Chicago based artist Seamus Wray – sporting an appropriately locked-down facial expression – channels the Droste effect, painting portraits of himself painting portraits of himself painting portraits of himself, and so on.
Author Archives: Chompsky
The extraordinary skills of 17 year old Japanese freestyle skateboarder Isamu Yamamoto, who won his first world Championship at the age of 11. Yamamoto’s own hero, Rodney Mullen – the US ‘Godfather of Street Skateboarding’ – sez of him:
The way he links his tricks together and the speed of them — it’s beautiful to watch. I would dare say that not many could do that, in that way, if they tried.
In fairness
Hot Wheels
at
Behold: the CRTWRKS MOTO – a conceptual electric motorbike from the mind of Google industrial designer Adam Carvalho.
It may never be the bike of the future, as envisaged, but if it ever is, it’ll have a monocoque frame (incorporating the battery housing for weight reduction), direct belt-drive and square LED lighting (the rear doubling as a charging point).
Sure, it’s boxy but you know what they say about boxy.
The ‘cliff walk’ between Greystones and Bray, Co. Wicklow, today.
Colum Cronin tweetz:
Even when it’s cloudy Ireland is magic.
Mmff. Promised we…wouldn’t cry.
That’s right – two tails. What do you mean you’ve only seen one? To wit:
Of the two tails evident, the blue ion tail on the left points directly away from the Sun and is pushed out by the flowing and charged solar wind. Structure in the ion tail comes from different rates of expelled blue-glowing ions from the comet’s nucleus, as well as the always complex and continually changing structure of our Sun’s wind. Most unusual for Comet C/2020 F3 (NEOWISE), though, is the wavy structure of its dust tail. This dust tail is pushed out by sunlight, but curves as heavier dust particles are better able to resist this light pressure and continue along a solar orbit. Comet NEOWISE‘s impressive dust-tail striations are not fully understood, as yet, but likely related to rotating streams of sun-reflecting grit liberated by ice melting on its 5-kilometre wide nucleus. The featured 40-image conglomerate, digitally enhanced, was captured three days ago through the dark skies of the Gobi Desert in Inner Mongolia, China. Comet NEOWISE will make it closest pass to the Earth tomorrow as it moves out from the Sun. The comet, already fading but still visible to the unaided eye, should fade more rapidly as it recedes from the Earth.
(Image: Zixuan Lin (Beijing Normal U.)
Ultra HD ‘footage’ of Mars created by panning (using the Ken Burns effect) across high definition panoramas composed of stills taken by various Mars rovers. It’s not video but it’s very engaging.
Full screen for best effect and, if you’ve turned down the volume, ElderFoxDocumentaries sez:
Although the cameras are high quality, the rate at which the rovers can send data back to earth is the biggest challenge. Curiosity can only send data directly back to earth at 32 kilo-bits per second. Instead, when the rover can connect to the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, we get more favourable speeds of 2 Megabytes per second. However, this link is only available for about 8 minutes each Sol, or Martian day. As you would expect, sending HD video at these speeds would take a long long time. As nothing really moves on Mars, it makes more sense to take and send back images.
Localization tweets:
Definitely not Southside. Multilingualism in action in Dublin thanks to #dublincitycouncil and the local North Strand community for #Covid-19 #lockdown #safety
A short by Nelly Michenaud featuring the life and death of the virus Covidou, as imagined, written and narrated by her 10 year old niece, Molly Durey.