Author Archives: Chompsky

Behold: the Katalis Spacebar – an electric scooter inspired by Honda’s ill-fated Motocompo foldaway of the 1980s.

Produced by Indonesian maker Katalis, the Spacebar is a new twist on an old classic, powered by a 1200W electric motor with fore and aft cargo racks and foldaway peripherals on a rectangular body.

Price to be announced but presumably consistent with the budget of your average Jakartan teen.

hiconsumption

The incoherent, unsettling but strangely familiar works of an AI programme ‘schooled’ in the street art style of Banksy. To wit

GANksy was born into the cloud in September 2020, then underwent a strenuous A.I. training regime using hundreds of street art photos for thousands of iterations to become the fully-formed artist we see today. All of GANksy’s works are original creations derived from its understanding of shape, form and texture. GANksy wants to be put into a robot body so it can spray-paint the entire planet.

Explore further, become confused and angered, buy prints, etc. here.

kottke

Behold: the majestic 200,000 light years wide island universe of NGC 1365, aka the Great Barred Spiral Galaxy. To wit:

Located a mere 60 million light-years away toward the chemical constellation Fornax, NGC 1365 is a dominant member of the well-studied Fornax Cluster of galaxies. This impressively sharp color image shows the intense, reddish star forming regions near the ends of central bar and along the spiral arms, with details of the obscuring dust lanes cutting across the galaxy’s bright core. At the core lies a supermassive black hole. Astronomers think NGC 1365’s prominent bar plays a crucial role in the galaxy’s evolution, drawing gas and dust into a star-forming maelstrom and ultimately feeding material into the central black hole.

(Image: Mike Selby, Leonardo Orazi)

apod

Waddaya mean there wasn’t one?

If you were present along a narrow path between Chile and Argentina for the final New Moon of 2020 on December 14th last, you’d have seen the only total solar eclipse of the year. To wit:

Within about 2 days of perigee, the closest point in its elliptical orbit, the New Moon’s surface is faintly lit by earthshine in this dramatic composite view. The image is a processed composite of 55 calibrated exposures ranging from 1/640 to 3 seconds. Covering a large range in brightness during totality, it reveals the dim lunar surface and faint background stars, along with planet-sized prominences at the Sun’s edge, an enormous coronal mass ejection, and sweeping coronal structures normally hidden in the Sun’s glare. Look closely for an ill-fated sungrazing Kreutz family comet (C/2020 X3 SOHO) approaching from the lower left, at about the 7 o’clock position. In 2021 eclipse chasers will see an annular solar eclipse coming up on June 10. They’ll have to wait until December 4 for the only total solar eclipse in 2021 though. That eclipse will be total along a narrow path crossing the southernmost continent of Antarctica.

(Image: Miloslav Druckmuller, Andreas Moller, (Brno University of Technology)

apod

Behold: the Kyron Design Nzuri concept – a luxurious 70m expedition megayacht with an aggressive, chinny silhouette, redolent of an ancient trireme, formed by a fibreglass superstructure and steel hull.

The main deck features a bar, lounge space, and helipad/pool with additional parking for two Audia AI: Trail Quattro vehicles. Another bar and sundeck are located aft. Below deck are 10 guest cabins, expedition equipment room, crew quarters, a circular lounge with panoramic views and a master suite

Top speed: 22 knots. Range: 4,000 nautical miles. Price: on application but worth every cent when you outflank the Persians at Salamis.

uncrate