9/14 Moment of Zen: Prison Labor Beyond License Plates

What Do These Things Have in Common?

They're all made by inmates in the US. Beyond the classic prison jobs like stamping license plates (which they still do), US inmates are also employed in manufacturing everything from prescription eyeglasses to processed meats, and yes, Kevlar vests, dentures and toilet brushes like the ones pictured above. Click the pictures to find out more about things you wouldn't suspect were made by inmates.

9/10 Moment of Zen: Improbable Loads

Moment of Zen

Experiments In Improbable Physics

In considering the photo series the above image comes from, called "Manufactured Totems" by French photographer Alain Delorme, which features transport workers in Shanghai, China with towers of merchandise lashed to the backs of bikes, such that you have no idea how they're even upright. Click the picture to see more, including stacks of furniture, flowers and more.

Moment of Zen 9/9: Disney Princess Superheroes

Moment of Zen

Reimagining Disney Princesses as Superheroes

This late night brainchild of casual artist Melissa Erickson takes the almost ubiquitous images of the Disney "princesses" and reimagines them as superheroes instead. There's a lot of different ways you could see this, but in all of them, it's a pretty interesting idea. What do you think? (click the image above to see a more extensive lineup)

Moment of Zen 9/8: The World's Longest Maki is Local News!

Moment of Zen

9/7/2010: UMass Amherst students make the world's longest sushi roll

420 feet of California Roll:
650 sheets of nori (seaweed),
200 pounds of sushi rice,
200 pounds of crab,
100 pounds of avocado,
100 pounds of cucumber,
2 pounds of sesame seeds,
5 gallons of soy sauce
6 pounds of wasabi
Video of the sushi feat

9/7 Moment of Zen: Knitting a Year in Two Meters

How Long Is A Year?

About two meters, according to this conceptual timepiece designed by German-based Norwegian industrial designer Siren Elise Wilhelmsen. A round knitting machine, ticking off one stitch every half hour, one round per day, this uncanny timepiece produces a knitted tube about two meters (6' 4") in the 365 days of a year.

¡Simpatico! - Original Pattern for Free Download

I am very proud to introduce ¡Simpatico! Though I've been making up patterns on the fly for years for myself and for people I can talk through it in person, this is the first one that's ready to fly solo. (also see original in this earlier post)

An excellent one-skein project, this cabled earflap hat is worked from the bottoms of the flaps up. The two earflaps are worked separately, back and forth, then joined in the round, with the rest of the hat cast on. The whole hat is symmetrical in a way that's nonobvious from the front but still cuts the number of instructions in half.

Here's its specs:

• Needles: set circular needles and/or set of 4 DPNs in size 5 (3.75 mm) or size needed to obtain gauge
• Yarn: 9-10 wpi (worsted weight), about 120 yds (a little less than 50g for most worsted yarns)
• Gauge: 4.5 sts/in; 17.5 st/10 cm
• Size: ~22.5”/57 cm circumference (average adult head)

• Download adult-size ¡Simpatico! pattern as a .pdf (1.0 MB)
• Download child-size ¡Simpatico! pattern as a .pdf (1.0 MB)

Errata: All noted errors are now included in the .pdf
Thanks to all the intrepid Ravelers who have spotted my little brain farts.

Updates:

• 1/15/11: Thanks to knitter feedback, ¡Simpatico! is now bigger and better - literally! Many knitters found the pattern came out too small for grown-up heads, so I've reworked the pattern to have about 2 more inches in both directions. However, the original pattern seems to work okay for kids, so I've left it and called it child size. Both patterns include any relevant errata.


• 1/30/11: Reworked an egregious oversight in the adult size at the join between the earflaps and hat body.

Here are a few yarns currently available from RPM Fiberworks which would be good choices for this pattern:

• Secret Garden (pictured) - Dense, 75% silk blend
• Stone on the Water - Skin-soft angora blend hand-dyed in cool blues and deep browns
• Coffee Stain - Same angora blend hand-dyed in several warm tones of brown

9/3 Moment of Zen: Return of the MoZ

School's back, which means I'm keeping up the students' homework blog and its embedded dangling carrot, the Moment of Zen. These will also get posted here when I put them up, which means most M-F in the early afternoon sometime. Without further ado...

A Matter of Perspective...

What planet is this? Although seemingly something out of The Little Prince, the planet is actually Earth. More specifically, it is a small part of the Earth incorporated into a four image stereographic "Little Planet " projection. The central fisheye image points down, while the surrounding wide-angle images were taken at a 30 degree tilt and added digitally later. Earth-anchored items surrounding the image center include green grass, dark shadows, and trees near and far. At the image top ("noon" if the planet were a clock) is the well-lit Parkes Radio Telescope dish in New South Wales, Australia. The surrounding sky contains many jewels of the night including the Moon at 9 pm, the plane of our Milky Way Galaxy at 1:30 pm and 7 pm, and the Small Magellanic Cloud galaxy at 5 pm. A full field interactive version of this scene can be found here.

Photo and explanation lifted from NASA's Astronomy Photo of the Day archive, which features and explains an interesting image every day.