The Expert Level Coloring Book

Posted on May 31, 2014 by

Between the Lines, subtitled an “Expert Level Coloring Book,” is impossible to color properly with crayons.

Filled with intricately detailed lined drawings, you’re going to need steady hands and some finely-sharpened colored pencils to properly do the trick. Illustrated by Peter Deligdisch, the book contains a variety of artwork. [E]ach illustration is filled with a ridiculous amount of detail, making the job of laying down color feel like solving a complicated maze.

Via CoolThings.
Between the Lines: An Expert Level Coloring Book available on Amazon.

Millie the Feline Climbing Partner

Posted on May 31, 2014 by

Most pet cats will become timid or defensive when outdoors, but not Millie – after being adopted by her mountain-climbing owner Craig Armstrong, Millie has become a feline hiking and mountain-climbing legend.

“She literally loves to climb things… if there’s high-ground she’ll seek it out. Generally she does best on slabby routes where she can scramble from ledge to ledge. I go on a lot of weekend climbing adventures. It never seemed odd to me, just seemed like something I’d do with my pet, take her places.”

Interested in doing the same with your cat?

Armstrong explains, “Get them used to their name and to you as a safe place. In talus fields or thick woods she’ll get distracted and climb trees or explore tiny caves and under boulders and stop following sometimes. It’s taken a lot of practice and many trips to get Millie to the point where she follows me down a trail past areas like thickets that would have distracted her otherwise.”

“It’s taken a lot of practice and many trips to get Millie to the point where she follows me down a trail past areas like thickets that would have distracted her otherwise. Put your agenda away, be prepared to move slowly and explore the world around you at a smaller, slower pace.”

Via Bored Panda for tons more pictures and more of Craig and Millie’s story.

The Story of Hannah Duston

Posted on May 31, 2014 by

The woman in the monument is Hannah Duston and in 1697 she was living in Haverhill, Massachusetts, when she, her infant daughter, and her nurse-maid, Mary Neff, were kidnapped by a band of Abenaki Native Americans.

The three were marched north and at some point Hannah’s infant daughter was killed by the Abenakis.

They stopped for the night in Boscawen, New Hampshire, and while the Abenaki families slept, Hannah and her companions killed 10 of them – including six children – and then scalped each victim before making their escape back to Haverhill.

Hannah Duston’s story was revived again in the 1800s during the era of “Manifest Destiny” by writers such as Henry David Thoreau and John Greenleaf Whittier, who were looking to tell the stories of American heroes and heroines.

But as the original Cotton Mather version of the story was rewritten and retold, people changed the narrative to suit their purposes – often omitting the part of the story in which Duston and her companions kill the sleeping children.

Via Slate for the full story and additional material.

The Plan for a Lunar Worm by the United States Space Program of the 1960s

Posted on May 31, 2014 by

In the mid-1960s, though the United States was firmly on the path to landing an American on the Moon, there were a lot of unanswered questions wrapped up in the lunar landing program. Among them was the question of how the astronauts would explore the Moon once they landed.

In 1966, the Aeronutronic Division of the Philco Corporation, a subsidiary of Ford Motors, presented NASA with the results of a feasibility study that looked at vehicles that used bellows for surface mobility. Taking the name of one of the animals that inspired the vehicle, the concept was known as the Lunar Worm.

The system Aeronutronic designed was a tubular moving habitat that looked and moved just like a worm. It was a design that could traverse a variety of obstacles like a centipede, while distributing its weight across a potentially poor load-bearing surface like a snake or an earthworm.

The Lunar Worm used bellows as a propulsion system so that all the moving pieces would be housed inside the vehicle’s pressurized environment, preventing lunar dust from getting into the delicate mechanisms.

After the Surveyor missions and first Apollo lunar landings found the lunar surface to be drivable, NASA developed the Lunar Rover car we’re familiar with.

NASA via Dvice for the full article on the various methods such a transport device was envisioned by.

Best Practices for Sending Artful Secret Messages from 1677

Posted on May 30, 2014 by

One can write messages quite effectively on playing cards. It is first necessary to lay out the cards in a certain order, each one beside the next, either face up or face down.

Once you have arranged them in this way, you can write whatever message you want along the borders between cards. Then you flip the cards and shuffle them well. The message will no longer appear, and if anyone is curious enough to examine the cards closely, he will see only some disorderly markings.

But when the intended recipient wants to read the message, he will lay out the cards in the predetermined order, so that the corners and edges join and line up with each other, and it will be possible to read the message perfectly.

– Giambattista Della Porta, Della magia naturale, 1677

Image by Theodoor Rombouts, detail of Jouers de cartes 17th c.
Via Ask the Past.

New Swabia: Nazi Germany in Antarctica

Posted on May 30, 2014 by

Like many other countries, Germany sent expeditions to the Antarctic region in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, most of which were scientific.

The third German Antarctic Expedition (1938–1939) was [intended] to find an area in Antarctica for a German whaling station. Whale oil was then the most important raw material for the production of margarine and soap in Germany and the country was the second largest purchaser of Norwegian whale oil.

[I]t was thought that Germany would soon likely be at war, which was considered to put too much strain on Germany’s foreign currency reserves. Another goal was to scout possible locations for a German naval base.

On December 17, 1938 the New Swabia Expedition left Hamburg for Antarctica aboard the MS Schwabenland. On January 19, 1939 the ship arrived at the Princess Martha Coast, in an area which had lately been claimed by Norway and began charting the region.

Nazi German flags were placed on the sea ice along the coast. Naming the area Neu-Schwabenland after the ship, the expedition established a temporary base.

Seven photographic survey flights were made by the ship’s two Dornier Wal seaplanes. About a dozen 1.2 meter-long aluminum arrows, with 30 centimeter steel cones and three upper stabilizer wings embossed with swastikas, were air dropped onto the ice at turning points of the flight polygons.

I had heard of secret Nazi bases in South America, in the center of the Earth, on the Moon, even in Canada, but never in Antarctica.

Maybe this means there’s still the possibility of that next Chinese lunar expedition coming across some Nazi ruins on the Moon…

Via Wikipedia.

Sand Painting

Posted on May 30, 2014 by

A collective exploration in Art and Nature of the threshold awaiting each of us individually and collectively.

What is the nature of your threshold? What do you desire to create in your life? What is the collective threshold happening on Earth? Creativity, self expression, companionship and reverence for nature are the deepest, oldest healing currents in the human psyche.

Artist Andres Amador.
Quoted text via Taxi.

prettyawfulthings

Strange and odd and pretty and awful things.

Monthly Archives: May 2014

The Expert Level Coloring Book

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Millie the Feline Climbing Partner

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The Story of Hannah Duston

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The Plan for a Lunar Worm by the United States Space Program of the 1960s

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Best Practices for Sending Artful Secret Messages from 1677

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New Swabia: Nazi Germany in Antarctica

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Sand Painting

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