Year: 2010

Beautiful element photography on Wikimedia Commons

Beautiful element photography on Wikimedia Commons

I have been reading the Picture of the Day feed from Wikimedia Commons for about a month, now, and it is fast becoming one of the best parts of my daily newsreader experience. Every day there’s a gorgeous new publicly-licensed photograph pre-selected for quality by a vote amongst Wikimedia community members.

That’s how I happened upon the work of German inorganic chemist and photographer alchemist-hp (English-language page). She or he takes amazing photographs of element, mineral, and chemical samples and has a stated goal (badly translated by yours truly) “to create special pictures of all naturally occurring elements.”

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan2
EMSL on magnetic fields

EMSL on magnetic fields

Trust our friends Lenore and Windell at Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories to take something most of us take for granted and explore it thoroughly. In their recent column Start Seeing Magnetic Fields, they explore a bunch of different ways of visualizing the fields, ranging from the classic iron filings method to “magnetic field viewing film” […]

Continue Reading John Baichtal2

Nature Textures Library

As a designer, I have a great love as well as a professional need for visual lexicons. Type faces, illustration, ephemera, old signage — you name it, I collect it. Textures are no different. It’s not infrequent that a texture is needed for a design project, and what better way to amass a royalty-free collection […]

Continue Reading Katiewalkerwilson8
Printable mechanical CFL dimmer idea

Printable mechanical CFL dimmer idea

Interesting concept from Thingiverse user 12meyer. All kinds of potential problems here, so this is more of the “way to think outside the box” kind of shout-out than the “where can I invest in your start-up” kind. One can, of course, dim fluorescent bulbs electrically, but it turns out to be kind of a PITA. The idea here is to exploit the spiral shape of the bulb itself to make an opaque cover that screws on or off to block more or less light, respectively.

Continue Reading Sean Michael Ragan6