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The sliding shade function is pretty neat too. I didn't like the yellow stud they gave for the traffic lights so I changed it to the round tiles to match the other red and green ones. Looks more streamlined... :D
Form follows function is a principle associated with 20th-century modernist architecture and industrial design which says that the shape of a building or object should primarily relate to its intended function or purpose.
Kaleidoscope and spirograph meet in a tunnel. Collaborative effort with { tcb } He did most of the lighting while I worked the optics
While in Italy some years ago, I saw this beautiful classic motorcycle, perfectly restored. I believe it is a 1963 Moto Guzzi Falcone Sport. I could not help but admire the graceful clean lines. Italians certainly know motorcycles!
Built for the Return of the G.O.A.T. contest on classic-castle. I chose to re-imagine set 6078 and had fun putting my own twist on the recognizable structure. My rendition features ladders or stairs to reach every area of the gatehouse, along with a functional drawbridge. The two hidden spaces under ramps at front and back are also there, though I added some barred gates under the front ramp so minifigures have access to that storage area. The rear one contains a hidden nook where some unfortunate soul seems to have been on the wrong end of a magical scroll.
Special thanks to Rolli for loaning me the original minifigures!
Plenty more images and a functions video on Brickbuilt.
153385, a former EMR dogbox, now in faithful Network Rail service stopped at Leeds as it worked back and forth between there and Bradford Interchange.
21/03/23
Orient Express train, powered by Lego train motors and controlled by PFx Brick. It has steam function as well (BigZ31 , many thanks for inspiration). Soon I will present video how it works and runs on rails.
One in a series of images titled 'Form minus Function'.
It's fair to say that type and ink only ever meet on a printed page. In this series of images, the two elements are presented to us in a way that is a little more unusual. Images of black and white ink in water are accompanied by small typographical letters to generate strange yet captivating forms that appear to float effortlessly in the air.
A contemporary tribute to traditional methods of print.
Best viewed large!
Just a little (and probably incorrect) mock-up of Storm Beast's function. It's very clever and yet simple. However I have to admit I'm a little disappointed with how far you need to move the tail to get the full rotation, which is pretty small 90 degrees anyway. In the video I activate the function slowly, trying to make the arms swing faster means flailing the tail around all over the place like a maniac. All in all it's fun but it feels more similar to controlling a stringed puppet more than a function. It requires a certain carefulness to use or else to becomes too chaotic.
Build you own Rollertron with my instructions
Built for Mark Stafford for a Christmas gift exchange. I sent him the parts and printed instructions.
Mature bull (male) elk are recognizable by their very large set of antlers, colloquially called a "rack." A lot of biological energy goes into creating those antlers, which are shed late each winter and immediately start to re-grow in time to achieve maximum impressiveness (to cow - female - elk) and function (to warn competition for those cows) in time for September breeding season, known as "rut." During rut the bulls barely eat but they burn a ton of calories herding the cows around and threatening and sometimes coming to fisticuffs with other bulls. This individual was saving a lot of winter energy by walking down the plowed road but as I crept up to him in my car he ultimately decided to deal with traversing the deep snow along the side of the road instead of allowing me to pass him.
Note two things: 1. he's very thin, he most likely had a very rowdy rut in September and was not able to regain much weight afterwards, and 2. I suspect at some point he slept on his right side and his hair stuck to the ice and he lost a lot of it when he stood up.
Hope he makes it through winter in spite of a very poor start to the lean season.
Let’s not understate the complexity of a simple hexagonal plate snowflake. Roughly a millimeter in size, these nearly microscopic snowflakes wouldn’t get a passing glance to the naked eye – you wouldn’t be able to even see it. The connection of two features here reveal a hidden mystery!
Let’s start with the outer edge of the snowflake and work our way in. You might notice, especially along the top edge of the snowflake, that the outer edge is thicker than the inner areas. This plays an important role in generating the circles that echo in towards the center. A thick outer edge can do two things: grow outward into traditional snowflake-like patterns (60-degree growth, branches, etc.) but it also has an inside edge that can collect water vapour as well. This growth starts to round out the corners, becoming more circular as it reaches closer to the center of the snowflake. Circles in the snow are always caused by inward growth from a thick edge! It took me a long time to wrap my head around this when I was first studying them.
The lighter areas of the snowflake are bubbles, or cavities, forming inside the ice. This happens when the center of the prism facet (the thin sides) grows slower than the outer edges of the facet. The patterns change by subtle fluctuations in humidity, and can close entirely when the humidity is higher. You can see how thick these bubbles are by looking at the thin edge of the snowflake. Notice the white line? It’s less than 3 microns (0.003mm) thick. It creates additional ice/air boundaries which allow for more reflection from the flash – which is why these areas appear brighter. They also function to create thinner “layers” of ice on the top and bottom… which is where the turquoise colour comes in.
The colour is caused by the phenomenon known as “thin film interference”, which is the same physics that puts rainbows in soap bubbles and oil spots. If Ice is just the right thickness, light bouncing off the surface of the snowflake will interfere with ice that entered into the snowflake for a brief period of time (slowing down as it passes through a denser material) and the combination of constructive (amplifying) and destructive (dampening) interference will cause white light to be revealed as a specific colour. Further reading on some of pages of my book Sky Crystals as a freebie: skycrystals.ca/pages/optical-interference-pages.jpg
This is where those rings come in. Thin film interference is relatively rare in snowflakes with only a handful of snowfalls a year creating this type of snowflake. You’ll notice that the turquoise colouring happens only in one of the “rings” created by inward crystal growth. At exactly this thickness, we get proper interference patterns. Adjust the thickness slightly on either side and we see no interference at all. The snowflake growing back in on itself allowed it to meet the very strict requires for colours to show up in a snowflake.
All of this is a tiny hexagon falling from the sky. If you like this sort of deep dive into the building blocks of nature, you’d love a copy of my book Sky Crystals:
Hardcover: www.skycrystals.ca/book/
eBook: www.skycrystals.ca/ebook/
2018 Ice Crystals coin, produced by the Royal Canadian Mint and designed by me: www.mint.ca/store/coins/coin-prod3040427
Bonus: How the heck to I measure a snowflakes features? Simple algebra and some practical observations. You’ll a few things:
-The magnification factor. This is easily obtained by photographing a ruler and counting the number of millimeters you cover. With a full-frame camera at 1:1 magnification you’ll see 36mm, since the sensor is 36mm wide.
-The resolution of your camera sensor (horizontal number of pixels)
-The image of the subject you wish to measure.
In this case, I see 3 millimeter markings, so 36 / 3 = 12:1 magnification. Actually, I don’t even really NEED this number, all I need is to know that the horizontal number of pixels of the sensor and divide that by 3. I get 1824px per mm.
Then you count the number of pixels across your subject. This snowflake measures 1880px or just over 1mm, and the thin white line measures 5px. 5 / 1824 = 0.00274mm, or 2.74 microns. Math!
Built for DA4: The Hammer Falls, the Armored Limousine was required to have black windows, a functioning hood, trunk, and four doors, little flags, license plates, and a secret weapon.
Olympus XA2 + Kodak Ektachrome E100 (Expired)
It's a restaurant in Matosinhos - Portugal.
Another image from the same place.
Lego animated Gym Thanks to Peter Reid (Legoloverman) for the inspiration.
Driven by Lego Power functions.
"The Ohio House, or Ohio State Building, is a historic building located in west Fairmount Park, Philadelphia. The house was built from various Ohio sandstones and functioned as the Ohio state exhibit for the Centennial Exposition of 1876. The only other extant exposition structures are Memorial Hall and two small comfort stations; the building is the only extant state exhibit remaining from the exposition. The house was restored for the Bicentennial Celebration in 1976, and leased to Ohio House Partners by the Fairmount Park Historic Preservation Trust in 2006. After extensive restoration, the building was opened to the public in November 2007 and has since functioned as a cafe, event venue and offices.
The Ohio House is listed on the Philadelphia Register of Historic Places and is an inventoried structure within the Fairmount Park Historic District entry on the National Register of Historic Places.
Fairmount Park is the largest municipal park in Philadelphia and the historic name for a group of parks located throughout the city. Fairmount Park consists of two park sections named East Park and West Park, divided by the Schuylkill River, with the two sections together totalling 2,052 acres (830 ha). Management of Fairmount Park and the entire citywide park system is overseen by Philadelphia Parks & Recreation, a city department created in 2010 from the merger of the Fairmount Park Commission and the Department of Recreation.
Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City, and the 68th-largest city in the world. Since 1854, the city has been coextensive with Philadelphia County, the most populous county in Pennsylvania and the urban core of the Delaware Valley, the nation's seventh-largest and world's 68th-largest metropolitan region, with 6.245 million residents as of 2020. The city's population as of the 2020 census was 1,603,797, and over 56 million people live within 250 mi (400 km) of Philadelphia.
Philadelphia was founded in 1682 by William Penn, an English Quaker. The city served as capital of the Pennsylvania Colony during the British colonial era and went on to play a historic and vital role as the central meeting place for the nation's founding fathers whose plans and actions in Philadelphia ultimately inspired the American Revolution and the nation's independence. Philadelphia hosted the First Continental Congress in 1774 following the Boston Tea Party, preserved the Liberty Bell, and hosted the Second Continental Congress during which the founders signed the Declaration of Independence, which historian Joseph Ellis has described as "the most potent and consequential words in American history". Once the Revolutionary War commenced, both the Battle of Germantown and the Siege of Fort Mifflin were fought within Philadelphia's city limits. The U.S. Constitution was later ratified in Philadelphia at the Philadelphia Convention of 1787. Philadelphia remained the nation's largest city until 1790, when it was surpassed by New York City, and served as the nation's first capital from May 10, 1775, until December 12, 1776, and on four subsequent occasions during and following the American Revolution, including from 1790 to 1800 while the new national capital of Washington, D.C. was under construction.
During the 19th and 20th centuries, Philadelphia emerged as a major national industrial center and railroad hub. The city’s blossoming industrial sector attracted European immigrants, predominantly from Germany and Ireland, the two largest reported ancestry groups in the city as of 2015. In the 20th century, immigrant waves from Italy and elsewhere in Southern Europe arrived. Following the end of the Civil War in 1865, Philadelphia became a leading destination for African Americans in the Great Migration. In the 20th century, Puerto Rican Americans moved to the city in large numbers. Between 1890 and 1950, Philadelphia's population doubled to 2.07 million. Philadelphia has since attracted immigrants from East and South Asia, Eastern Europe, and Latin America.
With 18 four-year universities and colleges, Philadelphia is one of the nation's leading centers for higher education and academic research. As of 2021, the Philadelphia metropolitan area was the nation's ninth-largest metropolitan economy with a gross metropolitan product (GMP) of US$479 billion. Philadelphia is the largest center of economic activity in Pennsylvania and the broader multi-state Delaware Valley region; the city is home to five Fortune 500 corporate headquarters as of 2022. The Philadelphia skyline, which includes several globally renowned commercial skyscrapers, is expanding, primarily with new residential high-rise condominiums. The city and the Delaware Valley are a biotechnology and venture capital hub; and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, owned by NASDAQ, is the nation's oldest stock exchange and a global leader in options trading. 30th Street Station, the city's primary rail station, is the third-busiest Amtrak hub in the nation, and the city's multimodal transport and logistics infrastructure, including Philadelphia International Airport, the PhilaPort seaport, freight rail infrastructure, roadway traffic capacity, and warehouse storage space, are all expanding.
Philadelphia is a national cultural hub, hosting more outdoor sculptures and murals than any other American city. Fairmount Park, when combined with adjacent Wissahickon Valley Park in the same watershed, is 2,052 acres (830 ha), representing one of the nation's largest contiguous urban parks and the 45th largest urban park in the world. The city is known for its arts, culture, cuisine, and colonial and Revolution-era history; in 2016, it attracted 42 million domestic tourists who spent $6.8 billion, representing $11 billion in total economic impact to the city and surrounding Pennsylvania counties.
With five professional sports teams and a hugely loyal fan base, the city is often ranked as the nation's best city for professional sports fans. The city has a culturally and philanthropically active LGBTQ+ community. Philadelphia also has played an immensely influential historic and ongoing role in the development and evolution of American music, especially R&B, soul, and rock.
Philadelphia is a city of many firsts, including the nation's first library (1731), hospital (1751), medical school (1765), national capital (1774), university (by some accounts) (1779), stock exchange (1790), zoo (1874), and business school (1881). Philadelphia contains 67 National Historic Landmarks, including Independence Hall. From the city's 17th century founding through the present, Philadelphia has been the birthplace or home to an extensive number of prominent and influential Americans. In 2021, Time magazine named Philadelphia one of the world's greatest 100 places." - info from Wikipedia.
The fall of 2022 I did my 3rd major cycling tour. I began my adventure in Montreal, Canada and finished in Savannah, GA. This tour took me through the oldest parts of Quebec and the 13 original US states. During this adventure I cycled 7,126 km over the course of 2.5 months and took more than 68,000 photos. As with my previous tours, a major focus was to photograph historic architecture.
Now on Instagram.