Posted by Jerry on April 27th, 2008 — Posted in Journal, Woodwork
I’ve been turning more pens today – I shall be visiting some special friends next week and wanted to bring them something connected with Australia. What better gift, then, than a pen hand turned from Western Australian jarrah.
The timber is hard and brittle, but takes a wonderful finish when turned, burnished and polished. I cracked three of the blanks during the turning process and one during the assembly process – so I had to remake the blanks.
I wanted to achieve a design that would sit nicely in the hand – a shape that that would mold itself to the hand. And this is what I came up with – what do you think?
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on April 23rd, 2008 — Posted in Journal
Even a 50kg weakling can lift 500kg with this device – a new fitness craze? No, more a 14th Century crane for lifting building materials up the wall of a cathedral or castle.
In Prague, a team of fifteen have come together and built a replica 14th century tread-mill crane using traditional techniques and tools. And they are using it to reconstruct a real castle – Tocnik Castle.
Photo: Martin Dostoupil, www.estav.cz
While it looks cumbersome the whole thing can be dismantled and rebuilt – like a Lego construction – and in this way it can be moved from one location to another around the building site. This one is actually a double treadmill version capable of lifting one tonne of material at a time. That’s pretty impressive for a wooden structure.
You can read the whole story or listen to the radio broadcast at the link above.
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on April 11th, 2008 — Posted in Journal, New media, Technology, Writing
The Virtual Shakespeare Consortium is a consortium of individuals and organizations dedicated to bringing Shakespeare and his culture to the Internet and beyond.
View my page on vShakespeare
Partly it’s about bringing together people from all over the world – virtually – to perform his plays in virtual worlds, like SecondLife.
Shakespeare’s sonnets are often forgotten in such ventures, but I think the richness of their imagery and of their conceits would lend themselves to creative treatment in SL, along with sonnet readings in-world.
This venture will celebrate the polyglot nature of Shakespeare’s language – he emerged after all, at a pivotal point in the development of the English language, benefiting from the three major language groups that made up English, in a context in which new words were being coined daily and entered the language with the kind of speed not seen again until the birth of the internet.
I look forward to see how this develops
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on March 29th, 2008 — Posted in Journal
The Turner to Monet exhibition at the National Gallery of Australia in Canberra is visually sumptuous and well worth a visit.
The exhibition traces the rise of landscape painting from the late 18th to the late 19th centuries into impressionism and post-impressionism.
Monet – Water Lilies – photo: Everard – Musee d’Orsay, Paris
The website is fantastic – if you skip the soap-commercial intro – and get to the Director’s introduction and views of the works themselves. I thought the days of the deep masculine voice-over and images of a young anglo woman stunned by the sublime works of art were long gone. That is not the way to sell an exhibition. The works are quite strong enough to stand as sufficient advert for the display.
Ok rant over – this exhibition is about how an inherited tradition was transformed by the plein air painters to show the landscape in new and dramatic ways – usually with some sense of humanity’s insignificance in the face of nature.
As the exhibition moves into the impressionists you can see how the play of light and colour made the paintings glow as though backlit on screen – it must have been at once amazing and shocking to the 19th century audience, and still has immense power today.
If you get the chance this is an exhibition well worth seeing
Cheers
Jerry
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Posted by Jerry on March 27th, 2008 — Posted in Journal, Steam, Technology
The late Peter Barrett’s experimental steam car is up for sale – currently at US$20,000 (my guess would be a UK bid from Jeff Theobold – one of the few who could make real use of this amazing vehicle.
The car uses two cylinders of a converted VW engine and is mounted in a fibreglass kit car. It is reported to have been run at 80mph. The car comes with full design notes – Peter Barrett was a meticulous engineer and every aspect is documented. It would be great to see this car go to someone capable of understanding the system and getting it on the road as a modern turnkey steam car.
Some of Barrett’s notes are here, so you can see the kind of work that has gone into this.
If it sells for less than US$50,000 the buyer will have quite a bargain – with 20 years of documentation. This is an outstanding opportunity for the right buyer. (why can’t I just win lotto now?).
Cheers
Jerry
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