hylobatidae.org

Sunday mornings are for reading the Sunday Papers, drinking tea and planning new photographic excursions.

Film Programme for Fritz Lang's 1927 Metropolis - "Depicting Scenes, Story and Incidents in the Making of the World's Greatest Modern Spectacular Film Masterpiece".

Geometric Sculpture from a George W. Hart. Maximum mathematics!

Soviet Passenger Hydrofoils - straight from an alternate Communist future. Like me, Dark Roasted Blend has an obsession with hydrofoils and ekranoplans.

1936 Fairbanks Morse Model 32D - huge old earth-shaking locomotive engine belching fumes and blowing smoke-rings. Extra: stop-motion Triumph engine rebuild.

DZIWNE PRZYGODY KOZIOŁKA MATOŁKA - occasionally something completely inexplicable arrives via one's RSS feeds. This is one of those things.

Bonus Weird History corner:

• Quite Likely the Worst Job Ever - 19th century toshers, crawling through the rat-infested sewers of London to pick coins and other valuable items from the raw sewage.
• The Anatomical Machines of Cappella Sansevero - preserved corpses of murdered servants, with arteries, veins and organs 'marbilised' through some strange alchemical process - or something altogether less grisly?

I'm still writing up parts two (and three) of my how-does-my-intervalometer-work series of articles, but in the meantime have a summery, Space Needle-y, Sunday Seattle sunset sequence that I shot the other day:

Apparently it's good enough to appear on the Cliff Mass Weather Blog - home of gloriously in-depth discussion and analysis of the weird weather we get in the Pacific Northwest.

I'm rather proud of it - and I've still got loads more to upload from Sunday. It was a particularly productive day of photography...

Volunteer Park Conservatory - has lots of cacti, bromeliads, epiphytes and all sorts.

And orchids. Why does nobody ever explain the etymology of that name? They had a not-yet-flowering Amorphophallus titanum too. Ditto.

Unforecast thunderstorm early in the morning - go read Prof. Cliff's blog for details.

First, we celebrate CERN's discovery of the Higgs boson and their gloriously inappropriate use of Comic Sans! At last, the world of physics has cast aside the dreadfully tedious Computer Modern and replaced it with the idiot's font of choice.

RP FLIP - FLoating Instrument Platform - ludicrous research vessel which upends itself, turning from a long and skinny ship to a hugely stable vertical platform. Extra: Wikipedia article, video.

Stanley Kubrick was a photographer - seriously, watch his films as photography. Visually they make perfect sense. He's undoubtedly spinning in his grave at the use of this font, too.

Exposure Render - extremely fancy GPU-powered renderer, available for download - complete with CT scans for maximum offal-exploration. Needs a beast of a GPU to work quickly, but gives surprisingly decent results on my old 8800 GTX.

ESA Astronaut with a Flickr account - annoyingly, I only discovered it after he returned to Earth. Extra: his NASA crewmate was doing educational physics experiments on YouTube too...

Bonus Horrifying Biology corner

• Symbion pandora - tiny parasite of Norway lobsters' mouthparts with a fantastically complex life-cycle. It even includes a Prometheus larva. Thought the xenomorphs were complicated? Think again! Also, New Scientist has an entire blog of similarly peculiar beasts.
• Facetotecta - crustacean known only by its common larval stage, nobody knows what the adult form is. "In 2008, a juvenile form was produced by treating y-larvae with the hormone 20-hydroxyecdysone, which stimulated ecdysis and the transition to the next life phase. The resulting animal, named the ypsigon, was slug-like, apparently unsegmented, and limbless." Possibly another parasite, similar to...
• Sacculina - a barnacle that foregoes the usual immobile, armoured lifestyle and instead lives as a parasitic castrator of crabs, growing as a tendril-like mass through the host crab's body. Extra: gratuitously high-resolution shots of a related barnacle's protruding gonad - 1, 2, 3 - via LOLRhizocephalans.

Now, has all that biology dislodged this particularly hideous parasite, that of Comic Sans? We can only hope so. ... Wait, we're free! At last! The agony is finally over! Oh crap.

Finally getting around to uploading photos I took nearly four years ago - here's a wider selection from the Modlin Fortress, a vast 19th century fortress north of Warsaw.

Hopefully coming within another four years - more from Gdańsk!

Almost a month of the blog-thing. How's it going? Plenty of people reading, not so many commenting. Like it or not, I'm going to continue! BWUAHAHAHA, etc.

Deep Blue Sea - splendid imagery of our nearest star by Alan Friedman, sun-photographer extraordinaire. Extra: He has a blog!

Olympus BioScapes Digital Imaging Competition winners - weird and wonderful micrographs from across the world. I think their microscopes must be a little better than mine...

Airbus A380 - from construction of infrastructure to test flights. Extra: Mark Power has plenty of other projects to look at too.

Continuing from last week's Mars-landing videos: How Curiosity Will Land on Mars, part one and part two. Extra: detailed JPL paper (PDF) on the landing.

Bonus Soviet Links From Non-Soviet Friends corner:

• More Soyuz survival training - including the triple-barreled Soyuz Space Gun, presumably for fending off Soviet Space-Bears in the wilderness. via isoma
• Underground communications centre - straight out of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and/or my list of holiday destinations. via locworks