Category: looky

something cool I found on the internets

Cloisonne and Enamel work sources

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Best Bets: Local enamellists (California)

Other artists sifted from the web:

Way out- not sources of commissioned work:

H2 is not SMART

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The H2 gets 10-13 miles per gallon, according to GM. They don’t have to tell you on the lot because the vehicle is so heavy it is exempt from federal reporting requirements. Of course you have to figure people who buy the H2 know it’s not going to be the most fuel-efficient car in the world, and they probably don’t care…

The ESA just launched their unmanned moon probe, “SMART”, which is short for Small Missions for Advanced Research and Technology. It is equipped with an experimental “ion drive” system, which is basically what they use on Star Trek. To quote CNN:

To power the drive SMART-1 is carrying just 60 liters (about 15.8 U.S. gallons) of fuel for a journey of 100 million kilometers (62 million miles).

In automotive terms that converts to an enviably efficient fuel consumption rate of 3,911,671 miles per U.S. gallon — the average American family car consumes somewhere in the region of 30 miles per gallon.

So the SMART is over 300,000 times more efficient than an H2.

Microtonal Music

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Western music is based on the octave- which despite the name is based on 12 evenly-spaced notes per doubling of frequency. However some Indian music has not only the “half-steps” (chromatic steps) of the Western scale, it also has “quarter-steps.” I personally can’t hear quarter steps.

The modern name for this concept of cutting the octave into different-sized pieces for each note is “microtonal.” Some of the instruments used to make this music are really wild.

Here’s a short list of some of the sites I have been looking at :

Galleries and Lists:

Instruments:

Composition theory:

Pitcairn Islands

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The Pitcairn Islands. What are they? Where are they? Are they for real?

I thought it sounded like the islands where “Sabine” comes from in Griffin & Sabine– but it isn’t, that would be the “Sicmon Islands.” There is even a site where this guy tries to extrapolate where the Sicmon Islands are, which is too funny.

Why was I even thinking about the Pitcairn Islands? Shac recently showed me this
IANA report on the history of redelegation of the .pn top-level domain.

A top-level domain is the set of all the machine names (used in URLs, like “www.prestonscandy.com” which end in a particular word- like “.com” or “.net.” Other countries have their own top-level domains- so for example Amazon‘s Japanese site is www.amazon.co.jp, because Japan’s top-level domain is “.jp.”

Okay now that we’re caught up: the IANA report
describes the (not very interesting) history of the account… then, as part of its analysis, describes the population-

has a total population consisting of approximately 50 descendants of the Bounty mutineers and their Tahitian wives.

…and the state of the existing information infrastructure:

Pitcairn Island’s telephone service consists of a local party-line telephone system. International telephone service is limited to Inmarsat service within a daily window. The local system is not presently capable of transmitting e-mail. The island has no airstrip. The economy consists of subsistence farming, fishing, and handicrafts made for sale to passing ships.

And now they have their own top-level domain! I just think that’s funny.

The Pitcairn Islands, like their fictional counterparts in Nick Bantock’s books, have their own stamps… although of course they are not quite as pretty. And since they are printed in Singapore and the entire island is only 50 people, I have the impression they are mostly used for collecting, rather than actual postage.

I thought the Pitcairn Islands sounded like the islands where “Sabine” comes from in Griffin & Sabine– but it isn’t, that would be the “Sicmon Islands.” There is even a site where this guy tries to extrapolate where the Sicmon Islands are, which is too funny.