Tag: illustration

  • Pedro Martinez Was Amazing

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    So the Red Sox in 2015 are godawful, terrible, bloody bad baseball. But, go back 11 years and they were amazing, fantastic, great and awesome baseball. 2004 was, of course, the year the curse was broken and that was in no small part due to the pitching efforts of Pedro Martinez, who would head down…

  • How We’re Talking to New Horizons

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    So New Horizons is long since gone from Pluto. But it will still take 16 months to send back all the photographs and science. Why so long? Because so far away. 3 billion miles away. Put another way, light from the sun takes eight minutes to reach Earth as it travels at, well, the speed…

  • New Horizon’s Flypast

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    A little after 07.30 EDT, New Horizons began its race past Pluto, what your author grew up learning as the ninth planet in the Solar System—the last planet to be explored. I recall thinking that when it launched back in 2006 I had no idea what I would be doing nine years later. Or at…

  • Putting Tatooine to Shame

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    While the title sounds science-fiction-y, it is true. Star Wars has a famous scenece where a landscape is shown with a binary star system in the sky. But we now know of a quintuple-star system that has two separate sets of binary stars. This BBC article takes a look at how the system is structured.…

  • New Horizons

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    So this is generally a more serious post than usual for a Friday. Because, it is about New Horizons, the probe we launched almost a decade ago to explore Pluto, which at that point was still technically a planet. Anyway, the Washington Post has a nice illustration detailing the various sensors and orbits and trajectories.…

  • LeBron James in the NBA Finals

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    I really do not know much about basketball. I did not realise that the finals had been going on. But, rest assured, they were. The Washington Post looked at whether or not LeBron James had the best finals match performances since 1985. It turns out, not so much. For those of you from the Chicago…

  • Donald Trump is Running for President

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    This week saw a few new people officially jump into the 2016 election: Jeb Bush and Donald Trump. Next week I want to at least look at some design-related elements to the forthcoming primaries. But, today is Friday. So let’s get to the important stuff first: Donald Trump’s hair. Thankfully, Time has that covered. (Get…

  • Rotting Wooden Beams

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    Earlier this week a balcony collapse in Berkeley, California killed six Irish students. The building had only been finished in 2007 and was barely ten years old. While the investigation is ongoing, the Los Angeles Times reported on what might have been the cause: dry rot. Credit for the piece goes to Rong Gong-Lin II.

  • Aircraft Cabin Flow

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    Today’s post looks at an illustration from the BBC about aircraft cabin flow. As I have flown on four aircraft in the last month—quite a lot for me—I do recall thinking during one particular flight just where the air intakes were on the aircraft. It never dawned on me that they were in the actual…

  • Mountain of Friendships

    —

    by

    Brendan Barry
    in

    I read this piece quite some time ago. But, the other night at the bar, I ended up drawing it to explain the concept to people. So, I figured I would share the original. The whole post is worth the read. Credit for the piece goes to Tim Urban.