Robot Claw – Page 392 – “Life In The So-Called Space Age”

The Masterpiece

May 12, 2015

There are Perler Beads:

They are tiny little plastic cylindrical beads used for crafting. You create pictures using them, and then iron the beads, which melts them together to make the picture permanent. I learned of these through the internet, and decided to buy a sizeable portion of them for a very specific project. This past Saturday I dedicated the entire day to this undertaking.

But first I started with something small, to get used to using the beads:

Yes sir, pixel art! Specifically a Pac Man ghost (very specifically ‘Blinky’). Of course I had to make his frenemy as well. Here they both are after the all important ironing to fuse the beads:

Not bad eh? All told, the above took maybe half an hour tops.

I was now a Perler Bead master, and it was time to move on to my intended project. I won’t spoil it just yet, but let’s see how quickly you can work out what I decided to make as you look through these ‘making of’ images:

Hrm… interesting. I wonder what this is?

Looks like a piece of classical art no?

Oh my god! Could it be….?

Oh my god! It’s Bernard! I’ve turned his likeness into pixel art!

But I wasn’t finished yet. Even though I’d been placing beads for about 4 hours by this point, there was still a lot of unused space around his head. This had to be remedied. Here’s the master at work:

Look at that concentration! For over five and a half hours on Saturday I individually placed – using tweezers – a grand total of 3364 beads in over 23 colours to create my masterpiece. And here it is:

A detail clearly showing the beads:

This was no small endeavour! In fact it ended up being much, much harder than I thought it was. For starters I did absolutely no pre-planning, and I certainly didn’t really consider the palette of the available beads. Instead I used a ghetto technique to resize the original photo down to 60×60 and then just used it as a guideline for bead placement. There was considerable deviating from the pixelated picture on my ipad, especially when it came down to establishing the all-important detail (such as the cheeks or nose shading).

But then it transpired that placing the beads although time consuming wasn’t even the hardest part. Ironing them turned out to be much more challenging and took over 90 minutes in total (and more than a few stressful moments when it seemed like the whole thing would be ruined). The beads aren’t snapped onto the board in any way, they just sit there and can easily be dislodged with a bump:

So, more than seven hours after I started, and in one sitting, I finished what can only be described as the greatest masterpiece I have ever created. And here it is:

Here’s the original – and famous – photograph that inspired it:

I think you’ll agree I did it justice?

Now and forever this will be displayed proudly in our house. It’s hanging in the hall next to Freddy Mercury, and defies any passer-by to not stop and appreciated it:

It has instantly become one of my prized possessions 🙂

Lego Technician

May 9, 2015

I bought this kit several months ago, and it was time to make it:

A licensed Technic kit is a bit weird, but it’s another construction vehicle, and I’m a sucker for those. Although to be honest I would have preferred it without the ‘power functions’, which sadly have become more than just an option in recent years. More on that later.

The box is suitable massive, but strangely empty when opened. I guess they make it bigger to make it seem like it has more pieces than it does! Unlike other kits, the bags aren’t labelled and you need to open them all before starting. If you don’t like sorting pieces in advance (and I don’t) this sort of packaging leads to longer build times due to the time digging through the pile to find a particular piece.

The instruction book is massive – over 300 pages in total. As usual for Lego kits, it’s wonderful designed and makes the kit very easy to assemble. Things start off complex from the get go. I’m only a few pages in and you can see already how complicated the gearing for the wheels is. It also becomes quickly apparent just how large the finished kit is:

That’s a shot from much later in assembly, showing the massive bulk of the main engine compartment. You can see how dense the construction is here, and you can see how the ‘power function’ elements (such as the motors) are structural. Even if you wanted to build the kit without them, you would be in for some serious customization and deviation from the manual. I’m not a big fan of this approach.

It’s an extremely sturdily build model, and I know if I’m ever going to take it apart it’ll be a hell of a job. Good thing I didn’t make any mistakes during construction…

…except that I did! It’s hard to see in the photo, but I used the incorrect axle on one rear wheel, all the way back at the start of assembly. I didn’t notice this until the 11.99th hour (long after the above shot was taken) and it was a real chore disassembling half the underside of the rear wheels to fix the problem. Had I made an error somewhere internal in the model, I may have had to put it away somewhere for a while out of frustration!

All told the construction took me maybe 6 or 7 hours over a few weeks. Here’s the gigantic (and heavy!) finished kit:

A better shot:

And one for scale:

Since many of you know just how big Yossie is, you can clearly see that this is a monster of a Technic kit. It’s heavy and long enough that you need two hands to carry it!

And how does it work? Here’s a quick video I shot of the ‘power functions’:

A bit slow perhaps, but impressive given the size of the model. I don’t show it too well in the video, but it moves along quite speedily for it’s size!

Verdict: massive, impressive, complex and fun-to-build technic kit that I believe would have been even better without the motors.

Stamp Otaku

April 30, 2015

I like postage stamps. Always have, always will. I still buy them a lot, especially when I’m in Australia. They are also one of the reasons I love sending postcards, and I enjoy sending (or receiving!) cards with exotic or particularly pretty stamps on them. I wonder if any of my recipients notice?

That’s a screen grab from yesterdays lecture, which was about the atomic structure. Rutherford is a real character, and I’ve always found it humorous that he’s been on so many postage stamps considering his (in)famous quote about science. Other slides in yesterdays lecture were peppered with stamps as well, and it’s actually quite easy to find stamps to use as illustrations in physics lectures.

In searching for such examples, I couldn’t help but notice that the masters of honoring their scientists on postage stamps are unquestionably the Germans. There are many and varied examples of beautiful stamps showcasing very famous scientists from German history.

Take for example this one:

What a beautiful stamp! Hertz discovered electromagnetic waves, and this stamp displays the oscillations of the electric force due to a magnetic dipole (ie. EM waves) in the background. I love that the lines are superimposed over Hertz’s portrait, as if to put the science before the man.

This stamp of Bessel is magnificent! The portrait is wonderful, and the fact the stamp prominently displays a plot of a ‘Bessel function’ (important mathematical tools required to solve complex partial differential equations) is just icing on the cake! How I’d love to stick this on a postcard!

Here are some other wonderful examples of Germany’s science stamps:

That last one (Gauss) is sublime! Gauss is one of the titans of mathematics, and is one of the few men to have multiple identities or equations named after him. One may imagine that they would have shown a Gaussian distribution on the stamp, but whoever designed it chose the 17-sided polygon that he created using compass and straightedge when he was only 19. I love it!

Lovely stamps these all are. The woodcut portraits add to the appeal, and the fact the stamps embrace the science only make them more appealing.

Of course Germany isn’t alone in recognizing science in their stamps. Here are a few other wonderful examples I found (and in some cases have inserted into lectures):

From the top, we have Roentgen (x-ray), Babbage (computers), Fermi (atomic physics), Bohr (atomic structure), Mendelev (chemistry), Democritus (coined the word ‘atom’ in 450BC) and Ramanujan (Indian mathematics prodigy). I love them all. I wish I had them all in a big frame. I’d display it proudly in my office.

You’re all wondering “What about Einstein?” He’s on more stamps than any other scientist, and they run the entire range of design and theme, since his fame moved into celebrity as well. I think this is perhaps my favourite Einstein stamp of all those I found:

It’s simple, subtle (note the background) and a lovely portrait of Einstein when he wasn’t much older than when he presented his most important theories. This stamp would look beautiful on the back of a postcard of a surfing koala or kangaroo drinking a beer 😉