The Samrat Yantra in Jaipur, India is the largest sundial ever built. Its gnomon is 73 ft. The sundial is part of the Jantar Mantar complex in Jaipur, India, one of five large astronomical observatories constructed out of stone by Jai Sing II between 1727 and 1734.

A French artist/scientist named Laurent Maget has done one better, by using the 150 ft. spire of the Mont Saint-Michel abbey as the gnomon of a giant sundial.
Mont Saint-Michel is a small rocky tidal island in Normandy, roughly one kilometre from the north coast of France. Rising from a hazy expanse of sand and waves, Mont Saint Michel appears like Man’s defiance of the elements and of time. Suspended high on the rock, the abbey calls you to discover the wild ambition of its builders and of those who, since 708, had wanted to make this isolated spot a meeting place for all people.

Manet used 600 one-meter reflective plates to create huge Roman numerals, placed in the surrounding tidal flats by the French army. The spire cast a shadow as long as three-quarters of a mile. At that size you can actually see the sun’s shadow moving as the minutes tick by. The panels stayed up for several weeks and then were then removed, but you can see a video of the incredible sundial in action.

For more sundial fun, check out the North American Sundial Society website- it’s full of cool info!

Thanks to the always-fascinating Spurgeonblog and Moonriver!

Pretty cool! Thanks to Dan Goodsell for this visual chronology of the beloved ursine Bing Crosby. (Fantastic as the list is, I’ll just add the origin, a VERY 80’s S.B., and the current bastardization.)

I’ve been fooling around with my airbrush lately, and I recently borrowed an awesome book of American pin-up art from Ericka. Coincidentally, I stumbled upon a great airbrushed pin-up tutorial. It’s from 3 years ago, but that hardly matters. John P. Thompson, in his wonderful example, transports Bettie Page to the WWII era. He goes through the painting step-by-step, and provides detailed explanations of his equipment, techniques and reasoning.
The process images and explanations should be fascinating to anyone starting out with the airbrush. The advanced state of his underpainting was a relief- I subconsciously felt that such involved prep work is somehow “cheating”. It’s not, of course, and it’s great to discover enlightening tutorials such as this.

Keepon is a little yellow robot designed to interact with humans, especially developmentally disabled children. It is something of an experiment in facial recognition and social interaction. Keepon’s features are pared down to the bare minimum- just two eyes and a nose on a bulbous frame.Keepon is the most adorable thing imaginable. Its countenance and its purpose just warms the cockles of your heart. Watch him dance here.

My signature is notoriously awful. I’ve refused to hand-letter signs, and simply hearing the word “penmanship” sends a chill down my Catholic-schooled spine.
Ironically, I love typography. As some of my good friends can attest, I’m a walking catalog of fonts. I’ve dabbled in type design, and someday I’ll surely dive into brush lettering. In the meantime however, I’ll scrawl my hideous endorsement on the backs of my paychecks.

In any case, check out this wonderful illustrator signature gallery.

This just in: checkers has been solved. You can theoretically prevent a defeat by Chinook, the “World Man-Machine Checkers Champion“, but a draw is the best you can hope for against this foe. Checkers was solved on April 29, 2007 by the team of Jonathan Schaeffer. We now know that, from the standard starting position, both players can guarantee a draw with perfect play.

Interestingly, checkers is the most complex game that has been solved to date. Modest inroads have been made into chess endgames, but computer science is light-years away from guaranteeing a win or anything like that.
The July 2007 announcement by Chinook’s team stating that the game had been solved must be understood in the sense that, with perfect play on both sides, the game will always finish with a draw. Not all positions that could result from imperfect play have been analyzed.

Wow. This clears everything up. Evidently Brutus and Bluto were two different characters. Rule of thumb: Bluto cartoons were good, Brutus, not so much.

How cursors work
Thanks to Ericka for this one.

Oh man, that was incredible. A bunch of tikiphiles on a chartered bus, stopping at the best Polynesian restaurants/bars in Mass. I’m so glad I signed up!!

The Official Homepage
Some great pics from Waitiki
A few of my own

edit 8/29- A whole bunch of great pics from Johnman!

Did you know that several governments have spent millions since the 1950s on weather control programs? Did you know that China claims that it will not rain at the opening ceremonies at the 2008 Beijing Olympic Games?Somehow, in the ever-expanding torrents of information we filter through each day, we haven’t categorized this one as important. True, the efficacy of cloud-seeding is debated, since creating a weather-control is both the ends and the means of properly testing the process (a real catch-22!) But I’m still amazed I never heard of this until now.

Apparently silver iodide (aka dry ice) is shot into the sky, in order to somehow cause rain. There is a perceived dependency of this in dry areas of China, where tanks routinely shoot large quantities of the stuff into the air to produce rain. Even in the United States, companies exist solely to drop dry ice from airplanes for rainmaking purposes.

If you trust any of this at all, research more at Wikipedia.