[Image: The "Lady Blunt" Stradivarius violin recently sold for £15.9 million]. I have to admit to a certain amount of obsession with the various quasi-scientific hypotheses for why Stradivarius violins have their so-called "perfect" sound, ranging from sunspots and European cold spells to tales of "secret...
British Countryside Generator
[Image: From Sir, You Are Being Hunted by Big Robot]. For the last ten months or so, I've been watching from afar the development of ground forms and landscapes for a game called Sir, You Are Being Hunted, from Big Robot. Big Robot, of course, is a small game design firm founded by Jim Rossignol, who...
Mountain View
[Image: Courtesy of the U.S. Library of Congress Prints & Photographs Division]. After posting several of these images in our recent Venue interview with outdoor equipment strategist Scott McGuire—easily one of my favorite interviews of late, touching on everything from civilianized military gear...
Two-Track Mind
[Image: NYC's "track geometry car," via Wikipedia]. The MTA's "track geometry car" slides around through the New York City subway, employing "a variety of sensors, measuring systems, and data management [software] to create a profile of the track being inspected." It's a large-scale, precision optical...
Intentional Landscapes
[Image: This humid and apocalyptic image—one of my favorite of the last few years—by photographer Daniel Shea depicts a house in Cheshire, Ohio, seemingly stranded amidst its own, artificially maintained lawn, as a coal-fired power plant belches out new climates in the distance]. Over the last few months,...
Temple of the Autonomous Machine
[Image: The archaeological robot Tlaloc II-TC, a design descendent of Tlaloque I, courtesy of INAH/Cortesía]. A news item over at Archaeology reports that a little wireless robot called Tlaloc II-TC will soon "investigate the far reaches of a tunnel found beneath the Temple of the Plumed Serpent at...
