by Andrew Liszewski on Toyland, shared by Annalee Newitz to io9
As part of Star Wars Celebration last week, Sideshow Collectibles reached out to over 90 artists, designers, and friends with a simple task: take the company’s new sixth-scale R2-D2 figure and reimagine the astromech droid in weird and wonderful ways.
Tuesday Tips - Inspirations Batman: Animated (the book) Probably the first non-Disney art book to make a lasting impression on me. As a teenager/young adult, it completely changed the way I would approach and appreciate animated art. It made me realize early on that “less is more”. At that point in my art education, I would be amazed by anything Disney, but it was so sophisticated in its use of every animation principles and unmatched talents, that my brain couldn’t “see” the process. Batman animated was different. I could “see” the shapes and the use of contrast and color choices. The book swung open the doors to the inner workings of an animated project for me. It solidified my decision to work in animation an made me a lifelong fan of anything Bruce Timm / Paul Dini / Darwyn Cooke / Shane Glines / etc. Buy this book! Now. -Norm
The African Renaissance Monument in Senegal, larger that the Eiffel tower and the statue of liberty .. Things you don’t see in mainstream media. @KrystVegaNeteru
This is beautiful.
I think this picture better illustrates the size of that monument.
I never even knew this existed this makes me so happy to find out about it
Nah it’s awful
Have you ever spoken to a Senegalese person about this monument to macho megalomania? They hate it.
This statue cost the same as the public debt of Senegal’s hospitals. It’s a big strong man sweeping a scantily clad woman along behind him - they’re all half naked which is extremely insensitive in a country with a 92% Muslim majority …it’s supposed to signify the future and progress but it looks like a throwback to Stalin era politics, it’s supposed to signify African “renaissance” but African people neither designed nor built it.
We can marvel at the size of it, but people in Senegal are pretty adamant that they’d prefer electricity that stays on and surfaces on the roads, books for schools.
It’s a monument to the ego of President Abdoulaye Wade, who, by the way, has claimed 35% of the revenue generated by tourists thanks to this thing, on the basis that he had the idea to build it 20 years ago. He’s 83.
Sandpaper has to be the number one consumable in the modern-day furniture shop. But a subset of craftspeople, like Toshio Tokunaga and his four apprentices, don't use any of the stuff—yet are still able to achieve a glass-like finish on their furniture pieces, even absent varnish.
Anti-sandpaper furniture builders achieve this with handplanes and spokeshaves, or what are collectively called kanna in Japanese. While Western planes are made with cast-iron or bronze bodies, kanna are made with wooden bodies supporting the iron cutter.
While sandpaper and kanna might seem to produce the same results to the untrained eye—or hand rubbing the surface—it's simply not true, particularly when seen at a microscopic level, or touched with sensitive fingertips.
As you can see, blades cut. Sandpaper tears. Thus, as Tokunaga Furniture Studio explains,
We use no sandpaper at all when crafting our furniture. Sandpaper rubs away the natural pattern of the wood, leaving behind a smoothness that is artificial and which obscures the tree's innate characteristics. In contrast to this, the kanna cuts away successive layers of wood in a way that preserves the wood's natural appearance.
Tokunaga, by the way, makes his own kanna, from the ones that do the roughing work to the ones that take the final fine shavings.
As you can see, he's designed a staggering range of shapes. Collectively these tools can cope with every type of contour required in his work, whether flat, concave or convex.
Here's the team putting in the elbow grease:
And here's Tokunaga discussing the benefits of the kanna finish:
The blades of course require regular maintenance. Here an apprentice sharpens an iron on a waterstone.
Speaking of the irons, take a closer look:
Those look store-bought to you? Nope, Tokunaga has them made locally. And while I hate to write this hacky, clickbaitey sentence, you really won't believe where they came from! Stay tuned.
Back in the bad old days, table saw fences were terrible. You would have to measure the top and bottom of the fence before each cut, just to make sure the fence was square to the blade. In the 1970s, [Bill Biesemeyer] invented a better table saw fence, one that was always square, and included a measuring tape, right on the table saw.
[Jer] wanted an upgrade for his table saw and came up with what might be the next evolution of the table saw fence. It will always produce a square cut, but unlike the 1970s version, this fence has repeatability. If you rip a board to 1″, move the fence, come back to it after a month, and try to rip another board to 1″, those two boards will be exactly the same width.
The secret to this repeatability is a threaded rod. On the front of the fence is a big, beefy piece of threaded rod with 16 threads per inch. On the fence itself is two nuts, cut in half, welded to the guide, with a lever and cam to lock them in place.
When the lever is up and the nuts are disengaged from the threaded rod, the fence easily moves from one side of the table to the other. When the fence is locked down, it locks to the nearest 16th of an inch, and only the nearest 16th of an inch. While that may seem a little large for a relatively expensive tool, this is wood we’re talking about here. There’s not much reason to make the resolution of this fence any smaller; wait until the humidity changes and you’ll have a piece of wood that’s the desired dimension.
TL;DR - Clock loses less than 5/8 second per 100 days, so it's the world's most accurate mechanical pendulum-driven clock.
Shortly before his death in 1776, eccentric British clock-maker John Harrison claimed to have designed the ‘perfect’ clock, one that would keep time flawlessly. His rivals and peers wrote it off as the boastings of a bitter, 80-year-old failure — but in modern-day light, Harrison has finally been proved right.
I think this picture better illustrates the size of that monument.
