Bizzarie di varie Figure / Giovanni Battista Bracelli (1624)

A fascinating set of images by Giovanni Battista Bracelli’s Bizzarie di varie Figure. They are, in some ways, much more modern than the 1624 production date suggests and good number of them would fit nicely in with the various art movements of the early to mid 20th Century. Some also remind me of the creations that used to fill York’s Museum of Automata.

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A Macintosh Independence Day

I’ve started to develop a fondness for these older computer adverts. This ‘Apple/Independence Day’ tie-in ad – from the dark days of 1996 when Apple was on the cusp of bankruptcy and Jobs was yet to return – feels comfortingly of that moment.

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The Doctor Shops for a Minicomputer…

And here’s a rather nice pair of Doctor Who-themed adverts for the Prime Computer range of minicomputers. There are so fairly obvious hints that Tom Baker and Lalla Ward are phoning it in but the shoutout to their current – but brief – marriage is rather nice.

A VJ Day Topper in Malton

In spite of what I said previously, this blog’s descent into postbox topper groupie-ism appears to continue.

This time Malton sees a simple – yet effective – topper to mark the 80th anniversary of VJ Day on the 15th of August.

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Converting PDFs to JPEG sequences using imagemagick

Imagemagick (available from all good package managers) has the ability to split a .pdf file into a set of numbered images via the following incantation…

convert -quality 100 -density 200 -colorspace sRGB <PathToPDF> -flatten <PathToOutputDirectory/>Page-%02d.jpeg

…where, of course, ‘%02d’ represents the auto-numbering element of the incantation.

Lightning verses Trees – FIGHT!

Simulating Lightning‐Induced Tree Mortality in the Dynamic Global Vegetation Model LPJ‐GUESS‘ (pdf) is a nice little read about simulating global tree death rates due to lighting strikes. The methods they use to validate their model are interesting and, while the number they come up with (301–340 million trees of a diameter of greater than 10cm) seems rather large, it pales when compared to their cited number of 50 billion trees killed by all combined natural causes.