Doodling in the margins
Dibujitos en los margenes
Man with big chin in a recliner with remote in hand
Created using Acorn for the Mac and a Wacom tablet.
Here’s to you, Lego Exxon man
As an only child, I spent hours playing with Lego, and was especially excited when they came out with the mini-figures. This little man was one of my original ones, part of a Lego city set most likely. I still remember those towns I would build, full of little smiling people going about their daily Lego lives, in some sort of a semi-European world I would build for them.
Now that I’m older, the little Lego men have migrated their way into my sons’ Lego bins, commingled with dozens of much more advanced mini-figures, replete with grimacing faces, magic hats, and long flowing hair. But one by one, my original men (and, alas, they are all men) are finding their way back onto my desk, reminding me of a simpler time when all my cares were focused on whether or not I could find that one matching piece to complete the little gas station, spaceship, or whatever it was I was building at the time.
Here’s to you, little Exxon man, here’s to you.
Trying to travel a bit lighter this time
Just sketched this out using a sweet little iPhone app called C64 Paint
http://itunes.apple.com/us/app/c64-paint-xl/id363962811?mt=8
House, pool, car, mailbox, by me, today
Massive - just massive - automobile brake
(click image to zoom)
So if you think about it, the brakes on cars are fairly ridiculous. Think about it. You’re hurtling down the highway at 80 mph, a good two tons of Detroit’s Finest at your fingertips, and some natty little hypermiler pops out in front of you doing 20 with his two kids in the back seat looking back at you as you slide in a howling cloud of smoke towards their precious lives and even more precious nearing-expiration Carpool Lane sticker on the back bumper. But I digress.
Each tire puts, what, 16 square inches of rubber on the ground? That’s all of 64 square inches total? What if - instead - we put a massive 48”x42” rubber foot on the bottom of the car, safely tucked up and out of the way for 99.9% of your driving? And what if, when you’re quickly closing in on said Prius with a trunk full of Trader Joe’s, your car would sense your panicked stab at the brakes, and drop - nay, shove - the massive foot onto the ground? Heck, it could even do some fancy ABS action to keep it from just erasing itself in the span of 30 feet.
And then, instead of 64 square inches on terra firma, you’d have 2,080 square inches of massive stopping power.
