hey all, just found this on EarthMeasurement.com & it is a great read, hope you find it useful!

GPS Accuracy and Limitations

GPS is proven to be a very valuable tool for the purposes of Surveying and Navigation however its users must be aware of its characteristics and cautious of its limitations.

Common Factors affecting the accuracy of GPS:

• GPS Technique employed (i.e.: Autonomous, WADGPS, DGPS, RTK, etc.)
• Surrounding conditions (satellite visibility and multipath)
• Number of satellites in view
• Satellite Geometry (HDOP, GDOP, PDOP etc.)
• Distance from Reference Receiver(s) (non-autonomous GPS ie: WADGPS, DGPS, RTK)
• Ionospheric conditions
• Quality of GPS receiver

Precision and Accuracy

Although precision and accuracy are often assumed to be the same thing, technically they are slightly different. Precision refers to the closeness to the mean of observations and accuracy refers to the closeness to truth.

Care must be taken particularly when using differential GPS to the accuracy of the results (closeness to truth) as reference points used can and often are inconsistent with truth.

The precision or accuracy quoted by many GPS manufacturers is often done using a statistic known as CEP (Circular Error Probable) and are usually tested under ideal conditions.

sp = standard deviation of latitude
sl = standard deviation of longitude

CEP = 0.59[sp + sl]

CEP is the radius of the circle that will contain approximately 50 percent of the horizontal position measurements reported by the GPS receiver. This also means that 50% of the positions reported by your GPS will be outside of this circle.

Another common measure of accuracy is 2DRMS (Distance Root Mean Squared).

2DRMS = 2*sqrt(sp*sp + sl*sl)

2DRMS is the 95-98% probability that the position will be within the stated 2 dimensional accuracy. The probability varies between 95-98% because the standard deviation of latitude and longitude may not always match.

Two plots are shown below (data courtesy Satloc)

Each has been created using 24 hours of data taken at 20 second intervals in the south western USA.

Figure 1:

GPS Corrected with WAAS

Figure 2:

Autonomous GPS

There are 4 techniques commonly used for GPS Navigation: Autonomous, WADGPS and RTK. Surveying applications usually require the use of RTK or Post Processing.

When used properly under ideal conditions, the CEP precisions for each method will depend on the quality of the GPS equipment in use and is approximated below:

Autonomous <10m
WADGPS 0.3-2m
RTK 0.05 – 0.5 m
Post Processed 0.02 – 0.25 m

Accuracy (closeness to truth) of differential systems is relative to the accuracy of the reference points used.

When used in less than ideal conditions, the accuracy and precision of any GPS system can be degraded significantly.

Ideal Conditions

Ideal conditions for GPS Surveying or Navigation are a clear view of the sky with no obstructions from about 5 degrees elevation and up.

Any obstructions in the area of the GPS antenna can cause a very significant reduction in accuracy. Examples of interfering obstructions include: buildings, trees, fences, cables etc. Obstructions may have the following effects thereby reducing accuracy:

• Reduced number of satellites seen by the receiver
• Reduced strength of satellite geometry (Dilution of Precision (DOP) values)
• Satellite signal multipath
• Corruption of GPS measurements

Multipath is caused by GPS signals being reflected from surfaces near the GPS antenna that can either interfere with or be mistaken for the signal that follows the straight line path from the satellite. In order to get an accurate measurement from a GPS satellite, it is necessary that the signal from the GPS satellite travels directly from the satellite to the GPS antenna. If the signal has been reflected off of another surface prior to being received at the antenna, its length will be greater than was anticipated and will result in positioning error. Multipath is difficult to detect and sometimes hard to avoid.

Figure 3

Other Sources of Error in GPS

• Signal Delay caused by the Ionosphere
• Signal Delay caused by the Troposphere
• Orbit Errors (GPS satellite position inaccuracy)
• Receiver Noise

Common GPS Surveying and Navigation Techniques and Associated Errors

Autonomous or Stand Alone

The method involves using a GPS on its own with no additional correction information other that what is broadcast by the GPS system. Prior to May 2, 2000 accuracies obtained using this method weren’t usually much better than 100m due to a US Department of Defense induced error called Selective Availability (SA). On May 2 SA was turned off and now accuracies are usually better than 10m.

Autonomous receivers will attempt to correct the Ionospheric and Tropospheric errors bases on mathematical models which are very limited in their accuracy. They have no way of correcting for orbit errors, multipath or receiver noise.

Wide Area Differential GPS (WADGPS)

Examples of Systems that use WADGPS include:

• WAAS (Wide Area Augmentation System)
• OMNIStar
• Racal
• Navcom Starfire

These systems receive an additional satellite signal that contains more accurate information about GPS Ionosphere and Orbit errors allowing the GPS receiver to determine a more accurate position. These systems have no way of correcting for multipath or receiver noise. Accuracies of WADGPS are often better than 2-3 meters. Although multipath can cause very large errors as is the case in the Autonomous positioning. A solar maximum of a an 11 year solar cycle occurred near the year 2000 which can also have dramatic and unpredictable effects on the accuracy of WADGPS systems.

Real-Time Kinematic (RTK)

Many GPS receiver manufacturers provide a system that employs a technique known as RTK. RTK implements the use of much more complex GPS data processing than other techniques, although RTK can eliminate many errors characteristic of other systems. RTK has additional limitations.

When using RTK, a reference receiver (Base) must be placed on a known reference point. This reference receiver then transmits measurement or correction information over a radio link to the roving receiver (Remote) that will be used for positioning or navigation.

This technique can result in accuracies as good as 0.05 m – 0.10 m if used properly and in ideal conditions.

The limitations of an RTK system include the following:

• Initialization – The receiver must be initialized in good GPS conditions for up to 15 minutes before achieving sub-meter accuracy. If the receiver sees less than 4 satellites at any given time after being initialized, the receiver must re-initialize before again achieving sub-meter accuracy.

• Baseline Length – As the distance between the Base and Remote receivers grows larger, the errors observed between the GPS receivers becomes less and less common degrading accuracy at the remote. Good accuracies can normally be achieved with baselines (line between base and remote) in the order of 10 – 15 km. Baseline lengths can be reduced considerably when strong ionospheric conditions exist.

• Radio Transmission – The base and remote must maintain communications at all times in order to maintain good accuracy. Terrain, distance and interference all have effects on the distance in which the base and remote are able to maintain communications.

• Visibility and Multipath – Usually at least 5 satellites must be available in order to achieve good results. Although less susceptible to multipath after initialization compared to other techniques, RTK results can seriously be degraded by obstructions such as trees, fences and buildings.

• Accuracy of Reference Point – The absolute accuracy of the position reported by the Remote receiver is only as accurate in an absolute sense as is the position of the base station coordinates.

Post Processing

This technique of GPS is used mostly used for Surveying and is not used for navigation. It is similar to RTK in that a base station must be placed at a known reference point and a rover is used for gathering new positions. Instead of obtaining accurate results in real-time, accurate coordinates are generated by taking data stored from the receivers and processing them using special software on a computer. Extremely accurate results in the order of a few centimeters can be obtained if done properly and the conditions are good but post-processing is subject to many of the same limitations as RTK.

Summary

All GPS navigation and surveying techniques have limitations that may not permit desired accuracies in a given environment. The cause for poor accuracy is not always obvious but is usually attributable to one of the following source of error:

• Multipath / signal corruption
• Low number of satellites / poor satellite geometry
• Erratic Ionospheric activity

These errors can lead to position errors as large as several of meters or more.

A 5-4 majority of the U.S. Supreme Court (comprised of all men) delivered a stunning set-back for women’s reproductive rights in the Hobby Lobby case yesterday. The conservative majority ruled that a crafts chain store (here, one with over 500 outlets) whose owners espouse “sincere religious beliefs” can refuse to provide insurance covering contraception to its female employees.

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Launching this May, a new science fiction comics serial by myself and Jason Howard, entitled TREES, will be published by Image Comics.

(If longtime readers were wondering what happened to the SCATTERLANDS experiment?  We got involved with this instead.  Basically, we had so much fun doing SCATTERLANDS that we wondered what a full series together would look like, and then it took over.)

I’m working on the end of issue 4 right now, while Jason has just wrapped issue 3.  We expect to have six issues in the can by the end of May, when issue 1 is published.  Final order cut-off for comics stores on issue 1 is May 5. 

All contact and PR is being handled through Image Comics at this time.  Here’s their contacts page.

Below, the solicitation text for issue 1.

Ten years after they landed. All over the world. And they did nothing, standing on the surface of the Earth like trees, exerting their silent pressure on the world, as if there were no-one here and nothing under foot. Ten years since we learned that there is intelligent life in the universe, but that they did not recognise us as intelligent or alive. Beginning a new science fiction graphic novel by Warren Ellis & Jason Howard.

The hard part about killing people is that sometimes they kill you back. (Just ask Prince Oberyn.) So at some point, some primitive pugilist concluded it would be better if one was not within arm's reach of the person one was trying to kill.

One way you can do this is to kill your opponent with kindness. But this can take an unsatisfyingly long time. A more immediate way to kill someone from afar is with a ranged weapon.

Spears and slings were relatively simple to make, but no civilization could gain an enduring military advantage with such basic and duplicable weapons. The earliest example of an object that required both design and manufacturing know-how, and which led to a tremendously decisive advantage, was probably the 13th Century Mongol bow.

Bows and arrows have been around for tens of thousands of years—depending on who you listen to, we may have had them 64,000 freaking years ago—but the Mongol bow was a standout. First off, it was made out of something like the carbon fiber of that era, a complicated-to-make sandwich of horn, wood or bamboo, and strands of animal sinew all laminated together with animal glue. The horn provided the rigidity, the wood or bamboo provided the flex, and the elastic sinew laminated to the wood helped store potential energy as the string was drawn.

The traditional problem with composite bows was that they tended to delaminate when wet, as water dissolved the animal glue holding them together. Since the Mongols didn't like the idea that they would have to surrender if it was raining out, and throwing arrows by hand didn't seem terribly practical, they either developed or stole the technology to produce a waterproof lacquer. By coating their bows with this stuff, they effectively made them all-weather. And the results were simply devastating.

(more...)

[Images by Fiddler49]

By mastering the assembly of compound materials, the Mongols had created an incredibly powerful bow, as we saw in the previous entry. But the way that they used it, which differed from the European method, necessitated a secondary support object that was the result of early ergonomic observation.

The Europeans used what is known as the "Mediterranean draw" to pull their bowstrings back. This uses the first three fingers of the hand. However, the Mongols used their thumbs to pull the string back, and curled their index and middle fingers over the thumb to support it. This, they reckoned, was stronger and allowed for a cleaner release. Whether you're an archer or not, if you use your own hand to mimic the release of either pull, you can clearly see it's easier to instantly spread your thumb, forefinger and middle finger than it is to release the first three fingers of your hand; that's because the thumb and fingers oppose, and thus balance, each other.

But concentrating over 100 pounds of force against the thumb would damage that thumb. So to protect them, the Mongols had to create yet another object: The thumb ring. This hand-carved object could be made from wood, bone, horn or antler. Here's a shot of a modern-day one owned by this Hong-Kong-based archery enthusiast:

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Clockwise from top left: Glider, Kammok; Curface composite panels, Adam Fairweather; Microbial Home Probe, Phillips Design; Bogobrush, photo by Mike Glinski

While the Internet is a seemingly limitless resource when it comes to research or reference, sometimes it's nice to peruse the information in print. Short of actually including samples of ABS, flyknit, etc., Material ConneXion's new book series serves as a handy guide to what's new and what's next in materials for architects and designers (the samples, of course, are available at their materials libraries). Written with an audience of design students and professionals in mind, the first two volumes, on Architecture and Product Design, were published by Thames & Hudson just last week. (The latter, pictured above, includes a preface by our own Allan Chochinov.)

From cutting-edge technological advances to novel applications of tried-and-true methodologies, co-authors Andrew Dent, Ph.D, and Leslie Sherr present a well-curated selection of materials in an impressive series of highly visual, broadly informative compendia. According to the press release, the books also "include a Materials Directory that provides insight on additional materials that are part of the Material ConneXion library and that can be used as substitutes for the projects featured." We had a chance to speak to Dent on the occasion of the launch.

Core77: How did you determine which projects to include in this book? Did you make a conscious effort to include a diverse range of projects in each of the six sections?

Andrew Dent: Diversity was essential to demonstrate our thesis, that the material trends we see are independent of product type. The decision about which projects to feature was determined by a group at Material ConneXion along with my co-author Leslie Sherr. Though we looked at predominantly very recent projects, where an slightly older project could exemplify an arc in a material type's trajectory, it was included. Clear presentation of material innovation was essential, though it should not detract from the overall value of design.

The inclusion of Iron Man 2 body armor, in particular, points to noncommercial (or at least non-traditional) applications of new technologies, yet it also suggests a potential use case for 3D printing, while student projects, concepts and prototypes depict possibilities that may be years away from becoming a reality. As a resource and reference, do you have the sense that the Material Innovation series may shape the future of design (i.e. by introducing designers to new or alternative materials) as much as it documents it in the present?

Our hope is that the series opens designers' eyes to the value of material innovation and the range of material possibilities that exist beyond what they currently know (the "unknown unknowns"). We also hope that it can show how materials can jump product type, from say consumer electronics to automotive, or from sports equipment to home appliances. This cross-pollination gives designers greater freedom to design, and offers the potential to stretch existing beliefs about how a product should be.

(more...)

While TrackingPoint released their self-aiming PGF rifle just last year, a slightly similar, if less deadly, consumer-level technology has been available for quite some time. For years, paintball enthusiasts have been hacking together self-targeting paintball sentry guns, which not only track targets, but light them up without you needing to bother to pull the trigger. In this video from several years ago, a nice, frosty bottle of beer is placed on a table. Joe is across the yard and he's thirsty. The only thing standing between Joe and the beer is a paintball gun in Auto Sentry mode:

Of course, the real question on everyone's mind is if this system can stop an intruder using multiple trampolines in your backyard:

(more...)

Photo by Christopher Schwarz & John Hoffman's Lost Art Press

Behind the Berrybrook School in Duxbury, Massachusetts, stands an old beat-up shed. Teachers were using it for overflow storage in 2012 when Michael Burrey, a restoration carpenter working on a project at the school, came across the building. Inside, looking past the scattered toys and tricycles, he recognized the space for what it was: A woodworking shop. An extremely old one that predated electricity, judging by the "1789" painted on a roof beam and the remains of a treadle-powered lathe.

Photo by Christopher Schwarz & John Hoffman's Lost Art Press

Photo by Jeffrey E. Klee, Architectural Historian of the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation

"All the benches were there," Burrey told The Boston Globe. More giveaways as to the structure's purpose: "The way the benches are in relation to the windows, how the light comes in to light an area, the location of the tool racks on the walls."

Photo by Christopher Schwarz & John Hoffman's Lost Art Press

(more...)

In West Pomerania, Poland, stands a rather odd grove of pine trees. Some 400 of the trees have taken the peculiar shapes you see pictured, while the surrounding forest is filled with pines that have grown the ordinary way, true and straight.

The trees, collectively called "The Crooked Forest," were estimated to have been planted from 1930 to 1934, when Pomerania was still a German possession. And while nature-driven theories have been put forth as to why the trees are shaped this way—some think heavy snowfall caused the bends when the trees were sapling-aged—what seems more likely is that this is man-made intervention.

The prevailing theory is that the trees were deliberately shaped, when seven to ten years old, for the purpose of eventually harvesting the naturally bent wood to construct something. Boats, furniture or some type of structure are the best guesses. On the nautical side, IFLScience's Justine Alford dug up this quote from a Navy & Marine article on 19th Century shipbuilding called "Wooden Vessel Ship Construction:"

Oaks from the areas of Northern Europe were fine for the development of long straight planking, but the gnarled English "Hedgerow" Oak was the best for the natural curved timbers used to strengthen the ship internally. Trees were even deliberately bent in certain ways so as to 'grow' a needed set of curved timbers. These curved timbers were known as 'compass' timbers.

(more...)

dogend:

erikamoen:

medievalpoc:

Fiction Week!

Dicebox (Review)

by Jenn Manley Lee

Dicebox is different.

Now, a lot of people say that about a lot of things, but in this case, I swear to you I haven’t read anything I can say is like Dicebox. Sure, it’s definitely a Space Opera. It’s definitely a comic. But it reads like your life.

I picked up a print copy of Dicebox Book 1: Wander, about a year ago, and I must admit it was on a lark. It’s available online as well. And I have to recommend it; the book is a fat 314-page graphic novel and is quite high quality. The art is lovely, the text is readable and the story…well. The story is interesting in an unusual way.

Although the story’s setting is  fascinating exercise in world-building, the plot revolves entirely around the characters and their relationships, their daily activities, and their hopes and fears in an almost claustrophobic way. It’s been called “slice-of-life” in a space opera setting, and I’d have to agree with that on one level, but at times it devolves into feeling like you’re sitting with a group of people who love to gossip about their mutual friends that you’ve never met. But if you can keep up with the social environment and the conversational storytelling style, you can and will get caught up in a very detailed world and the lives of Molly Robbins, a migrant factory worker, and her partner, Griffin Stoyka, who just can’t seem to outrun her past or her own penchant for drama.

The interpersonal world of Dicebox has room for all kinds of people, relationships, genders, races, cultures, and dynamics. In some ways the social complexity can overshadow the characters themselves, but there is so much to explore that re-reading is extremely rewarding. There is also a lot of sex and spaceships, which is also nice. There’s tongue-in-cheek (AHEM) humor, smartassery, narrow escapes, snide comments, and lots of snark, bawdy jokes, and the facial expressions alone make Dicebox worth it for me.

This comic entitled “A Concise Summary” by Erika Moen is a fairly accurate  description of what you’ll be getting yourself into with Dicebox.

Dicebox official site

Jenn Manley Lee official site

Dicebox is superb.

Ever so glad I actually updated yesterday.

Part 4 of a series in which I redraw characters from MASK, the superheroine league I created in middle school. Complete series here.

CODE NAME: JACK
REAL NAME: WINTER GALVEN
POWERS: ?

BIO: 
Jack! The primary supervillainess! Time-traveller. Psychopath. Half-sister to one of Mask’s core members (Psyalyd). Mask’s own lost protegee. For as important as Jack is to the story, you think I’d remember more about what her general deal is. Suffice to say there was a traumatic childhood story thrown in there; a whole period where she declared war on the Fates and jumped to the next level of human evolution; and the founding of her own villainous league of misfits, malcontents, and malevolent cyborgs. Jack would stop at almost nothing to terrorize Mask. Why can’t I remember what her powers are? Probably because they changed so often. 

MY RECOLLECTIONS:
I had a big crush on Jack. I even tried to copy her haircut for several years running in middle school, before eventually conceding to the reality that mine is a head of hair made for the pixie cut. She was a very fun villain to play in roleplaying sessions; sinister and cool and totally nuts. 

DESIGN NOTES: 
The first in a long line of blonde villains. I’d had some exposure to the X-Men character Emma Frost (aka the White Queen), who has a similar blonde ice-queen vibe, but Jack was definitely not the sort to walk around in a bustier. Just a practical bodysuit for her, thanks!

For this revamp, I got rid of the weird blue face make-up, mostly because I couldn’t make it work; and I simplified the blue/white spaces on the outfit. I absolutely love that you can see the erased pencil versions of the many poses I tried out on the original drawing.

I’m not quite sure what she’s supposed to be doing, but I just tweaked her left arm to a little bit of a creepy salute, and gave her a little power bloom behind her head. Whenever Jack does something weird, it’s a good time to dive behind the nearest obstacle and cover your head.

Up next: PSYALYD! (for real this time)

We are in love with the new summer edition Edison Nouveau Premiere and its turquoise blue color. The Caribbean Sea just screams “summertime” and we couldn’t resist featuring it on Monday Matchup. There are many turquoise inks to choose from, but we landed on Monteverde Turquoise as its match for this week. This ink is bright and vibrant and pairs perfectly with our newest Edison addition.

Artwork was done by Caitlin D. this week. Hope you love it as much as we do :)


Happy Summer!

Zagala.

I lost the picture this drawing is based on, can you help me find it so I can give the photographer proper credits?

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