My friend Jon Singer sent me a link to this fellow’s homebrewed Panaplex display, using a jam jar as the vacuum chamber. Panaplex is a kind of gas-discharge plasma display tech related to the Nixie tube. The builder, Lindsay Wilson, explains the basic setup for his display: The entire thing is based on using a […]
Nikon Small World – Gallery via BB. Here’s the winner, Jonas King, Anopheles gambiae (mosquito) heart (100X). The Nikon International Small World Competition first began in 1974 as a means to recognize and applaud the efforts of those involved with photography through the light microscope. Since then, Small World has become a leading showcase for photomicrographers […]
With a motion-control camera, a printout under glass, and some gaffer’s tape. It’s one of several completely nerdilicious photos from a new book called The Making of Star Wars: The Empire Strikes Back by J. W. Rinzler. More pics and anecdotes over at Vanity Fair. I especially like the long shot of the iconic Luke-I-Am-Your-Father scene that shows the big pile of mattresses on the floor in case Mark Hamill falls. [via Core77]
Entertaining video from YouTuber David Alvarez. I have a hard time imagining that he’s not working from a plan of some kind, but just from watching the video, it rather looks like he’s “free-handing” his Heath-Ledger-Joker mosaic. He just stands there, solves each cube to present the right pattern, and sets it in place, apparently without any kind of reference.
This link came in the mailbag from one Junior Veloso, of Singapore, who has produced this very impressive homemade photopolymer-based 3D printer. Traditional stereolithography uses a scanning UV laser to cure the liquid resin, one layer at a time. A DLP printer is similar, but uses a micromirror-based video projector to expose each layer, as shown in the diagram. Junior’s version exposes each layer for four to eight seconds, resulting in print times on the order of several hours. The resin has to be opaque to prevent “shadowing” from light transmitted through the printing layer.
Spice Your Prints with “Shadowgraphs†Mechanix Illustrated, Aug, 1941. So that’s what people did before clip art and photoshop :)
The latest high altitude weather balloon video making the rounds is from the father and son team of Luke and Max Geisshuhler of Brooklyn, NY. Their setup included a 19-inch helium balloon with a payload consisting of a camcorder, GPS enabled phone, and a couple of hand warmers inside a styrofoam container.
