Simian Design

The Wilkinson Residence, designed by Robert Harvey Oshatz, is in Portland Oregon. It’s gorgeous, and breathtaking. It also is awful. This sort of high-profile, self-indulgent  project, which I LOVE, is what architects are drawn too. And why most houses look like they do; there is no money there.  I mean this took some serious cash.

Plus can you imagine the upkeep of this house? Already you can see issues with some dripping and mold it looks like in some of the photos.

But at the same time, this is EXACTLY the type of Space-Age Bachelor Pad I’d want when I hit the lotto. It really is gorgeous. I just wish we had elements of this in normal, day-to-day architecture. If we had stuff like this that the majority of people lived in, how could we not, as a society, have jet-packs? It’s simply demand it, wouldn’t it?

NOW THIS is a motorcycle. I mean, sign me up. If you own and ride one of these, it automatically makes you cooler than 99% of the people out there. This is the 1949 MOTO MAJOR 350.

Torinese engineer Salvatore Majorca created the revolutionary Moto Major straight after WWII. Apparently it was an engineering rather than styling exercise, but 60 years on, its shape is still breathtaking. The wheels, in particular, would not look out of place on many modern motorcycle

Wow.  I’m totally in love with the work of Chow Martin.  Amazing stuff.

If this isn’t camera porn, I don’t know what is.  It’s a stunningly complex photo of  a Nikon D3 cut in half.  The detail shown is amazing.  Just look at all the glass in that lens.

I love this.

Ultimate House is a tv show produced for Discovery.  It follows the story of two projects, one self-build and one restoration that are have high aspirations.  Through the series they will take you inside some extraordinary homes they could find. 

The real gem is in the gallery.  While I like the design, it’s not super-clear on how to get to the static images of the amazing spaces.  Click on the main top graphic to go to the image gallery.

The Villa Kaleidoscope treehouse, the lighthouse, the house of spiritual retreat, bow wow japan are just a few stunning examples that are to be found in here.

Looks like the show might be worth checking out.

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.

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.

He-Man was a cartoon I am very familiar with.  Grew up with He-Man, the show, the toys, all of it.  Having a little brother allowed me to be more than familiar with a lot of toys and cartoons, longer than I might have normally.

Marko Djurdjevic created a series of He-Man designs.  They are just beautiful.  I want to see the entire case redesigned.  He-Man, Teela, Battle Cat, Castle Grayskull, all of it.  He has a very nice collection, I just crave MORE.

Just a quick break to show you this brilliance. He also does Aliens,  Cthulhu, Predator and more.