Heroes of Science Volume III, now +21

I've just posted the third edition of Heroes of Science, which features another 21 science heroes, including Brian Greene, Peter Higgs, Lawrence Krauss, Wolfgang Pauli, Henrietta Swan Leavitt, Albert Michelson and Edward Morley, Andrei Sakharov, David Hilbert, Lord Kelvin, Emmy Noether, Srinivasa Ramanujan, Andrew Wiles, Norman Borlaug, Barbara McClintock, Tim Berners-Lee, Steven Pinker, B F Skinner, Konrad Lorenz and Edward O Wilson!

You can check it out at DeviantART, and there's an FAQ over here.

Thanks, everyone, for your support and comments on the various incarnations of the Heroes of Science figures. You can find more posts on colonpipe.com about them by clicking this linky thing here.

Heroes of Science: Lord Kelvin

In continuation of the Heroes of Science fake action figure series, here's Lord Kelvin, the chap responsible for developing the absolute scale of temperature, which he aptly named the Kelvin temperature scale -- thus ensuring he'd live on eternally in the minds and memories of science geeks and anyone who's ever tried to set white balance on a digital camera.

You can also find this image over on DeviantART if you're not comfortable viewing or commenting on it here, or feel your action figure examining experience would be enhanced by the greenish grey viewing experience of a DeviantART window.

Just passed 260,000 collective views between Heroes of Science Action Figures and Heroes of Science Volumes I and II on DeviantART. That's a bit nuts.

Vintage Photo Extravaganza

I recently posted an article about smartphone apps like Hipstamatic and Instragram, and how they're ruining the originality of photography. I'm about to be spectacularly hypocritical and backtrack over a great deal of what I said. There's a caveat, though. All of the pictures I'm about to post are original, and deliberately edited. I have a huge collection of photographs. I take photos of crap constantly. I have a lot of photos that I like, but I just don't like enough to do anything with. Photos of things, photos of places, photos of the sky. Lots of photos of, just, stuff, really. On their own, none of them stand up to scrutiny. I've posted a few on DeviantART, and some of them have been successfully received. Balanced Barbs, Probably Unsafe and No Sense of Time are a few examples of images that aren't widely hated. Generally, if I post these pictures, they sink to the bottom of the pile, and I eventually delete them because they just end up as clutter.

I'm going to shamelessly self-indulge, now, and post a shit-ton of them all at once. They kind of function as a collection. Put them all together and they get a weird nostalgic feel to them, with their cross-processed filters and Hipstamatic flavour.

So, without further ado, here's a LOT of little pictures. Click "Read more" to, uh, read more. Although I suppose it's more looking at pictures than reading. Click on the images to embiggen. Enjoy!

Various old "artworks", if you will

Most of these are terrifying, but I was young, so I'll forgive that. Most of these lack a certain level of contrast that I've come to apply to images, but I'll forgive that, too. I hardly touch 3D images any more. Not sure if that's a good thing, or not. Hit the jump for the gallery, 15 pics.

Lightning and Sunsets and Rainbows and Mammatus, Oh My

The storms that appeared in northern New South Wales around the 28-29th of January, 2009 were pretty spectacular. Among their features: lightning, awesome sunset formations, mammatus, a rainbow, crepuscular rays, opportunities for lengthy exposures, clear starry skies surrounding. Among the other photos below, I also took "From the Top" on the 29th, which was featured as a Daily Deviation on DeviantART on the 9th of April, 2009.