Check out these conceptual designs for Hong Kong's proposed PleXus Tower — a segmented structure that will integrate directly with the city's transportation infrastructure. Given its undeniable Tron-like aesthetic, we'll be sure to bring our lightcycles.
    
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Bunker.jordanYES
We're getting a full season of the new 12 Monkeys TV series from Syfy, which will help push the channel's slate of original scripted series forward (especially since we're losing Warehouse 13 and Being Human this year).
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| Still the most expensive motorcycle sold at auction: this 1915 Cyclone bitsa fetched $520k at a MidAmerica Auction in 2008 |
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| This 1939 BMW RS255 Kompressor sold for $480k at the Bonhams Las Vegas sale in 2013 |
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| The famous Brough Superior sprinter 'Old Bill' was used by George Brough himself to win 51 out of 52 races entered - and Old Bill crossed that 52nd finish line ahead of rival George Dance on his Sunbeam, but George wasn't on it at the time! Sold by H+H in 2012 for $469,800 |
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| This 1929 Brough Superior SS100 sold for $465,000 at H+H in 2010 |
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| This fantastic 1926 Brough SS100 with JAP KTOR engine sold for $453,000 at the RM Battersea auction in 2012 |
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| The fame factor: this Von Dutch-painted, ex-Steve McQueen 1926 Scott sold for a phenomenal $276,000 in 2009, at an Antiquorum watch sale! |
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| The Pope's 2013 Harley-Davidson Dyna sold for $327,000 at the Bonhams Paris auction this year |
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| Crocker big twins occupy 25% of my Top 20 Auction Price slots... |
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| The 2010 Ducatis GP2 CS1 which sold for $320,000 in 2012 at RM Monaco |
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| This 1907 Harley-Davidson 'Strap Tank' single sold for $352,000 at a Gooding sale in 2006 |
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| This spectacular, original-paint ex-Daytona BMW 1938 R51RS sold for $132,000 at the Bonhams Las Vegas sale in 2010. |
When you normally wear grubby overalls, a fancy dress is a nice change of attire and Kaylee Frye’s dress from “Shindig” is one of the most memorable costumes from Firefly. I couldn’t imagine re-creating all those ruffles, but cosplayer Fire Lily put the entire gown together for $160. She used dupioni silk and lots of white sheer voile fabric – yes, she dyed all the pink and peach layers:
The second hard part was the skirt – although the costume was said to have used pre-made silk chiffon hoops, chiffon is entirely too flimsy a fabric to get the correct drape for the ruffles, in my opinion. I opted to use a white sheer voile fabric and dye the peach and pink layers. Each layer of ruffles is edged with rolled hems that I had to run through my sewing machine twice using a zig-zag stitch (omg took forever!). I then sewed each layer onto a plain cotton sheath skirt and attached it to the bodice.
Read more at Fire Lily Cosplay’s blog.
It's turning out that the outer reaches of the solar system may be more hospitable to life than we ever imagined. Gravity measurements made by Cassini have confirmed that Enceladus, a tiny moon orbiting Saturn, hosts a subsurface ocean in its southern latitudes. Astronomers are now saying it's potentially habitable.
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Bunker.jordanTerrifying. Also awesome.
Bunker.jordanI am beginning to think that Michael Bay is actually just trying to take a huge shit on an entire generation of people who loved TMNT. Ultimate troll.
Although everyone supposed that they would be voiced by their young mo-cap actors, the Michael Bay-produced Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie has just announced that it's recasting its voice roles. And now the teenage leader of the TMNT will be voiced by Jackass' Johnny Knoxville, who hasn't been a teen since 1990.
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‘A fashionable atomic fallout suit, approved by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, sells for $49.98.’
Pulling inspiration from The Thing, the new practical effects-laced horror movie Blood Glacier has our attention. Because of the title, and the monsters. So many monsters! Check out the trailer now.
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Inspired by physics and math, French engineering student Hugo Germain has created some of the oddest GIFs we've seen in quite some time — from incoming asteroids that can change direction to gravity-defying coils.
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We may not actually be able see the harrowing chase that pitted a theropod against a sauropod over 110 million years ago. But — thanks to this 3D model reconstructing what happened — we can at least get a pretty good view of the aftermath.
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You've probably seen two beads of liquid coalesce hundreds of times in your life. Maybe thousands. But we're willing to bet you've never seen them do it in slow motion.
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On April 8th, Earth will soar between the Sun and Mars. When it does, the Red Planet will reach what astronomers call "opposition" in the night sky. Just a few days later, Earth will be closer to Mars than it's been in more than six years. The resulting views should be extraordinary. Here's what you need to know to catch a glimpse yourself.
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We've waited 29 years for a live action Jem movie. But now every piece of news we hear about this project makes us want to rip out our pink hair and weep. The new Jem movie announced last month is now filming in three weeks! How is this possible? What is going on? Where are the women?
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When we talk about a future of drought and water shortages , we're not just talking about the amount of water. We're also talking about how it's distributed — a feature that this world map of the per capita renewable water resources in each country illustrates nicely.
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Kerri Cameron rides the Wall of Death at The Carole Nash International Classic Motorcycle Show in Staffordshire, United Kingdom.
The Wall of Death, also known by the names motordrome and silodrome, is a carnival favorite that dates back to 1911. The very first motordrome appeared at the Coney Island amusement park in New York city.
[ more tagged Wall of Death | history ]
On February 25th, the Sun let loose an X4.9-class solar flare . It was our parent star's most violent outburst of the year. When the debris from the ensuing coronal mass ejection collided with Earth's atmosphere, it produced one of the most colorful auroral displays in recent memory.
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Bunker.jordanThings I Would Watch if They Were TV Shows
The European Southern Observatory has released a detailed image of galaxy NGC 1316, which has engulfed several other galaxies in its violent history... and has the battle scars to prove it.
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Bunker.jordanHmmm... my class ring is made of platinum. And graphene is pretty easy to pull off of graphite with scotch tape. Maybe I should get into the diamond making business?
“The sea raised its great wings, coal black smoke arose from Vesuvius into the blue sky…”
Hans Christian Andersen revolutionized storytelling with his timeless fairy tales, driven by a cinematic sensitivity to beauty. In mid-February of 1834, while touring Europe, 29-year-old Andersen arrived in Naples just as the mighty Mount Vesuvius was in the midst of one of its then-regular and dramatic eruptions, three centuries after the first of them had drowned dozens of Italian villages in hot lava and killed an estimated 3,000 people. The flamboyant mesmerism of the event cast a spell that would stay with him for the rest of his life. In The Diaries of Hans Christian Andersen (public library) — the same obscure yet remarkable volume that gave us Andersen’s little-known and lovely sketches — comes his breathtaking account of his visit to Vesuvius and his crazy quest to climb the mount as it was erupting.
18th-century painting of Vesuvius erupting by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–1797)
In a diary entry from February 18, Andersen — a true enchanter with a penchant for cinematic storytelling — recounts his first breathtaking impressions of the fiery marvel:
I bought some drawings, walked by the sea pounding against the rocks. — It was the world’s great pulse beat that I heard. The sea raised its great wings, coal black smoke arose from Vesuvius into the blue sky… Such shades of colors on the mountains! Just as the sun went down, the red lava was glowing. Some boys played soldiers on the beach, and tramps in their brown hooded coats sat on the rocks watching them.
It may seem like a wild and rather unsafe notion today, but the eruption of Vesuvius, a regular occurrence since the middle of the 17th century, was quite the tourist attraction in Andersen’s time — so much so, that tour guides hustled for visitors’ attention. Andersen writes on February 21:
They were literally chasing me, underbidding each other… I had to say, in order to get away, that I would come back tomorrow. Then they all asked me to write down their names, and I got away by scribbling something down, and so I walked around in a small side street that seems to have been constructed entirely by lava debris.
But unperturbed by this brush with the materialistic exploitation of such a wonder, he goes on to marvel at nature’s might ablaze before him:
Smoke swirled thickly up out of Vesuvius, and the lava gave off a cloud of steam… At dusk I walked down to the sea. Vesuvius spewed great streams of lava; it blazed into the air; it was like tongues of fire flaring up. This is the most violent I have seen it.
Hans Christian Andersen's diary drawing of the Vesuvius eruption, 1834
Four days later, on February 22, Vesuvius quiets down as Andersen paints another breathtaking vignette:
The moon was shining on the dark blue water, and the waves breaking on the shore looked like a glimmering piece of embroidery. Fire was running in great streams down Vesuvius, but there was almost no smoke to be seen. — I walked out to the lighthouse and saw then in the moonlight a handsome frigate coursing under full sail into the harbor.
But then, two days later, Vesuvius reaches its climax and Andersen beholds it in breathtaking detail as he and a small group of fellow Danes set out to climb the mountain, now shaken by Vesuvius’s frequent huffs and puffs of smoke and lava:
The evening was so infinitely beautiful; the sun set like a ball of fire; the sky was a glimmering gold that shaded over into the ether-blue. The sea was like indigo, and the islands were lying like pale blue clouds on it. It was a magic world that had manifested itself… The mountains were shining so splendidly with the white snow; they lay far off in the blue sky, and close to us we could see all the red lava of Vesuvius.
Nocturnal Eruption of Vesuvius with Bay of Naples by Michael Wutky (1739–1822)
By the time Andersen and his crew reached the hermitage in the mountain, it was almost dark — a perilous detail that only added to the inspired insanity of their expedition. Andersen recounts:
The wind was so biting cold that I had to get off my donkey and walk… Soon the donkeys couldn’t take us any further. We stood before the mountain itself, whose rounded contours were covered with blocks of lava and ash. We were now ascending a fairly steep grade, sinking up over our knees into ash. With every other step we slid backward by one. Large, loose rocks went sliding downward when we stepped on them.
[…]
An hour passed and we were on some sort of plain under the cauldron. Here we caught a sudden glimpse of the moon right over the crater. Coal-black smoke swirled upward; then a ball of fire and gigantic, glowing boulders rolled down onto the plain that we had to cross to get to the lava flow… There was no path at all; we had to walk and crawl between huge pieces of lava… With every eruption the moon was entirely hidden by the pitch-black smoke.
Andersen was a man at once keenly sensitive to beauty, as both his fairy tales and his travel writing attest, and afflicted by great vanity, which reared its head even in these grueling circumstances: “I sang loudly to show how little it was tiring me,” he confesses in the diary. Indeed, the entire endeavor was perhaps a manifestation of youthful vanity for a band of twenty-something men — an exercise to conquer danger for no good reason, except the vainglory of living to tell about it. And their bravado only accelerated as the danger got more intense:
After a while we could feel the heat coming up from underneath us. In order to see the new lava flow we had to cross one that had been flowing the night before; only the outermost crust was black and hard, and red fire was burning in the cracks. We stepped out onto it; it burned our feet through the soles of our shoes. If the crust had broken, we would have sunk into a sea of fire. Then we saw the monstrous stream of fire pouring slowly, thick and red like porridge, down the mountains. The sulphur fumes were so strong; the fire was burning our feet, so that after two minutes we had to go back. All around we saw fissures of fire. There was a whooshing sound coming from the crater, like when all at once a flock of birds starts up from a forest.
Eruption of Vesuvius by Johan Christian Dahl (1788–1857)
Ultimately, however, one has to give Andersen the benefit of the doubt and trust that the hazardous undertaking was for the sake of beauty, driven by a longing to get as close as humanly possible to nature’s source, to that fiery frontier of life and death, of beauty and suffering, from which true awe springs. It was beauty, ultimately, that Andersen took away:
The lava looked like colossal, fallen stars. — We rode again over the black lava field. I hung back from the others in order to watch the matchless play of nature.
The voyage to Vesuvius is but a sliver of the richness found in The Diaries of Hans Christian Andersen, an exquisite read in its entirety — a treasure trove that blends breathtaking travel writing with rare insight into the great storyteller’s soul. Complement it with the most beautiful illustrations from 150 years of Andersen fairy tales.
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Here’s another interesting project to come out of the MIT Media Lab — it’s called LightByte, and it’s all about interacting with sunlight and shadows in a new, rather unorthodox way.
We suppose its technical name could be a massive interactive sun pixel facade, but that’s a bit too much of a mouthful. What you really want to know is how it works, and the answer is, a lot of servos. We weren’t able to find an exact number but the hardware behind LightByte includes well over 100 servos, and a matrix of Arduinos to control them. While that is quite impressive by itself, it gets better — it’s actually completely interactive; recognizing gestures, responding to text messages and emails, and you can even draw pictures with the included “wand”.
We love anything mechanical like this — it’s just something about mechanical shutters that make them so awesome. Of course, reverse-engineered flip dot displays are pretty cool too! Or massive home-made flip-dot displays like this one…
[Thanks Alexander!]
Bunker.jordanOuch.
