for fans of Warner Brothers cartoons, a filmography of the cartoons released from 1929 to 1964.

Along with the titles, producers, animators etc, a gallery of the title page graphics is included as well.

link (via Dave Mackey)

Update...sorry , the link is gone, but here is some more Warner Bros.

In 1901, after working in Japan, and training in judo and jujutsu, an Englishman named E W Barton-Wright wrote a piece on defending yourself with a walking stick using a method he named "Bartitsu".

"It must be understood that the new art of self-defence with a walking-stick, herewith introduced for the first time, differs essentially from single-stick or sword-play; for a man may be a champion in the use of sword or single-stick and yet be quite unable to put a walking-stick to any effective use as a weapon of defence."

10 good moves with drawings, from the Journal of Non-Lethal Combatives.

link

An offshoot of the Mozilla product suite, the Firefox browser is proving a very popular alternative to Internet Explorer.There has been lots of words about this, and Wired News has a good article that explains why.

"....Firefox the browser is an impressive piece of software. It's easy to use, easy on the eyes, and safer than IE - partly because it's too new to have amassed a following of evil hackers. Firefox the phenomenon is something much bigger. It's a combination of innovations in engineering, developer politics, and consumer marketing."

Internet Explorer users who haven't considered using anything else might want to consider this.

the band is riffing and Jim does what he did best.

Brian Berg is the Cardstacker.

Some pretty amazing engineering with playing cards.According to his website, his latest record-holding stacked card structure is more than twenty-five feet tall.

There is a small gallery of photos of his work and also he has an instructional book, not to mention an impressive list of past appearances.

Not surprisingly, he is in a program at the Harvard Graduate School of Design.

link to cardstacker.com.

There is a book that is four hundred years old and still defies translation , not to mention explanation.

From Nature Magazine....

"The Voynich manuscript is often described as the world's most mysterious book. It is hand-written in a unique alphabet, about 250 pages long, and contains pictures of unrecognizable flowers, naked nymphs and astrological symbols"

and from Crystalinks...

"It is written in a language of which no other example is known to exist. It is an alphabetic script, but of an alphabet variously reckoned to have from nineteen to twenty-eight letters, none of which bear any relationship to any English or European letter system."

whether it is an elaborate, ancient hoax or something completely different, it is still very much a puzzle.

Recent findings have agreed that the universe is expanding, but much faster than previously thought.There is some way-out thinking going on, not only about why this is happening, but how to survive the ultimate end of the universe.

Prospect Magazine has a article that puts forth various discussions on these subjects,from finding wormholes to a parallel universe ,to creating another 'baby' universe , when our present one is nearing it's end. As far as I can make out, we still have lots of time to figure this out.

from the Museum of Media History...

a vision of the future of media and information that makes you wonder where we are going with all this.

you'll need some time with this - an eight minute Flash animation

have some fun with the 'Error Message Generator' from Atom Smasher.

some very interesting looking horns, reed and string instruments that made the music of the Medieval and Renaissance periods. Pictured, is the Serpent, a prelude to the tuba.

Descriptions, usage and short sound clips. All very bizarre by today's standards.

When digital clocks (and analog ones, too, for that matter) get boring and mundane, then catch the time of day from www.humanclock.com.

An interesting concept...the site invites photo submissions of clock times, with great imagination, and each minute changes to display the current time (after making time zone / daylight saving time adjustments), with a photo of someone's version of the time of day.

Not really 'Bad Astronomy' , but correcting some bad astronomy.

Phil Plait takes some popular misconceptions and sets them right, as well as looking at some common idioms that have found their way into our language, such as 'the dark side of the moon' (apparently Pink Floyd put in a quiet disclaimer on their usage of that one).

Bad movie and bad TV astronomy are also taken to task...

Gallery of photographic images taken of snowflakes by Wilson Bentley. Not the easiest subject , considering the conditions... it needs to be cold (and snowing), all the equipment and the photographer needs to be outside, and the image must be recorded before the snowflake melts.

This man's patience has recorded some beautiful images.

"Stefan Mart was the narrator and illustrator of the picture book Tales of the Nations, published in Hamburg in 1933 by the "Cigarettenbilderdienst Hamburg-Bahrenfeld" ("Cigarette Picture Service"). It won the hearts of innumerable children and grown-ups in the course of the six years that it was in print. This was due above all to the 150 colour illustrations: they were small in size, but strong in expression, each a microcosm packed with action, each a feast for the eyes like a beautifully set jewel; everything was finely-drawn and clear, indeed with the exaggerated clarity of the caricature..."

The artist remains virtually unknown, only his work is recognized by the people who collected the stories as they were printed and distributed all over Germany, and by present day art historians and collectors.

link

Realm of the Unreal

"Henry Darger died in 1973 in a Catholic mission operated by the Little Sisters of the Poor. He was buried in a paupers' cemetery. He had no family or friends. The neighbors in his north Chicago apartment building remembered him as an odd, unkempt man who scavenged through garbage cans and talked to himself in numerous voices. He attended mass every day, often several times a day, but otherwise led a solitary life.

Unknown to his neighbors and to everyone, Darger had been creating and compiling a massive literary and graphic body of work since 1909."

This man had created a 15,000 page, 12 volume epic complete with hundreds of watercolour paintings,only discovered after his death.

link to pages describing his story and a sampling of some of the artwork

From the Museum of Unworkable Devices

Project Orion was a interesting idea, back in the early sixties, a nuclear powered spaceship for looooong distance traveling, until the treaty banning exploding nuclear devices in space put an end to it.......however, another project was in the works as well. More terrestrial and a lot more sinister. Project Pluto. Coldwar paranoia and a new technology enabled US engineers to come up with a missile weapon which actually got to a testing stage.

"... Realizing that the Soviets were ahead in missiles, Americans became concerned that they might be ahead in anti-missile missiles as well. To counter that threat, Pentagon planners decided they needed an unmanned atomic bomber or a nuclear-powered cruise missile able to fly below enemy defenses.

What they came up with was SLAM, for Supersonic Low-Altitude Missile. SLAM was to use a revolutionary new type of propulsion: nuclear ramjet power. The project to build the weapon's nuclear reactor was given the code name "Pluto," which also came to refer to the weapon itself."

a nice selection of vintage recordings copied into MP3 format (small files) that can be sampled online or downloaded for collecting.(see terms of use).

"....The vast majority of recordings featured here are from the collection of John D. Floyd, Jr. of Laurel, MD and are used with his permission. Not every recording is priceless, rare and blisteringly hot; some are the exact opposite! You can be sure all are interesting, and not likely to be found anywhere else. "

almost everything you wanted to know about Da Vinci's Last Supper

" Da Vinci's Last Supper has become one of the most widely appreciated masterpieces in the world. It began to acquire its unique reputation immediately after it was finished in 1498 and its prestige has never diminished. Despite the many changes in tastes, artistic styles, and rapid physical deterioration of the painting itself, the painting's status as an extraordinary creation has never been questioned nor doubted"

link

"War"...Campaign on Iraq Poster Exhibition" contains lots of graphic opinions on this subject....

"..... the project has become a living exhibition, with new posters being added on an on-going basis. None of these posters are for sale, though some are available for immediate download. But all are intended to stimulate discussion about the issues surrounding the war, both inside the online design community and beyond."

link

compare the mood here, with the WW2 collections below.....

"...........The "Hurricane" is powered by one Rolls-Royce "Merlin" II 12 cylinder liquid-cooled motor. It is an all-metal low-wing cantilever monoplane with retractable undercarriage....."

For info and graphics on vintage aircraft and related items , such as patches, emblems and cigarette cards. Also sections on vintage industrial machines, tractors, cars and military vehicles.....link

WAIT!, there are more vintage WW2 collections.......

A series of cartoon sketches by an American serviceman, George Rarey, while stationed in England in 1943-1944.

"In 1942 my father, George Rarey, a young cartoonist and commercial artist, was drafted into the Army Air Corps. He flew a P-47 before he drove a car. During his service he kept a cartoon journal of the daily life of the fighter pilots. A few weeks after D-Day he was killed in combat over France."

.........a neat collection that reflects the mood, glamour and brotherhood of fighter Squadrons that was England in the war years before D-Day.

link

what do you believe is true, even though you cannot prove it?

In 1935 two Russians traveled the roads of America as correspondents on special assignment from the newspaper Pravda.

"Shortly after their arrival in New York aboard the French luxury liner Normandie, they purchased a Ford automobile and embarked upon a ten-week road trip to California and back. Ilf and Petrov visited America as literary tourists, stopping at major attractions, staying in tourist motels, consulting with AAA for travel advice, and relying upon Russian-speaking tour guides to smooth their way. Like a good tourist, Ilf extensively recorded his trip with his Leica camera."

A great excerpt from a larger work, from a couple of out-of-towners coming to grips with the North American obsession with highways and automobiles.

.......is a kind of 'Popular Mechanics' site where one can find some plain language reference and explanations to modern day technologies and processes, as well as science and natural subjects.

I have mentioned this here before, but it is such a great service that I have to say it again. A means of bypassing the compulsory web registration that a lot of news sites are requiring to read their articles. One can invoke Bugmenot , when required, and it will provide a id / password from its database and then proceed to access the news story or article you were looking for. Available as a single use tool , or as an extension to popular web browsers (IE, Firefox) in the right click context menu.

a beautifully detailed look at the very small and normally unseen.

a series of scientific photographs from 'The Eye of Science" using electron microscopes and other computerized methods of imaging. Subjects ranging from bugs to bacteria to botany and more.....

paintings from the US Naval Historical Centre archives , relating to submarines and submariners, dating from 1902 , but mostly from the WW2 years , when this craft really became an effective weapon in the battle on the seas.

link

Anyone using a peer-to-peer (P2P) network for acquiring music or videos should be aware that there is a new and sneaky method for installing adware and spyware on your pc by disguising aggressive content in Windows Media Files (WMA) and making it appear like a normal music or video file.

From PC World....

" has learned that some Windows Media files on peer-to-peer networks such as Kazaa contain code that can spawn a string of pop-up ads and install adware. They look just like regular songs or short videos in Windows Media format, but launch ads instead of media clips.

When we ran the files, we noted over half a dozen pop-ups, some attempts to download adware onto our test PC, and an attempt to hijack our browser's home page."

All this apparently due to a loophole in the Windows Media DRM (Digital Rights Management)........use with caution.

link to PC World story .....link to P2Pnet article

An online gallery containing the artwork of Hieronymus Bosch (1415-1516).

The piece pictured here is called 'Death of the Miser' (1490)....the man truly had his own vision of the dark places.

JPL Multimedia has a presentation reviewing the adventures of their two Mars Rovers, Spirit and Opportunity, after a year of wandering around on the Red Planet. Includes images, discoveries and future plans.