a fine lady

Following the instructions of the nursery rhyme:

Ride a cock-horse to Banbury Cross,
To see a fine lady upon a white horse;
Rings on her fingers and bells on her toes,
And she shall have music wherever she goes

I went to Banbury and found this fine lady:



And I thought she really did look like a fine lady. And she had the bells on her toes all right, though one couldn't move the bells, so she couldn't have any music. But the horse is looking very nice too:



The sculpture isn't historic, by the way, it was put up 5 or 6 years ago, probably in an attempt to attract more tourists to Banbury, which is in fact a charming market town with a shopping area that's probably larger than Oxford's.

christmas tandem

This year's christmas lights in Oxford's High Street feature a few bicycles, very fitting for one of the UK's biggest bike hotspots, also including a tandem:



Wondering whether they picked up abandoned bikes from the street and painted them ...

Oh, and I have to admit I haven't written a single xmas card this year - if you were expecting one, I'm afraid this seasonal blog post is all you're going to get.

happy holidays!


PS (2011): the tandem is there again this year, and somebody else took a much better photo of it, which you can see on flickr

Santiago Calatrava at Lyon

While I was at Lyon, I also visited one of the major works of my favourite architect, Santiago Calatrava, namely the railway station serving Saint-Exupery airport. From the outside it looks like it could fly:



while from the inside the gravity defying height and lightness of the structure makes me think of a modern variation on the theme of gothic cathedrals. In both cases, the windows are extremely important:



After duly admiring the structure itself inside out and from all sides, I had a lot of fun walking around and checking which details were and which weren't designed by Calatrava - the granite benches, the departures board, the dustbins, and the bollards clearly were part of his grand design. Disappointingly, the fittings in the gents were off-the-shelf stuff (maybe he doesn't want his work to be peed on?).



When you drive a train to the station, it looks like this:



Ok, I'll admit I cheated here, this is in fact the tram towards the city centre moving away from the station ...

For further photos of my visit, check my flickr photostream. In the architecture set you'll also find two other buildings by Calatrava.

Tweet

in praise of squares

As cropping is the main (and usually the only) thing I do to my photos, I've been thinking of the merits of various formats, and at the moment I have a thing for squares, especially to capture things that normally aren't square, like petals:



Accordingly, the six photos I've added to my flickr photostream today are all square, and I also started a new set with squares. Obviously, if this 3D craze catches on, I'll have to move up to cubes :)

bangles or bracelets or what?

Saw this display at the antiques market yesterday and loved the sight of the silver circles against the red background:



I labelled the photo "bangles" without thinking much, but as a complete dummie in all things fashion, I am now beginning to wonder whether they are called something else. I've just uploaded this and a few older photos to my flickr photostream. And joined the antiques and 2CV groups. I have yet to discover a visual topic that doesn't have a group on flickr.

antiques fair

I only discovered last year or so that we have a lovely antiques fair in this town, which happens every Thursday and is always good for some surprising discoveries.



I have on occasions found things there that we actually needed (eg an adjustable stool for the cellist to sit on) but most of the time I just enjoy the sights, and if I find something that looks really nice, I remember that our house is already 300% over carrying capacity and take a picture instead of buying.

So here are two beautiful women whom I might have taken home if I had a suitable space to accommodate them:





And here's something I spotted some time last year and photographed mainly for the irony of the leaf being inadvertently weighed, not that I was actually tempted to buy this one:



PS Turns out the painting is by Angelo Asti, whose work was used for Art Nouveau post cards and porcelain, hence appears via an indirect route in this wall calendar.

peeling patterns

The new banner picture fits my occasional series "Things I like the look/design of," as I like the patterns and textures revealed when paint, plaster, or other surface coatings come off. As for instance, on the walls of houses in Venice, where the water eats away all attempts at covering up the bricks.

In this case it's from a tree though - I think it's a plane, and I think it shed its bark naturally. But no guarantee, as I don't know much about biology above the cellular level ...

venn diagrams

Car design is of course one of the creative activities we're most exposed to, as all our streets are clogged with the things, so I do tend to have strong opinions on what I am confronted with, even though I'm not going to buy a car any time soon. One of the designs I really like is the outline of the backside of the original Ford Ka, which is like a Venn diagram with the lights defined by the overlap between two sets (best appreciated from straight behind, as the kink will disappear).

I was reluctant to put this on here, as I didn't want to do advertising for cars, but I noticed recently that the new version of the model has switched to a completely different (more Japanese-looking) design, so assuming that this one isn't being built any more, I can praise it without fear of boosting car sales (happy to support the vintage car trade, though).



and of course it looks even better with the reflection of the OU Museum of Natural History ...

physical mystery

Here comes a physics question. I constructed the kinetic toy shown below from "GeoMag" magnets and steel balls, it's suspended from the ceiling and has two joints that move freely, i.e. the places where two steel balls touch directly. So there are three parts that are independent of each other. If I spin the bottom part quite fast, the middle part will rotate too (but not as fast, I think), will then stop, rotate for a while again, etc.



Any clues ?

I'm thinking the magnetic field of the dumbbell in the middle should be symmetrical with respect to the rotation axis, so I can't think of a magnetic reason for this "behaviour". Maybe it's just random small differences in the friction depending on how the balls touch. But in any case it's fascinating to watch and procrastinate over ...

snow pix

... quickly before the UK's Internet provision collapses under the weight of snow pictures that everybody uploads to facebook and emails to their local media outlets, here are some of my snaps from this morning. I measured 20 cm snow on the top of our dustbin (which of course wasn't collected today, like everything else was shut down as well).






PS This blog service is of course severely disrupted by the extreme weather conditions. Every morning I have to clear the snow off the ice so we can get some ice-skating done. Expecting to resume normal service next week.

beauty of fractals

... time to break up the series of text posts with a picture, here's in praise of natural fractals:



Oddly enough this tree stands in Oxford city centre (Jowett Walk), on a small patch of land that is probably a College garden and really to small for it.

ode to pay

among the few books left in the library room where I am sitting right now is the 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (1911). I just love the slightly battered look of it, and the inadvertent poetry of its three-letter signposts on the spine, such as the "ode to pay":



Other examples include the boarding pass: EVA to FRA and the weapons commission: SUB to TOM. Oh, and if your mother gets ill, you'll need Vol. XVIII.: MED to MUM.


PS for an appreciation of the dramatic potential of full-word Britannica titles, type "Jirasek Lighthouses" into google, you'll find a piece by Alan Coren on google books. Thanks to Aidan for the hint.

the world's a stage

Third in my series "things I like the look / design of" is very much not a design but a look, namely the look of a messy stage overcrowded with the collected instruments and electronics of two bands, just before a concert. It's not just the anticipation, I really like to look at this. Which is just as well, as sometimes one stands there for two hours looking at it :)
This one is of the Noisettes, and their support act, Little Camels:



pix from the actual concert(last Thu at the Oxford O2 academy) to follow.

favourite designs

As part two of my "things I like the look of" I was going to show the new British coins -- very surprisingly, they actually picked a very clever design for last year's revamp, where each coin is like a keyhole revealing part of a bigger picture :)

looking it up on Wikipedia, I found out that reproducing images of UK coins and banknotes, in whatever size and on whatever material will get me tarred, feathered, quartered, hanged and drowned, or something along these lines.

So I'll just post a link to wiki instead (apparently they have obtained an exceptional permission to show the coins, which they have to renew every year, or else they will be tarred ... etc.):

UK coin design.

I have by now collected nice specimens of all coins except the 1 pound coin (the one which contains the solution of the jigsaw).

things I like

Having drowned this blog in text, I need to offer some visual entertainment now, so I decided to start an occasional series of things I like the look / design of. Let's start with that eternal classic, the periodic table taxis -- here is one I caught from the front side, just before it ran me over (just kidding, the driver popped out for a chat with a colleague):