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Because ‘Popular Mechanics’ Should be More Popular

What do Nikola Tesla, Captain Nemo, Dr. Julius No, Dr. Victor Frankenstein, and Madame Marie Curie have in common?

Why, they are all on this list, wherein Daniel H. Wilson and Anna C. Long travel back in time (and into fiction) to psychoanalyze and rate their All-time Top 5 Mad Scientists, at Popular Mechanics Magazine. (found via Brassgoggles.co.uk)


Also at popular Mechanics:

Are Backyard Hot-Air Blimps the Future of Low-and-Slow Aviation?

“Two rival New England inventors have been launching a new breed of airship over New England’s Connecticut River Valley. But will recreational hot-air blimps go mainstream, or are they just a pleasant diversion for a summer morning?” … [more here]

4 New ‘Blimp’ Designs Bring Return of the Airship

“We already took you inside our floating future with hybrid airships. Can new tech put them on the fast track?”… [more at Popular Mechanics]

Just Don’t Call it a Blimp


Photograph by Phillip Toledano

“It’s a hybrid airship–part plane, part dirigible. Two Ohio inventors think production versions up to 990 feet long will launch a new era of aviation–one where low and slow is the way to go…” [more at Popular Mechanics]

Airship images are copyright © Popular Mechanics and/or by the phototographers listed. Madame Curie and Nikola Tesla photographs are public domain, and found at Wikipedia.org.

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Down with A.D.D.

Months ago, I programmed a flash movie that would read an XML page, generated by PHp, which drew its data from a MySQL database for a coppermine gallery (one which I had previously reprogrammed to act as a shopping cart in addition to its norms).

The movie would take images that were marked off special (I guess there was some extra programming there as well), and it would feed those XML items into itself, with descriptions, prices, and each linked to their individual pages.

Currently, I am making a similar movie, also XML fed, to rotate flyer ads with added text… placed bottom or side, according to the size of the image, it will also likely generate content for some AJAX-driven popup layers – cause that would be pretty ‘spiffy’…

Anyway… it has me thinking…

Have I ever mentioned how much I should be making lots of money at an agency instead of struggling as an artist? No? Well, I guess I was not all that sane before.

Maybe for a long time I have just not considered that these are things that not everyone could do.

… Or maybe it is just that things I cannot do, things improbable or impossible, interest me more than those which come easy. Continue reading Down with A.D.D.