I follow Martin Cook on Twitter. His day job is medical, which must be interesting just now. But he’s also a Real Photographer. Here we see him lining up a swan with Salisbury Cathedral:
Also, that tree on the left looks like it’s had a big old dose of pollarding done to it, a process that has long intrigued me.
See also: a deer; a rabbit; another deer; a monochrome deer; the same deer (?) in colour; a bee; … You get the pictures.
3D printed flexoskeletons. In English, that would be “a cheap army of robot insects”:
Engineers at the University of California San Diego have developed a new method that doesn’t require any special equipment and works in just minutes to create soft, flexible, 3D-printed robots.
The innovation comes from rethinking the way soft robots are built: instead of figuring out how to add soft materials to a rigid robot body, the UC San Diego researchers started with a soft body and added rigid features to key components. The structures were inspired by insect exoskeletons, which have both soft and rigid parts—the researchers called their creations “flexoskeletons.” The new method allows for the construction of soft components for robots in a small fraction of the time previously needed and for a small fraction of the cost. …
But what could an army of such robots actually do? The most obvious immediate applications would appear to be military. They could be what I’ve already said: an army. Of miniature kamikaze bugs, or some such horror movie type thing.
I wouldn’t want to be on the wrong side of a hive of these little thingies.
Another fun thought: See the second category in the category list below.
My designated official mission, to photo the supermoon, failed, but when up there, I photoed other photos, including this one:
Now, and as Instapundit would say, I’m not saying that it’s aliens.
But …:
… it’s aliens.
That second one would make a good book cover.
One of my favourite statues in all of London is Boadicea, with daughters, chariot and horses. Until lately, I have been in the habit of photoing her in this sort of silhouetted way, with the Wheel behind her, and cranes, like this, from October 2018:
But today, looking for other Other creatures stuff in the photo-archives, I encountered this photo of her:
No messing about, no clever linings up with other Things. No cranes. And no clue that we are even in the middle of London, across the road from Big Ben, next to Westminster Bridge, and surrounded by tourists. Well not tourists now, but usually.
I love that thing all the real sculptors know how to do with skimpy but wrinkly clothing on a body. Amazing. They make it look translucent, but with a totally solid object that they’ve made. There must be special classes for that in sculpture school.
And with cloudy weather to light her properly.
She dates from the late nineteenth century, so she’s Boadicea rather than Boudicca so she’s a quarter of a century bigger than these ladies, and over a century bigger than action heroines nowadays.
Why was I not informed about this remarkable building, erected in 2002 in Karlsruhe, Germany, until now?:
I am interested in unusual buildings. On Fridays, I like to do creature-related postings here, which are not just regular cats-or-dogs-doing-endearing-things postings, or at least not always. And, for a while, just after this building was built, I was an education blogger. So, The Internet really should have told me about the Kindergarten Wolfartsweier a decade and a half ago, rather than only yesterday.
The above photo is one of these, of Buildings That Look Like Animals. (Again, this list was published nearly two years ago, and only now am I being told about it. Come on Internet, you can do better than this.)
The Internet only got around to mentioning this building to me because Owen Hopkins has written a book about Postmodern Architecture (subtltled “Less is a Bore”), and The Internet finally deigned to send me an email, linking to an article about this book, at a website called “Luxury London”.
This article is quite informative, but the subheadings that sell it are a bit silly. As usual, the stupidest stuff in media is perpetrated by headline and subheading writers. For insteance, this:
London has become the global epicentre for postmodern architecture …
Which merely means that London, being quite big and quite rich, has quite a bit of postmodern architecture.
And this, which is silly, given what the article is about:
… narcissistic steel-and-glass megaliths of the City …
London is about to start seriously pining for more new narcissistic steel-and-glass megaliths, now that it has stopped building them, for the time being anyway.
What the world now needs is a narcissistic steel-and-glass megalith, shaped like a cat.
I know I know. There’s only one person in the whole world who likes clicking through huge collections of photos of London taxis with adverts on them. Me. But such galleries of persuasive transport are now easy for me to put up here, and have always been easy for you to ignore, so here’s another, consisting of fifty-four taxis-with-adverts photoed by me in the latter half of last year:
Photo 49, bottom row, number four, features Ms Calzedonia, a shapely lady with writing on her legs. But even my original 4000×3000 photo did not enable me to discern what this writing says and my googling also proved insufficient. Anyone?
Also puzzling, merely from my photo number 40, is “Duolingo”, but this was easy to learn about, and pretty easy to guess. It’s for learning a new language.
Sadly, Patrick and I were unable to record our intended WW2 bombing conversation this afternoon. Patrick has done his bit, but it turns out that my mere phone won’t suffice and I need to get Skype working at my end too, which is the sort of thing I am not good at and which will take me time.
But, the delay does mean I can do a bit more homework. Homework like pondering this question: What was the most impressive air war machine of WW2? The Spitfire, maybe? The Avro Lancaster? How about the de Havilland Mosquito? The North American P-51 Mustang, mentioned in yesterday’s posting?
Well, maybe none of the above. But, how about the aero-engine, also mentioned in passing yesterday, which powered all of the above? (Also the Halifax and the Hurricane.) Wikipedia has this resplendent photo, “Taken by JAW 19th November 2005 Pearce Air Force Base Western Australia”, of the engine in question:
Yes, it’s the Rolls-Royce Merlin. I doubt many of them looked like that, when they were fighting WW2. The one in this photo looks more like something we’d now see in Tate Modern. Well, we wouldn’t. But we should.
The Merlin was named, not after the noted wizard, but, like all the Rolls-Royce engines of the WW2 era, after a bird of prey.
I have long possessed and am now reading a book about the man (his name was Hives) who, more than anyone else, ensured the Merlin’s development and mass production in sufficiently war-winning numbers. The number in question being, according to Wikipedia: 149,659.
The Wikipedia entry on Hives is also worth a read, especially the bit about how Hives met, and won over, the “highly irascible but utterly pivotal” Admiral Hyman G. Rickover, the USA’s nuclear submarine boss during the Cold War, and got him to cooperate with the British nuclear submarine programme.
Being unable to use public transport, but still allowed to venture out of doors on foot, I have been concentrating my photographic attention on nearby places. And I have become especially fixated on the statues in Parliament Square.
Here are a couple of photos of one of these statues, a recently installed one, of Millicent Garrett Fawcett:
I show you the one on the left because it shows when not to try photoing some of these statues, namely those on the opposite side of Parliament Square from Parliament itself. I photoed that one on April 6th, in the quite late afternoon. Don’t try to photo these statues late in the afternoon, when the light is behind them to the west, unless all you want is silhouettes.
On the right is a photo I took this morning, when the light was coming from the east.
But the light coming from the east needed to be of a particular sort, which at first I got rather wrong, as the next two photos illustrate:
That’s Nelson Mandela, as I am sure you realise. The one on the left is a photo I took on the morning of April 26th, a morning I chose because it was so sunny. However, it was too sunny. By then, there were leaves (I constantly find leaves to be the enemy of successful photoing) casting random shadows over everything, and making it hard to discern the patterns on the surface of the statue,and totally messing up his face.
So, when I returned today, in the morning, I had chosen a less sunny morning, to see if that made things better. It did. Instead of the light crashing like a searchlight upon everything, and remembering all the things that had got in its way on the way to its destination, the light this morning wasn’t crashing anywhere. It was merely flowing gently, everywhere, in all directions, like a set of blurry lamps instead of one brutal searchlight. Hence the relative success of the photo on the right.
Until now, I have not tried very hard to photo statues. I have tried, but not very hard. I just photoed and hoped for the best, without wondering why it worked sometimes rather than at other times. But, I had begun to think that the sort of light I normally most enjoy for photoing, bright sunshine, might not be the best sort of light for statues. This morning, I paid attention to this notion, and it seemed to work very well.
So, here are several more photos that I took this morning, this next lot showing facial details of a sort I have never managed to get before, from these particular statues. These ones are close-ups of six of the statues that are at the west end of the square – Mandela (again), Disraeli, Gandhi, Fawcett (again), Lincoln, and Canning:
I forgot Peel and Derby, this morning. Or I think I did. I got in a bit of a muddle, forgetting that “Lord Beaconsfield” was really Disraeli. Maybe I have photos of Peel and Derby from earlier expeditions. If not, I might go back and do them too. Easy to do, what with all these Things being a walk away. (Photo rule: try to photo-obsess only about things within easy reach.)
Anyway, I’ll end this with three more photos I photoed this morning, two of them of one of my favourite statues in this square, Jan Smuts. I don’t know much about the man himself, but I really like this statue of him. I like that it’s green. And leaning forwards, like he’s skating:
I have photoed Smuts a lot, because he doesn’t always look like a mere silhouette in the afternoon. In these photos he has scaffolding behind him, and regulars here know how I feel about scaffolding. Also behind Smuts in the left hand photo of him there are the statues of Lloyd George and Churchill, which are properly photoed in the middle photo, again with scaffolding in the mix. Again, favourite subjects of mine, even though I don’t much like the statue of Lloyd George. To be exact, I don’t like his coat, which doesn’t look like a coat at all. More like metal. Which might be because it is metal.
Shame about all the birdshit.
A lot of my postings are puzzles. What’s this about? That kind of thing.
Well, what’s this about?:
That’s another photo I took last Sunday, the day I also photoed that reflection, and all those cyclists. A single photo-expedition, supplying me with many days worth of reflection, of the in-your-brain kind. Suddenly, in these strange times when venturing out of doors is so discouraged, my normal modus operandi is making more sense than usual.
Photoing children’s playgrounds is not a habit of mine. Single old man, of eccentric demeanour and dress, taking photos. Of a children’s playground. Not a good look these days. But this playground is now locked shut and empty of humans, so I reckon having photoed these two horses won’t ruin my life. We’ll see.
But what are these horses doing? The playground in question is at the far end of Victoria Tower Gardens, just upstream from the Houses of Parliament, so I had plenty of search words to stuff into The Internet. And it became clear that these horses refer to a nearby horse ferry, the one that Horseferry Road is named after. The playground is Horseferry Playground. But this creation is not grand enough to be easily learnable about. The Internet kept wanting to tell me about these two horses. But not the ones I was looking for.
As for Horseferry Road, let Wikipedia explain:
The road takes its name from the ferry which existed on the site of what is now Lambeth Bridge. Owned by the Archbishop of Canterbury, the ferry was an important crossing over the Thames, from Westminster Palace to Lambeth Palace.
Presumably the horses dragged the ferry across, at a spot where there was also a ford, i.e. a part of the river where you could walk across at low tide. Or, horses could. Something like that. But why can’t you just row a boat across, anywhere on the River? Or did people ride the horses?
The spot where these horses are to found is next to the northern end of Lambeth Bridge, which is of course also the southern end of Horseferry Road.
Horseferry Road does its right angle kink very near to where I live, but it never occurred to me to wonder why it’s called that. This is London. Things have strange names. If you spent your time wondering about every strange name of everything strange sounding in London, you’d never be able to do anything else with your life. In France, all the street names are explained, on the spot, with elaborate explanatory signs. Not here.
Says Steve Stewart-Williams: Horrific.
So much for social distancing.