Some More Rust, Reviewed.

 

 

 

 

 

These pics are all from my previous, 2011 Texas Travels, with the Red  Dirt Girl.

Pamplemousse (french): Grapefruit.

I really like these peoples. Pomplamoose
Nataly Dawn and Jack Conti.

No-Snow Soot Globes

I've seen these in various places on the interwebs over the last couple of weeks, and so far nobody's mentioned what's wrong with them.

They're made by a U.K. art collective, Dorothy. You can buy a soot globe for £2000.  well, you can if there's still one left.
They say:
"The single greatest threat to the climate comes from burning coal but despite this a whole new fleet of dirty coal-fired power stations are on the verge of being built in the UK (the first for 30 years). The snow globe was designed for Ctrl.Alt.Shift in anticipation of the United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen 2009.
Limited edition of 2 – only 1 remains
* Please email take@wearedorothy.com so we can provide you with a cost for shipping before you buy."

As with so many earnest  artworks, the idea's pretty clever, but on closer examination?
Okay: The first glaring fault? see those four big 'chimneys', all smoke blackened inside?
Wrong! Only the tall narrow one is a chimney. The four large waisted shapes are actually not chimneys. No smoke goes into them, in real life they're full of heat exchangers to cool water which the power station will turn back into steam, and recycle through its steam-turbines.  No  smoke, no blackening.
And if this thing's meant to embody filthy planet-killing evil, then how come there's no huge coal-mountain awaiting burning? how come the trees and grass are thriving so well?
Fail, Dorothy!
Before you make art that makes statements about anything, do your homework!

Oh. and for £2,000, I'd expect an altogether more detailed scene. I want yellow bulldozers and coal trains, and protestors outside the gates, who've driven there in their oil-burning cars, and, the least you could do is NOT  say "Post and Packing extra".

3D Printing update: Real world use, in Jay Leno's Garage.

Somewhere for Red Dirt Girl to Keep Her Portmanteau Words

My very special friend, Red Dirt Girl loves words, and she's recently acquired a truck-load of fresh ones.

I worried about how she'd keep them all organised and to hand for use in her craft as a writer, thinker, philosopher, POET.

Poets need their words to be well kept and carefully nurtured. No mess. To a poet, words are precision tools, honed and edged. You just can't keep precision words in a jumble on the floor. You need something better. Organised. Protected. Secure.  Leather bound, brass latched storage for a lady wordsmith.   Portmanteaux for safe carriage.

 This is for her.

A Sad Blow For Penguinedom

82 days ago, a daring Humboldt Penguin, identified only by his jail number, 'penguin337', broke out of Tokyo Zoo, scaling a 13 foot (4 metre) wall, and cutting through a barbed-wire fence. Despite determined pursuit, he made it through the Tokyo streets, stopping only to disguise himself and eat out at a sushi bar. The alarm was raised when , after a few rice-wines too many, he got into the karaoke...

A hue-and-cry was raised, but the fugitive made it to the water's edge and got clean away. A few sightings were made as for a couple of months he cruised Tokyo bay,  like a native.  A few times, authorities tried to net him, the Coastguard almost managed it, before he gave them the slip, flipped them the bird, and wrapped their net around their own propellor.

 

Today, however, I have sad news. Recaptured. Shackled. Tagged. The penguin's freedom is over. Some stinking stool-pigeon gave up his whereabouts. Now he's back in captivity.

But with tales to tell. Guys, it's possible.
False i.d., civilian clothes, c'mon....

Mass Breakout!

n.b.:- It is just possible a few features of this story may have been a little um, distorted, for 'editorial reasons'.

On Comments, and my Tendency to Overdo Them

I am not, nor may I ever be,  succinct.
I can't say things in a minimal way. I have words to spare.
And my mind meanders.

I was just responding to a post by Bulletholes, ( Fan Letter to Bob Dylan), in which he describes how he once stretched out a hand of friendship to the  truculent troubadour, and was rudely rebuffed.
I ended up laughing at his story, and then at myself (because the Red Dirt Girl keeps telling me I should stop worrying about not being able to think of new blog posts, and just make a blog of comments).

Here's one such comment, then, demonstrating how easily my mind gets derailed.

(comment)
"I've liked mister Dylan's music greatly over the years, and read and heard a lot about him.
Waaaay back in, I think, 1972? someone lent me a copy of Anthony Scaduto's biography of Dylan, which I read, cover to cover, because in those days I had some stupid internal rule that said I had to read any book that was presented to me. Now this idea fell by the wayside, when I incautiously, nay, stupidly, mentioned it, in confidence to a work-mate.
Oh foolish me. In about five minutes I was besieged by people proferring worthy tomes with titles like "The Population Ecology of the Water Vole", and " Old English Deverbal Substantives, Derived by Means of a Zero Morpheme", I kid you not. Dieter Kastovsky. I read it end to end, despite the fact that it was a book bigger than a refrigerator.
Tubingen. University of, I think it was his doctoral thesis. After that I was offered "A Brief Introduction To Stress-Concentrations Within the Core of the A1 Nuclear Reactor."



I gradually realised, probably half way through an exciting tome on the subject of slippage along shear planes in pacific abyssal ooze, that my friendly colleagues were betting on where I would break in my ongoing struggle to keep true to a foolish vow. Also, at the time, I was working at the National Lending Library for Science and Technology, so my tormentors had an endless supply of turgid texts.
It was something of a relief to be handed a doorstep-sized volume on Soviet Steam Locomotive Construction, in Russian.
It was clearly beyond me, as I have no grasp whatsoever, of Russian. I don't even know the cyrillic alphabet, so I had to content myself with looking at the engineering diagrams and the black and white photo-plates of triumphant sons and daughters of the revolution cheering brave locomotive crews as the sons of Genghis hurried thousands of tons of potatoes amidst thunder across the steppes.
Where was I? Oh.. I was replying to Bulletholes' post about Bob Dylan? Oh.
Yes, well. Scaduto. Biography... Oh yes. Well, I was amazed that there was a biography, after all, this was 1972, and Dylan had barely started. The thing I learned, and that none of the intervening decades has disproved is that the man's a great poetsingersongwriter, but an absolute arrogant asshole."

Sploot!

I've long been interested in 3D printing. The first exposure to the concept was, in fact, long before I'd ever seen a computer, when I was a schoolboy way back in the misty depths of time when dinosaurs roamed the earth, oh my, back when.... Oh, no, you're right, it's not relevant to the story ahead.

We had to, for  some purpose or class, it might have been art, it might have been history, it might have been geography, I can't remember now, but we had to make a scene, a diorama, of something, like a museum might have.

I chose something I'd been learning about, a viking raid on a lake village, and a hill-fort to which the lake-dwellers retreated.
This was based on a real place, and my teacher suggested I make the real, accurate topography of the site.
How?
Well, that idea vexed me, I had too few pictures to go about it, but then, after letting me struggle for a while, my teacher suggested that I trace successive contours on a large-scale ordnance-survey map of the site, and cut cardboard out so I had each ten-foot elevation as a 'slice'. Stack them up  and you have a scale, 3D stepped model.
And that I did. Years later, again, though, before computers were household items, I found a book called 'Cybernetic Serendipity' which contained images of grid-scanned human bodies.

It's not too long a step from that to realise that pretty much any item can be described by a series of superimposed grids.

Back in the late seventies, the BBC's 'Tomorrow's World' showed a machine which shone two laser beams at the surface of a pool of liquid plastic. Wherever the two beams coincided, the liquid solidified, and the beams would draw a 'slice' and the slice would, on a lowering platform, sink beneath the surface, ready for the lasers to draw another slice on top. In such a way, a three-dimensional form was slowly created.

Now, 3D printing is a reality, but so far mostly a high-tech domain.
Google it though, and you'll find a plethora of machines, from super mega-expensive high tech, to 'make it yourself' lash-ups.
It's clear to me that in a few years, that printer/copier/scanner on your desk will upgrade to having 3D capability too. Instead of buying something and having it shipped to you, maybe you'll get a file download, and your printer will pop out the thing you needed.

It's not quite ready yet, or is it? but ask yourself, how long ago was it that digital cameras didn't exist? Or televisions only an inch thick?

Here's a video of a fairly crude printer printing a chair out of recycled fridge-insulation plastic. Watch it and imagine the process a thousand times faster, and a thousand times more precise.




So? are these things real? Where is the 3D printer of today?
Thriving. What are people making?
Have a look at Thingiverse .

I'm not trying here to tell the whole story, just to open a little window, a thought-bubble, an idea. Three Dimensional printing is here. Hewlett Packard make desktop 3D printers.
Zcorp make big ones,



Or get it made by Shapeways.

Or Makerbot!