Selasa, 28 Desember 2010
Update on the Portugese barn find collection that shocked everyone a couple years ago, full story and list of cars
Feb 2007 was when 58 photos and a description of a barn with steel doors welded shut was opened for the first time in decades and this collection was found. Well, the story was all made up... but a journalist finally went to get to the truth of the matter in 2009, and new photos as well as a complete inventory are after the linkIsetta truck... good idea!
from http://bzisettas.blogspot.com/2010/08/bruce-weiner-microcar-museum.html the micro car museum tour gallery on BZ's BMW Isetta blog
1964 World's Fair display, Uniroyal Tire ferris wheel and Chrysler's Engineering Island
Chrysler's Pop-Art pavilion was one of the largest at the Fair and one of the most imaginative and fun places to visit. An over-sized engine, 55 feet high and 100 feet long with a dragon for a crank shaft stood on one island for the visitor to explore. Its Design Island was dominated by a giant car, 80 feet long from bumper to bumper. Its wheels were more than 20 feet high. Beneath the car, which sat seven feet off the ground, was an exhibit area in which visual displays stressed the company's automotive styling.
If you want to browse through the 1964 Worlds Fair, there is a website (First link below) that has some of the pavilions on an internet tour, and informs us of where some of the artifacts went after the fair was over and they have located a few interesting ones, like the Long Island Railroad Display (the front end of an engine the back half of a caboose) which is in the process of being restored
Woodlight Headlights, my number one in the headlight design world.. E&J come in 2nd place
Above 3 images from http://www.dieselpunks.org/photo/albums 
Above photos of the 1929 Auburn Cabin Speedster and 1929 Stutz M-8 from http://www.tuningforum.cz/
the above 2 are Du Pont cars, the bottom I don't know.. probably another model of Du Pont, but it has different louvers on the hood sides
As far as I've seen, only Ruxton and Du Pont had the Woodlight as standard lights. I read somewhere they were lousy for lighting the road ahead.Vespa calendar famous people, John Wayne, Cary Grant, Raquel Welch, Charleton Heston, Geraldine Chaplin
Thanks to Tim for sharing! Vespa had a damn good idea with this calendar, the added exposure and free advertisign they got by giving or loaning the scooters to famous people while they made movies was a brilliant idea, and far less costly than getting the stars paid to endorse. 
Lightning Captured by X-Ray Camera
Scientists triggered lightning using rockets
The first x-ray images of a lightning strike have been captured by a, well, lightning-fast camera, scientists say. The pictures suggest a lightning bolt carries all its x-ray radiation in its tip.
During recent thunderstorms in Camp Blanding, Florida, the camera's electronic shutter "froze" a lightning bolt—artificially triggered by rockets and wires—as it sped toward the ground at one-sixth the speed of light. "Something moving this fast would go from the Earth to the moon in less than ten seconds," said Joseph Dwyer, a lightning researcher at the Florida Institute of Technology in Melbourne. Scientists have known for several years that lightning emits radiation, said Dwyer, who revealed the photos at an annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco earlier this month. But until now scientists didn't have the technology to take x-ray images quickly enough to see where the radiation comes from, he said.
Lightning Imaged by 1,500-Pound Camera
Making a camera capable of taking such quick images was an achievement in and of itself, Dwyer emphasized. "You can't just go buy a camera and point it at lightning," he said. "We had to make it." The resulting 1,500-pound (680-kilogram) camera—created by Dwyer's graduate student Meagan Schaal—consists of an x-ray detector housed in a box about the size and shape of a refrigerator. The box is lined with lead to shield the x-ray detector from stray radiation. X-rays enter the box through a small hole that in turn focuses them, like an old-fashioned pinhole camera.
Speedy Trade-Off: Less Data Space
Because lightning moves blindingly fast, the camera was required to take ten million images per second. One challenge in taking such fast pictures is storing the data. To do so, the x-ray detector had to take pictures at a relatively low resolution of 30 pixels, which produced images on a crude, hexagonal grid—as shown in the chart below.
A chart shows x-ray observations of a lightning discharge.
Even so, the resolution was sharp enough to reveal a bright ball of x-rays at the head of the bolt, with almost no lingering radiation along the bolt's trail. "Almost all the x-rays are from the tip," Dwyer said. "We see the x-ray source descending with the lightning at up to one-sixth the speed of light."
Triggered Lightning Effective
The lightning bolts were triggered by launching small rockets into the thunderstorms. The rockets trailed wires behind them to direct the lightning through the camera's field of view. Artificially triggering the lightning strike likely didn't alter the natural workings of the thunderstorm, Dwyer noted. And, he said, "the advantage of triggered lightning is that we can repeat it."
