type 57

Last week, we were taken for a test drive in a porcelain Bugatti called L’Or Blanc (White Gold) and now we are given a demonstration of another fully-functional Bugatti model—a Chiron supercar—that was almost entirely built from LEGO Technics pieces, over a million assembled by hand.
The car is a legacy brand first founded by Ettore Bugatti in the city of Molsheim in 1909 that produced a line of high performance luxury and racing automobiles through the 1950s when the company went bankrupt and the factory acquisitioned for the aviation industry. Bugatti saw a comeback in the 1990s when the name and distinctive chassis style saw a revival, with Volkswagen engineering the Chiron, two-seated sports car, which was revealed for the first time at the Geneva Motor Show in 2016. See footage of both cars in action at the links above.

annuario pontificio

If you haven’t already done so, do yourself a favour and do give a listen to the Pontifacts podcast. A slightly irreverent romp through all the popes from Paul to Francis with indulgences on offer, each episode gives a biographical, hagiographical overview of each of the Vicars of Christ and some studied explanations of Church hierarchy (from the Greek for president of sacred rites) and other developments in catechism and rates them in the style of another one in our play-list, the Rex Factor.

c+c music factory

Found at The Awesomer, a group of researchers at the University of California’s Berkeley campus have created software for the motion retargeting of video subjects which can—most importantly—transpose dance moves from the source to target. Though the output is not has a few glitches and is not perfectly rotoscoped, it’s really remarkable that the process is nearly instantaneous with no special sensors or studio required.

7x7

secret garden: Google Earth leads a team of researchers to an untouched mountaintop rainforest in Mozambique

ultima thule: on its encore mission, Pluto probe beams back its first image of its next target

comnenian period: an exploration of Byzantine architecture from draughtsman Antoine Helbert, via Kottke

amos rex: a subterranean museum opens in Helsinki  

seven points of articulation: a visual history of the past four decades of LEGO Minifigs (previously)

drainspotting: a tour of the manhole covers (elsewhere) of Massachusetts  

hyperpolyglot: what the people who’ve mastered dozens of languages can teach us, via Digg