Guest artist

A sequence of comic strips: one | two | three | four | five.

Back story.

(h/t: John McQuaid)

Remember Spirograph?

Check this out.

(In case it's not obvious, you can drag the horizontal bar upwards, to show more of the bottom panel and less of the top.)

(h/t: Hacker Newsletter #144)

"Tsekalo and Puttin annealed at Sparrow Hills"

Or something like that. In any case, Цекало и Puttin` отожгли на Воробьевых горах is delightful.

(h/t: TC, via email)

FAQ of the Day

This made me laugh:

The whole site is worth a look, if you're interested in typography and/or elegantly designed websites. Just the FAQ page alone is an inspiration.

Want some eye candy?

Mozy has a collection of infographics on their site. The photos of CD collections are pretty funny, in how quaint they already look.

And since you ask, why, yes, I was on that site due to a desire to restore some data. 1.609 of 1.628 GB have already downloaded. Thanks, Mozy!

Two free gigabytes of storage isn't much in this day and age, but I do like the overall service. I encourage you to try it. BEFORE IT'S TOO LATE.

Simple Harmonic Eye Candy

If you have two minutes, I think you'll find it well-spent by the end of this clip. Recommendation: After you click Play, click the full screen button (lower right corner, next to the YouTube logo).

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Some discussion over on Harvard's Natural Sciences Lecture Demonstrations site, filed under Pendulum Waves. It is claimed that the first one of these cool things was built by Ernst Mach, in about 1867.

(h/t: KK, via email)

Eye Candy: The Classic Edition

Uncle Eb advises, over at Blogpocalypse, that Art Project is now live.

Their blurb:

Explore museums from around the world, discover and view hundreds of artworks at incredible zoom levels, and even create and share your own collection of masterpieces.

Yes, this is Google, being evil once again. Seems as though it's just getting going (or so one hopes), but you can already see a bunch of work from various famous museums and do a sort of walk-through of these museums. If you've used Street View in Google Maps, it will feel familiar.

(I've just started looking around.)

[Added] Google's plain-text intro/guide to the project.

"When the moon hits your eye, like a big ..."

Don McArthur has a picture of Io posted. This, apparently, is what it would look like if you were, I dunno, looking at it from the surface of Europa or something. With binoculars or something. (In the right conjunctions, phases, etc., etc. People, please. No need to nerdgas.)

I can't, in all honesty, say it's eye candy. Because that would be the wrong food group. And you know how I get about taxonomy.

Anyway, it's cool. Go see.

World population graphed as a function of latitude and longitude

For no particular reason; just that it's a cool chart:

Pic swiped from Paul Kedrosky, via a tweet from Christopher Mims.

Following the link from the former, it looks like it was put together by Bill Rankin, who is pursuing a dual Ph.D., in the history of science and architecture at Harvard, and who enjoys graphic design and cartography in his spare time. Either this guy has 72 hour days and no need for sleep, or I am even more inferior than I thought, but never mind that. The above chart appears here, on his hobby site, Radical Cartography. From the home page, follow PROJECTS → BROWSE BY GEOGRAPHY → THE WORLD → POPULATION to get there, if the "here" link doesn't work. Be advised that if your tastes for nerd eye candy are at all like mine, you risk losing the rest of the day.

[Added] I am by no means close to being done browsing this site, but I wanted to note that I particularly liked the "Underdevelopment" map of Manhattan.

[Added2] Animated map of time zones: slow | fast.

[Added3] A new word! endorheic, a geographical term which means an internal basin that does not drain outwardly. Not all water, it turns out, ends up in the sea. Who knew? From the Physical Geography page.

[Added4] World railways. Be sure to download the full-size image.

[Added5] U.S. Empire.

[Added6] From a link in the Research Candy section of Bill's academic page: "graph of the development of the US patent system." (PDF) Note especially the one titled "Patent Activity (per million population)."

[Added7] From same section: "graph of US construction activity, 1915–1960."

[Added8] Back to the RadCart site: "Place-Name Etymology."

More Eye Candy for Us Nerds!

The above swiped from "16 Techi-rific Google Logo Doodles," a geek-centric selection (and all one one page -- no tedious "Next" clicking required!) of those commemorative logos you sometimes see on Google's home page.

K-Lo will be very sad!

(previously)

(h/t: Damon Darlin)

Eye Candy for Us Space Nerds

I for one am outraged: Why is there no highlighting of the Combined Operational Load Bearing External Resistance Treadmill?

Other than that, go see this pretty cool Flash thing showing the growth over time of the International Space Station. Also has some clickies for more information on the various components.

NB: Might be a bit out of date. I went looking for a related article and it appears as though the above was put together in late 2008. Still fun to watch, though, and I doubt there's anything that wrong about the 2009-2010 parts.

(h/t: KK and KL, via email | pic. source)

Sc-eye-nce Candy

This beauty won first prize in the Illustration category in the NSF's 2009 International Science and Engineering Visualization Challenge. It's called Kuen's Surface: A Meditation on Euclid, Lobachevsky, and Quantum Fields, and it was composed by mathematician Richard Palais and digital artist Luc Benard. Click it to big it.

Sketch a line and then draw a point off it. How many lines parallel to the first line can you draw through that point? The Greek mathematician Euclid said just one, but for more than 2,000 years after his death, mathematicians struggled to prove that he was right based on his other geometric rules. Then the 19th century Russian mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky showed that you couldn't: In some circumstances, you can sketch an infinite number of lines through that point and not violate any of Euclid's other axioms. Mathematician Dick Palais of the University of California, Irvine, and digital artist Luc Benard wanted to convey the history of Lobachevsky's solution to this mathematical puzzle with their illustration.

In this illustration, a sheet of paper shows sketches of one of these surfaces, called Kuen's surface, and the expression, called a soliton, that describes it. "We wanted to talk about these equations in a way that nonmathematicians could understand," Palais says. "So we took a symbolic approach: The surface itself stands as a symbol for that equation."

Much more goodness at the links above and below.

(h/t: NYT Science section)

Eye Candy

This being a hermit crab, PZ talks about glass houses. Me, I say it lends a whole new depth to bottle cap.

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Also from PZ:

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This is from a page titled "Animals in Love." Yeah, yeah, yeah. Anthropomorphizing blah blah. Just go look. And check out "Surprising Friends," too.

Oh, okay one more, from the "Animals and Flowers" page:

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Your Moment of Eye Candy

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The above is a Chondrocladia lampadiglobus -- a Ping-Pong tree sponge, to us non-Latins -- and believe it or not, it is a carnivorous creature, according to Olivia Judson. Next time you're 20,000 leagues 1300 fathoms under the sea, look around.

Oh, and to her main point: next year (2010) will be the International Year of Biodiversity, and you should read her post for many reasons, but especially for the toast at the end.

(Above picture originally published in “The Deep: The Extraordinary Creatures of the Abyss” by Claire Nouvian/Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute. It and several more equally amazing can be viewed in a slideshow.)

Eye Candy (New and Improved!)

The Sacramento Bee has a set of pictures taken by the Hubble, which, as you may recall, was refurbished and upgraded this past May. These are among the first released by NASA since then. Pretty spectacular.

Waiting from Richard Hoagland (who?) to complain that there are none of Mars in 5..., 4..., 3...

(h/t: KK, via email)

Eye (Rock) Candy

Looks like the old master can still bring it.

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That's Neil Young, photographed by Leon Neal, item 12 in the latest Big Picture collection of goodness, all taken at this year's Glastonbury Festival. A big ol' outdoor music show, with 190,000 people, and sometimes rain and mud? You know it's going to make for some good crowd shots (hawt babez!). Plus, where else can you find Tom Jones and Spinal Tap in the same context? Oh, and a really cool lightning shot. Go!

Big Bag of Eye and Ear Candy

Here is a nice picture made by Sasha Frere-Jones:

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Plenty more where that came from, on his blog.

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[Added] Be sure to check out this short vid, especially if you live in NYC. Blade Runner. Heh.

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By the way, I came across his blog after hearing him interviewed on this week's On The Media, where he was talking about word choices. Here is the preceding segment, "Talking Retro," featuring author Ralph Keyes, and the one in which Sasha Frere-Jones appears, "Talking Tween." (Both have the usual thirty-second NPR promo noise at the start.)

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Audio, etc., for the whole show here.

Yesterday's Liftoff

Here is some eye candy for your viewing pleasure:

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A larger version, and related clips, live at the "alt. video link."

Big Helping of Eye Candy

NASA is celebrating the tenth anniversary of their Earth Observatory by featuring the "Top 10 Images of the Day," as selected by their viewers. Have a look.

If you want more, visit the Image of the Day home page. You can also sign up for a weekly email digest, subscribe to their RSS feed, and download widgets, all on the Earth Observatory home page.

Perhaps not surprisingly, the favorite image of all was one taken from farthest away. It's all about the framing, isn't it?

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(h/t: Andrew Freedman)

Hello, Children! Would You Like Some Candy?

Eye candy, that is. The Boston Globe's Big Picture blog has a new collection of shots taken by the Cassini spacecraft, still hanging out near Saturn. There are close-ups of the rings, and some of the moons, and the rings being perturbed by the moons, and all sorts of coolness. Here's one of my favorites, a view of Saturn obscured by the haze of Titan's upper atmosphere. (A moon with an atmosphere!)

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Here is another, a shot of Titan through the rings, with Epimetheus in front.

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Another coupla dozen where those came from, plus links to previous collections.

(h/t: The Awl)