April 2011 Archives

Sometimes you imagine a person before you ever see a picture of them, and then the actual person doesn't quite look right, they're not as you'd imagined.  Other times the imagination and reality line up precisely, this is one of those times

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A shot of Weegee taken in 1963 by Richard Sadler.  You can see the original on display through September 2011 at the National Media Museum, West Yorkshire.
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Importance of Posing

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Sometimes a good photo layout can avert blandness.  Neither of these pieces is very interesting alone, but together there's some interest

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The ring(left) and broach(right) are gold, set with Tsavorite, Toumaline and Peridot by Georland
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Just in case

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You were wondering what it looks like when lightning strikes the Burj Khalifa, in Dubai, Alisdair Miller has you covered. Follow the link for more from this series

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Fires in Texas

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One of twenty pictures from The Atlantic of the current wildfires in Texas.  The original caption follows

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The Texas Forest Service undertook controlled burns on Sunday, April 17, 2011 to get rid of fuel on the mountains around McDonald Observatory in the Davis Mountains of West Texas. Here, Black Mountain is burning. The Hobby-Eberly Telescope dome is at right. (Frank Cianciolo/McDonald Observatory)

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On voting for Rick Santorum

America is doomed. So we might as well rip the bandage off quickly and no one is better suited to end the American experiment than Santorum. Why linger and limp along for a decade or so before the country completely and yet painfully slowly sinks into the abyss of third-world-ness? Let's just get it over with. Santorum is our man.

(From Jim West)

Santorum/Kurtz 2012: Apocalypse Soon
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Boucheron (mentioned all over the place), has been working with Girard Perregaux for their watch collection since 2007.  For their next collection, Audacious, they have given up all pretense of restraint. 

The collection starts with a series of pieces in a sub-collection called L'Orientale.  The basic piece has a mother-of-pearl dial, carved, painted and inlayed with an arabesque of diamonds, and surrounded by a triple ring of diamonds on the bezel.  These are powered by the reliable, if inoffensive, GP 4000 movement.

Steel case, dial set with sapphiresRose gold case, dial set with rubies
Boucheron-Orientale.jpgBoucheron-OrientaleRG.jpg

Moving up in the collection we come to a pair of watches names Shéhérazade. These have dials of semi-precious stone mosaic set with colored stones in a dizzying pattern or circles and arabesques. To reinforce the vertigo, the subsecond dial is replaced with a rotating multi-colored wheel at 7 o'clock. As usual, the workmanship is exemplary. (NB: the 'crazy' is part of the model name NOT an editorial comment)

Crazy Shéhérazade in rose gold and diamonds. Dial in Sonora Sunrise mosaic set with multicolored sapphires and diamonds.Crazy Shéhérazade in white gold and diamonds. Dial in Lapis Lazuli mosaic set with multicolored sapphires, amethysts, aquamarines and diamonds.
Boucheron-Crazy_SheherazadeS.jpgBoucheron-Crazy_Sheherazade.jpg

Having featured animals in their watches, the basic subjects of the next three pieces is not a great surprise, but he execution is a bit unusual. For some reason, all three of the animal watches are referred to as "Crazy Jungle" although none of the animals depicted actually LIVE in the jungle.

Following in the same basic aesthetic as Sheherazade we have the elephant Hathi.

The Crazy Jungle Hathi in white gold set with blue sapphires, diamonds and tsavorites. Dial in a Murano aventurine glass mosaic set with diamonds, sapphires, tsavorites, amethysts and onyx. "Crazy Seconds" disc of aventurine glass marquetry.
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In the last couple of years using aquatic themes has become really quite popular, so these two pieces are not a complete surprise. The "crazy seconds" disk in both of them is set below the dial with a pattern representing small fish and bubbles, to try and give some life to the underwater scene. Interesting that they use a Flamingo here, as one was featured as a ring in their spring 2011 collection.

The Crazy Jungle Seahorse watch in pink gold, diamonds, garnets, multicoloured sapphires and onyx. Marquetry of mother-of-pearl and petrified palmtree. Automatic GP4000 movement with "Crazy Seconds" disc of mother-of-pearl bubbles.The Crazy Jungle Flamingo watch in white gold, diamonds, garnets, multicoloured sapphires, onyx and mother-of-pearl. Head of the flamingo and school of fishes appear under water. Automatic GP4000 movement with "Crazy Seconds" disc of shrimp and fish.
Boucheron-Crazy_Seahorse.jpgBoucheron-Crazy_Flamingo.jpg

All this leads to the pinnacle piece of the collection, the Hera watch, a fully gem-set bracelet piece with a GP tourbillon movement. The watch has the form of a peacock, one of Hera's emblems. The movement is one of the GP three-bridge series, one of the more distinct and unusual of the current crop of Tourbillon movements, based on a late 19th century design. The watch has no dial per-say, but three concentric ovals of tourmalines set on the visable bottom-plate of the movement. The case is white-gold and set with 35 carets of diamonds, sapphires and Pariba tourmalines.

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(pictures from TimeZone)
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Programming with .NET is like cooking in a McDonalds kitchen. It is full of amazing tools that automate absolutely everything. Just press the right button and follow the beeping lights, and you can churn out flawless 1.6 oz burgers faster than anybody else on the planet.

However, if you need to make a 1.7 oz burger, you simply can't. There's no button for it. The patties are pre-formed in the wrong size. They start out frozen so they can't be smushed up and reformed, and the thawing machine is so tightly integrated with the cooking machine that there's no way to intercept it between the two. A McDonalds kitchen makes exactly what's on the McDonalds menu -- and does so in an absolutely foolproof fashion. But it can't go off the menu, and any attempt to bend the machine to your will just breaks it such that it needs to be sent back to the factory for repairs.

the rest

An amusing piece, ans the very last comment might have been worth it alone.  It's a good example of "take an opinion, slightly overstate it for comedic effect, watch the net esplode" affect

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iEuroWatch

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Blatant Promotional Content Warning!

Apple approved my iPhone app for the European Watch Company, the local watch shop where I've done work in the past.  What's that you say, you'd like a link?

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Maps

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First a real(ish) map.  This is a simulation of the wave height of the March 11 Tsunami emanating from Japan.  The key is hard to read in this small version, but the higher waves are more intense colors.
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On a lighter note, this is a evolutionary map of science fiction.  I can't nessecarily decipher the entire thing, but it sure LOOKS interesting (for a much larger image)
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This page is an archive of entries from April 2011 listed from newest to oldest.

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