Danbusha

"Because of Watterson’s decision to avoid endless merchandising of his characters, we can only get our Calvin and Hobbes fix by digging out our books. We’re not saturated with Calvin and Hobbes in commercials or on toy shelves or at theme parks and that helps to keep the strip intact. It isn’t watered down, longtime fans still crave it, and new readers will always be introduced to the characters in their original, intended medium. Watterson has said it before, and stated the same idea again more recently: ‘Calvin and Hobbes was designed to be a comic strip and that’s all I want it to be. It’s the one place where everything works the way I intend it to.’”

deaR MR. Watterson, out on Nov.15th

Real Life Instagram

Hmm, this looks interesting: an upcoming book on the science of booze written by Adam Rogers.

In Proof, Adam Rogers reveals alcohol as a miracle of science, going deep into the pleasures of making and drinking booze-and the effects of the latter. The people who make and sell alcohol may talk about history and tradition, but alcohol production is really powered by physics, molecular biology, organic chemistry, and a bit of metallurgy-and our taste for those products is a melding of psychology and neurobiology.

Proof takes readers from the whisky-making mecca of the Scottish Highlands to the oenology labs at UC Davis, from Kentucky bourbon country to the most sophisticated gene-sequencing labs in the world -- and to more than one bar -- bringing to life the motley characters and evolving science behind the latest developments in boozy technology.

Rogers wrote the piece about the mystery whiskey fungus I linked to a couple of years ago.

It’s been a while since we’ve had a solid bit of dancing here on Colossal. There are several inspired moments of choreography in this clip featuring Nick Nitro and Jeppe Long of the Copenhagen-based Robotboys joined by Poppin John out of El Paso, Texas. Insert obligatory thoughts about inhuman abilities and cyborg appendages.

“Different vodkas have different effects. Some make you feel a little…poly-lingual. Some make you feel like you want to talk back to someone who’s giving you a hard time. Some make you feel like lifting kettle bells. There’s something about the taste of [Slovenia] vodka that takes the bad taste out of your mouth. I don’t mean like a mouthwash, but if something bad is on your mind, this makes it go away. I have a quieter voice when I drink it. I drink gin, and once, when drinking gin, I made a large man cry. Not with this. This makes you kind of sweet.”

“We were shooting in the old Paramount Studio on Santa Monica Boulevard, near the Formosa Café, which looks like a pagoda. It’s this kind of famous landmark thing — an Asian-themed bar, a beautiful place. It’s got old photographs of old movie stars. Great stories of John Wayne getting locked into the place, passed out, and the owner comes back the next morning and John Wayne’s cooking himself breakfast in the kitchen. We were working nights shooting, and it was late in the movie. I didn’t want to hang out with anyone during a break, so I walked across the street to this bar. That’s what actors used to do back then. And there was a guy from the camera crew there. We didn’t talk about the film, but first he bought me a drink, then I bought him a drink. Then we started talking about the Boston Red Sox, the Fred Lynn team, I think it was the 1978 season. … Anyway: the guy in the bar. He went into a trance about when Freddy Lynn crashed into the wall making a catch. “When the kid hit the wall…” He jumped from decade to decade of when the Red Sox came close to winning. Bucky Dent, Freddy Lynn. Every year blended into one tortured nightmare for him. Eventually it was time to go back to work across the street, and that was that, like nothing had happened. It was surreal. I think we were filming Scrooged. We had a long shoot, and we had to recreate the Christmas spirit every day, and it was a little hard sometimes — just hard to have that feeling every day. Anyway, I ended up getting the cameraman’s ghosts of Christmas past that day. When Freddy Lynn hit the wall.”

"That’s the only thing we really, surely have, is hope. You hope that you can be alive, that things will happen to you that you’ll actually witness, that you’ll participate in. Rather than life just rolling over you, and you wake up and it’s Thursday, and what happened to Monday? Whatever the best part of my life has been, has been as a result of that remembering.”

Bill Murray on vodka, baseball, and hope

Basta

Need-to-know: The Least Popular American Baby Names | The Week

(vs the Jennifers & Michaels)

Reigniting the Squire-Jettie campaign; who’s with me?

The Clutter

Meet Sueshiro Sano, a ninth-generation shipwright who makes 100% tailor-fit, impossibly lightweight, Honduras mahogany wooden bicycles, which take months to assemble. Price: up to $20k.

The Library: A World History

via cracktwo, these abandoned memorials were abandoned with the collapse of Yugoslavia:

These structures were commissioned by former Yugoslavian president Josip Broz Tito in the 1960s and 70s to commemorate sites where WWII battles took place (like Tjentište, Kozara and Kadinjača), or where concentration camps stood (like Jasenovac and Niš). They were designed by different sculptors (Dušan Džamonja, Vojin Bakić, Miodrag Živković, Jordan and Iskra Grabul, to name a few) and architects (Bogdan Bogdanović, Gradimir Medaković…), conveying powerful visual impact to show the confidence and strength of the Socialist Republic. In the 1980s, these monuments attracted millions of visitors per year, especially young pioneers for their “patriotic education.” After the Republic dissolved in early 1990s, they were completely abandoned, and their symbolic meanings were forever lost.

Derelict Planet, Pascal Blanché

Left-Over-Space

The residential building is designed for a couple with an independent area for guests and is divided into two parts: one introverted area, articulated by an arrangement of smaller openings following the surrounding typology of the neighborhood; its counterpart is an extroverted zone facing the forest and the beautiful view of the valley. The exterior space is interpreted as an extension of the open living area. The abstracted shape of the gabled roof draws an analogy to the surrounding roof typologies, which is common in Southern Germany. The transformation to an open cubic design made a maximum size of openings possible, as well as the visual merging of living and nature.

1915 Portland library & evangelical church turned home | NYT

What we’re reading

Artist Robert Wechsler (previously) was recently comissioned by the The New Yorker to create a series of coin sculptures for their October 14th money-themed edition. Wechsler used a jeweler’s saw to cut precise notches in coins from various currencies and then joined them together in several geometric forms. While nine pieces were selected for the magazine, a total of 22 were created, all of which can be seen in his Money gallery. (via Colossal Submissions)

The National

Professor Xavier downsizes Wolverine for being the most useless member of the X-Men.

Reason for dismissal: "Made of metal, the substance the guy we fight the most can manipulate with his mind." (via http://stellar.io/interesting)

The first trailer for Wes Anderson's new movie. This looks great!

Great story from the memoirs of William Moore, an Electrical Systems expert for the Apollo program in the 1960s. Moore writes about the time that he and his team had to take a trip out to the launchpad to fix something on the first unmanned launch of the Saturn V rocket.

Our goal was to enter this two level hermetically sealed, all welded steel coffin called the Mobil Launcher Base topped by a fully loaded 363 ft. high Saturn V, weighing 6.2 million pounds, and the permanently attached 380 ft. high Umbilical Tower, weighing 500k pounds. We finally stopped and left our van to walk up and into the second level of the Mobile Launcher Base. About this time, it came to my mind that during one of our training sessions we were told that one of the fully fueled prototype S11 rocket stages had been exploded out in the desert. The results showed that all buildings better be at least three miles from the launch lads -- which they are. We were now within 25 feet of this 363ft tall bomb that sounded like it's giant fuse had been lit, and we were soon going to get much closer.

(via hacker news)

Matt Zoller Seitz is doing a video essay series based on his new book, The Wes Anderson Collection. The first two installments, on Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, are already up:

I love what he says about Rushmore:

There are few perfect movies. This is one of them.

The book and video essays came about because Anderson saw Seitz's earlier video essay series, The Substance of Style, an examination of Anderson's stylistic influences. Great resource for fans of Anderson and film.

5 Year Plan

Where are you from?

Engineer Debbie Sterling has a mission to get her machine and construction set GoldieBlox into Barbie-dominated mainstream toy stores and get the attention of the young girls. It’s her hope that those who explore the ideas and tools it teaches might someday be our most important scientists and engineers. Sterling emphasizes how urgently their minds and perspectives are missed in the male-dominated industries that design and build our modern world.

The first challenge is to advocate for change within the tremendously conservative and slow to change toy industry. On her site she doesn’t sugar coat how difficult this will be, despite the fantastically successful Kickstarter crowdfunding project: “We’ve been told that GoldieBlox can’t survive in mass stores next to Barbie. Convention says that engineering toys for girls are a ‘niche’ for the affluent, and for the internet. Together, we must prove convention wrong.”

Here’s a profile of her from EngineerGirl.org:

Debbie Sterling is a female engineer and founder of GoldieBlox, a toy company out to inspire the next generation of female engineers. She has made it her mission in life to tackle the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and math. GoldieBlox is a book series+construction set that engages kids to build through the story of Goldie, the girl inventor who solves problems by building simple machines. Debbie writes and illustrates Goldie’s stories, taking inspiration from her grandmother, one of the first female cartoonists and creator of “Mr. Magoo”. Her company, launched in 2012, raised over $285,000 in 30 days through Kickstarter, and has been featured in numerous publications such as The Atlantic and Forbes.

Prior to founding GoldieBlox, Debbie served as the Marketing Director of Lori Bonn, a national jewelry company. For the past 7 years, she has also served as a brand strategy consultant for a wide variety of organizations including Microsoft, T-Mobile, Organic Valley and the New York Knicks. Debbie’s inspiration to create a mission-driven company came in 2008, when she spent 6 months volunteering at a grassroots nonprofit in rural India. She created a viral-video fundraising campaign called “I Want a Goat”, raising over $30,000 for economic and educational development in the region. This experience helped pave the way to finding her true passion: inspiring the next generation of female engineers. Debbie completed her degree in engineering at Stanford (Product Design, ’05) and currently lives with her husband in San Francisco.

Read more.

October 15th is Ada Lovelace Day! Today the world celebrates all of the accomplishments of women in science, art, design, technology, engineering, and math. Each year, Adafruit highlights a number of women who are pioneering their fields and inspiring women of all ages to make their voices heard. Today we will be sharing the stories of women that we think are modern day “Adas”. We will also be referencing women from history that have made impacts in science and math. Please promote and share #ALD13 with your friends and family so we can promote and share with all of the world wide web!

Today everything in the Adafruit store is 10% off, just use the code ALD13 on checkout! Today’s the perfect day to spark the imagination of a future “Ada” with a gift from the Adafruit store!

I needed a brush for ArtRage for some sketching. I painted brush strokes on paper and scanned them in, done it before many times but this was the first time that they really worked the way I wanted them to. 

Julian Love,Handmade London

Good luck.