Tony Stephens / Simian Design

These are my delicious links for November 23rd:

• Free Flickr eXporter iPhoto Plugin (FFXporter) - While I used to love and use the Flickr Exporter, I don't think it's worth $24 as it currently stands. I think shareware should be in the $10-15 range, and anything about 20 is asking for a lot. I just want to export to Flickr from iPhoto.

  This is a free exporter that works.

These are my delicious links for November 21st:

• Top 20 Great US Civil War Photographs - The List Universe - A really nice collection of photos. What I found shocking was how many of these photos I've never really seen before. I think I was familiar with about 3 of these 20 photos.

These are my delicious links for November 18th:

• Pop Culture Propaganda - Brilliant outtakes of Pop Culture done up in a old school propaganda style. Now I love me some propaganda, and they nail the style with these selections.

These are my delicious links for November 18th:

• prettyGallery - by Stephane Caron - A nice image gallery script written in jQuery.

Wow. I’m a fan of Dune, both the books and the movie, but this blows me away.   I was not aware that this ever was conceived.

Alejandro Jodorowsky worked at creating a truly amazing Dune movie in 1975.  He worked with H.R.Giger (!!), Jean Giraud, Chris Foss, Pink Floyd (!!) to do the score.  Funding stopped the process, and it’s a shame.

Casting, sound, art, it was all planned out to be a beautiful, weird movie (and yes, I know Lynch’s was the same, but go look at the art and tell me that this wasn’t going to be magic.)   I mean, check out his description of Emperor Padishah Shaddam IV.

The Emperor of the galaxy is insane. He lives on an artificial gold planet, in a gold palace built according to not-laws of antilogical. He lives in symbiosis with a robot identical to him.

 

 From his summary of the script:

Already 20,000 years ago
        that the Earth burst…
Man conquered the Galaxy,
        but he realizes
        that he still lives on an Island:
the Galaxy itself is encircled by
        an insuperable Magnetic Wall.
No one could cross it.
Not having anything more
        to discover,
        to conquer,
Man delivers himself completely
        to the pleasure,
give his capacity to machines
        and degenerates in the luxury.

Oh how I wish this was made.  The imagery just brings the books to life, just so much more in line with the books tones.

These are my delicious links for November 17th:

• 50 Beautiful Examples Of Tilt-Shift Photography - I could stare at these types of photos all day long. Just amazing.
• 5 Tips for Better jQuery Code: jQuery, Tutorial - Nice list of better jQuery techniques. I wasn't aware of some of the items in the list.
• Nudibranchs - Gorgeous photos of these weird sea creatures.

These are my delicious links for November 14th:

• A Better Place for a Banff Canoe Ride - Yeah, that's not bad. I'd go there, probably be pretty OK.
• The world's most super-designed data center – fit for a James Bond villain - This underground data center has greenhouses, waterfalls, German submarine engines, simulated daylight and can withstand a hit from a hydrogen bomb. A newly opened high-security data center run by one of Sweden’s largest ISPs, located in an old nuclear bunker deep below the bedrock of Stockholm city, sealed off from the world by entrance doors 40 cm thick (almost 16 inches).
• Amazing Home.. - I LOVE this house. LOVE it. I love the sheer wilderness. The Views. The stark simplicity.

These are my delicious links for November 14th:

• Displaying code on your blog - Nice embeddable code using SyntxHighlighter

Two groups of astronomers have taken the first pictures of planets going around other stars.   This is just astounding.  We’re now able to view OTHER PLANETS.  This just makes me giddy. 

Dr. Christian Marois is with a team from the Herzberg Institute of Astrophysics in Victoria, British Columbia that recorded three planets circling a star (HR 8799) that is 130 light-years away in the constellation Pegasus.

Paul Kalas, leading a team from UC Berkeley, photographed a planet orbiting Fomalhaut, which is 25 light-years away in the Piscis Austrinus constellation.

Granted, if you go look at the photos, they are scratchy, grainy images with little pixels jumping around.  But if you’re an astronomer, you see this and you see planets.  Kepler himself would feel right at home looking at these images. 

Now we’ve discovered 300 extrasolar planets out there, but based on indirect observation.  This is mostly done by measuring dips in starlight as the planet passes in front of it.

“Every extrasolar planet detected so far has been a wobble on a graph,” said Bruce Macintosh, an astrophysicist from Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California and a member of Dr. Marois’s team. “These are the first pictures of an entire system.”

These new planets are HUGE.   Just to put this into perspective, Jupiter is two and a half times larger than ALL the other planets in our solar system combined.  It’s 318 times more massive than Earth (it’s diameter is equal to 11 Earths.)  And we’re GREATLY expanding this size with these planets.  Hell, Jupiter is so big it’s barycenter is actually above the Sun’s surface. (A barycenter is the point between two objects where they balance each other. In other words, it is the center of gravity where two or more celestial bodies orbit each other.)

The three planets orbiting HR 8799 are roughly 10, 9 and 6 times the mass of Jupiter, and orbit their star in periods of 450, 180 and 100 years respectively, all counterclockwise.

The Fomalhaut planet is about three times as massive as Jupiter, according to Dr. Kalas’s calculations, and is on the inner edge of a huge band of dust, taking roughly 872 years to complete a revolution of its star.

I feel strongly that we, as a race, need to move to the stars.  We need to find other planets, other places where we can expand and grow.  These sort of studies and findings are crucial to that sort of growth.  That’s why I get so excited.

These are my delicious links for November 13th:

• Ralph McQuarrie Concept Paintings for Star Wars - a set on Flickr - I love his stuff, I have the book and have spent much time enjoying his work.
• delizzy - del.icio.us Bookmarks Search Engine - Sure, Delicious has a search, but they don't search everything, they just search tags, and title. This searches everything, the contents of each bookmarked page or site.
• Common Visual Design Misconceptions :: UXmatters - Excellent points here. Answering the questions/assumptions of: 1) Visual design is about making things look pretty.
  2) Making things pop more can improve visual design.
  3) It’s possible to evaluate visual design in pieces.