Category: Illustration

  • When Is a Torpedo Is Not a Torpedo?

    When Is a Torpedo Is Not a Torpedo?

    When it’s a torpedo bat. Last week I looked at baseball’s new torpedo bats in a humourous light. But I did want to take a more serious look, because bat evolution has been part of the tale of baseball since its beginning. Back in the day bats featured long lengths and heavier weights. These days,…

  • Damn the Torpedoes!

    Damn the Torpedoes!

    Baseball is back and so bring forth the controversies. One of the ones from last week? The torpedo bat. To be clear, the torpedo bat has been around for a few years—it’s not new. However, on Opening Weekend, the Yankees beat up on Milwaukee Brewers’ pitching. But a Yankees announcer specifically pointed out the design…

  • 113 Years Later and We’re Still Talking About Watertight Compartments

    113 Years Later and We’re Still Talking About Watertight Compartments

    Earlier this week, a Portuguese-flagged cargo container ship collided with an American-flagged tanker just off the Humber estuary in Yorkshire, England. The American-flagged ship, the Stena Immaculate, carries aviation fuel for the US Air Force. The Solong, the Portuguese-flagged tanker, carries alcohol, which is far better than the toxic chemicals initially feared. We still know…

  • Cavalcante Captured

    Well, I’ve had to update this since I first wrote, but had not yet published, this article. Because this morning police captured Danelo Cavalcante, the murderer on the lam after escaping from Chester County Prison, with details to follow later today. This story fascinates me because it understandably made headlines in Philadelphia, from which the…

  • Asshole

    Well, it’s Friday. We made it to the weekend. So here’s a nice Venn diagram from Indexed that captures that guy we all know. Credit for the piece goes to Jessica Hagy.

  • James Webb

    It’s cool. In the darkness of space. We made it to the end of the week, a big week for space news. So with that, enjoy this illustration from xkcd about the James Webb Space Telescope. Credit for the piece goes to Randall Munroe.

  • L2 Halo for JWST

    Yesterday I received a question about where the new James Webb Space Telescope is located. Is it in orbit of the Earth, like Hubble? Is it out in deep space? The answer is no, not really. Now I spent this morning trying to illustrate the answer to that question myself. However, it’s taking me too…

  • Those Quirky Quarks

    Last week scientists working at the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland announced the discovery of new sub-atomic particles: a pentaquark and tetraquarks. This BBC article does a really good job of explaining the role of quarks in the composition of our universe, so I encourage you to read the article. But they also included a…

  • Serfs Up, Bro

    Now get him into the fields. Well that was a week. But at least we made it to Friday and for my American readers and myself this weekend and its bank holiday on Monday, Memorial Day, mark the unofficial beginning of summer. So thanks to Indexed, it’s time to head down to the beach and…

  • Exposing More of China’s Crimes in Xinjiang

    For those who don’t know, China currently engages in ethnocide, or cultural genocide in its western province of Xinjiang, a province with a majority of its population being Uighurs, a Turkic Muslim people. Ethnocide is a term I prefer over genocide as genocide more commonly refers to practices like those in Nazi Germany or 1990s…