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those barrels are Kegs.. :D
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Merry winter solstice for all of you, also.
Thank you very much for this year of amazing discoveries all around the world. Eskerrik asko!
Pedro Iñaki
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Trinity Church looks like something out of a fantasy world.
Thanks for all the great links, pictures, art and general connection to good things in the world, DRB. I hope 2011 is the best year yet for you.
- R.
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Thanks for a great site, and have a great 2011!
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What was in the box then????
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Always good to see Carl Barks' paintings.
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A unicorn was in the box. One of the comments on Youtube translates the dialogue.
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The sea foam crashing is an awesome shot.
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what stunning imagery, magical descriptions and an awesome creature.
i have a new favourite animal. absolutely spectacular.
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It's worth saying that these animals are extremely shy. When I saw one, it was from a lodge that overlooked a small dam, so the platypus didn't know we were there. An Australian present said in awe, "Ninety-five percent of Australians will never see one in the wild."
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the plural of 'platypus' is correctly 'platypodes' although everyone in oz just says 'platypii'
(yeah i'm an aussie)
i lived in the country and has a family of platypus in the creedk behind my house. such beautiful animals!
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You are correct about the proper plural of platypus. The same ending goes with "octopus" since that word, also, was of Greek origin. The "i" words (octupi, platypi) presume the words were originally Latin. RR, you were so lucky to live near a family of them - I've never seen a live one.
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Aww, I'd love to give one a cuddle...
And then scream for a few weeks afterwards while the venom works its way out.
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As a (former) Australian I am happy to see Perry the Platypus as the silent chick-magnet character on Phineas and Ferb and a worthy nemesis of the evil Heinz Doofenshmirtz.
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They are common, not rare. There are some at my property and I have seen them in the day, even when having a party ! Water-birds peck at them to make them dive and drive up other food !
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The mecanical bettle remember me the film "Cronos" by Guillermo del Toro. His firts movie.
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I would like to see your source for John Dees "flying " beetle. it is an oft repeated claim but the only proper description I could find of this is in a history of his life
For this play he devised a clever mechanical and very spectacular effect.
Trygaeus, the Attic vine-dresser, carrying a large basket of food for himself, and
mounted on his gigantic beetle or scarab (which ate only dung), was seen ascending
from his dwelling on the stage to enter the palace of Zeus in the clouds above. One
has only to think of the scenic effects presented by Faust and Mephistopheles at Mr.
Tree’s theatre, for instance, to realise how crude and ineffective these attempts must
have been; but thirty or forty years before Shakespeare’s plays were written, so
unusual an exhibition was enough to excite wild rumours of supernatural powers.
From the diagram you print it does not look like something that could actually fly.
Also I think the present day robot makers must be missing something. They seem to be having huge problems getting autonomous robots to walk. Maybe they should try copying George Moores steam man! Although a closer examination of the literature shows
"When he developed a head of steam he could walk, but only in circles, since he was attached to a horezontal radius arm"
But hey why let the facts get in the way of a good story! Oh and why no mention of Faberges stuperb automata?
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Please write "amazing automata" (plur.), "amazing automaton" is singular, so doesn't exist "automatons". Excuse my teacherlike kind !
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Droz, not Doz. I seem to recall the history of the chess player is actually quite a bit more complicated, and may not have been intended as a hoax originally, but I lack the time needed to check. Nice work!
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You should also have a look at the automatons used in the Takayama festival in Gifu prefecture on Japan. I think they are around 400 years old and are quite impressive. There is one interesting one outside a restaurant that has a man "magic trick" with a box. Every time he lifts the box it reveals another item on the menu. It is powered by a water wheel which sits in one of the open drains that line the streets。I found a video of it here... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NxEUY0Y97Mw
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Great article. Some related interesting stuff at:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megascale_engineering
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
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I feel like the concept of "make it as thick as the earth to deal with gravity" suggests a lack of attention to high school physics.
Mass creates gravity, sure, but when we're not dealing with a nice, convenient, ball, you're going to have issues with exactly what direction gravity is pulling you. Hollow or not, you will be pulled towards the centre of mass. In the Dyson Sphere, that's the centre of the sun. With the disc it's a bit more of a complex math problem.
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"Did you ever go to a place... I think it's called... Norway?"
"What? No, no I didn't"
"Pity. That was one of mine. Won an award, you know. Lovely crinkly edges."
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My all time favorite megastructure was the huge hollow artificial planet in Tony Rothman's "The World is Round".
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In response to Neil, the concept of the disc is actually much more complicated than high school physics allows, as does this article. Gravity on a flat plane is significantly different from that of a sphere, as it will always be perpendicular to the surface. See the wikipedia article on Alderson Discs for an easy-to-follow refernce. However, as you approach the sun, there would be a shearing effect as the sun's gravity competed with the disc's.
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There's one more megascale structure from a more recent SF novel. It's not as large as the others but honstly? it's much more fun, and that counts, doesn't it?
I'm talking about Karl Schroeder Virga structure - basically a hollowed-out baloon the size of a planet, filled with air. there's no gravity inside so you can fly in the air. You live on rocks that float inside the environment, or in floating cities built like small rotating halos / space stations. For light, you need a large artificial sun in the middle or have smaller artificial suns placed throughout the structure.
There's probably less room for people inside one of these then there's on a regular planet the same size but You can make lots of similar structures from the material of one planet - provided you have air to fill all of them. Also, you don't need an impossibly high tensile strength like you need to build a ringworld. Lastly, if you live in such a structure you can fly by flapping your arm - that's just awesome.
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The problem with the Gibraltar dam is that the water lost from the Med ends up in the oceans, raising sea levels and reducing land area around the world. The net increase in land area would be negligible, and some inhabited areas would be flooded. Someone didn't think it all through!
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'Ringworld' is an awesome trilogy. It should be noted that its much 'wider than the planet'
About a million miles across I believe between the 1000 mile high edges.
Havent seen an illustration yet that accurately portrays this.
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Megastructures like Dyson spheres and Alderson discs are recurring themes in science fiction; back in the seventies a similar article (with, alas, sketches rather than the fine illustrations in this article) was published in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact. i believe it, too, was titled "Bigger Than Worlds."
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Very few images of Ringworld are realistic; there used to be some images created with POV-Ray that showed that at 93 some million miles from the sun, the even a million mile wide ringworld is almost invisible from the far side (which would be 186 million miles away).
Tom A.
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Have anyone ever tried to make a great illustration of Larry Niven's Integral Trees (natural grown megastructures) or John Varley's Titan?
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Don't you just love the Daily Mail (or Bile Duct as it's called in our house). That's not Assange's secret hideout, it's a data centre used by hundreds of organisations.
They really will print just about any old claptrap these days.
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Hey, a series of tubes!
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Allen Jones table is the best:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62Ap3GO3FbU&feature=player_embedded
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Totally awesome tables! Nice to see a functional object that doesn't skip on the form!
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That Alien one is insane.
Monkey Alan
http://askmonkeyalan.blogspot.com - The funnies
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1 Comments:
Thank you for the link love in this post. I hope you find more to feature from ephemera this year...
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