Having a bath can be such a relaxing treat when you're in the mood, but let's face it, once you've sat there stewing for a few minutes and the water's started to go a bit cold, the whole experience can become boring. UNLESS that is, you're the proud owner of what must be the coolest darn bath plug on Earth.
Stuck! will fit any plug, anywhere and is quite simply, very cool.
Watch concepts without traditional numerics and even analog hands? Minimalism to its extreme – or at least that’s what designer Robert Dabi is pitching. His ZERO watch has two discs (one each for hours and minutes) that spin to tell time. My main problem with many numeric-less concepts is a delay in reading them. The ZERO looks like it may avoid that because I have no problems reading it. No word if it’ll hit the market but the flexible metal/rubber band will come in an array of colors if it does.
Over almost a century and a half, Brooks England has grown from a small workshop to a byword in quality craftsmanship. Back in 1865, John Boultbee Brooks left his hometown of Hinckley in Leicestershire with just £20 in his pocket.
He headed for Birmingham, where in 1866 he established a business in horse harnesses and general leather goods in Great Charles Street under the name JB Brooks & Co.In 1878, the unfortunate death of Mr Brooks’ horse led to a stroke of inspiration. Unable to afford another horse, he borrowed a bicycle in order to commute to work. But he found the seat so uncomfortable that he vowed to do something about it. On 28 October 1882, Mr Brooks filed his first saddle patent.
Waddling cyclists everywhere threw their hats in the air and the new product was a roaring success. The company became known and respected for its beautiful leather handcrafted saddles, and soon started to make cycle and motorcycle bags and other accessories.
Traditional techniques in manufacturing leather saddles were passed down from generation to generation of craftsmen as the company grew under the guidance of the Brooks family until 1958.
In 1962 Brooks became part of Raleigh and moved to the current works in Smethwick in the West Midlands, just a few miles away from the original premises.
In the last decade, we have struck out on our own again as Brooks England, following a new course that honours the company’s heritage. Inspired by the timeless products designed by our predecessors, we have revived the original slogan ‘Saddles, Bags, Etc’ and introduced a range of cycle bags and other accessories.
Brooks England is steeped in history, a prestige brand that boasts almost 150 years of tradition and expertise. But quality and style never age. So come on in and take a seat.
I didn’t know that.
And what about “e” day?
“e” is one of those amazing numbers that arises naturally in the scheme of things.
(Others include “pi” π = 3.141592653…, which is the circumference of any circle divided by its diameter; and “phi” φ = 1.6180339887…, which is the so-called “beauty ratio“). Both of these numbers are irrational (that is, their decimals go on forever and never repeat).
e is also an irrational number and it has value:
e = 2.718281828459…
The number e was “discovered” by several mathematicians (Oughtred, Huygens, Jacob Bernoulli, Mercator and Leibniz) but they didn’t quite know they had stumbled on it and didn’t know its significance.
There are some curious properties of e, one of which is that it’s the limiting value as n → ∞ of (1 + 1/n)n.
It can also be found by adding the infinite sum:
e = 1 + 1/1! + 1/2! + 1/3! + …
So what is e good for?
It is used extensively in logarithms (which was the only way to do difficult calculations for hundreds of years before calculators came along), exponential growth (of populations, money or drug concentrations over time) and complex numbers (which were used to design the computer or mobile device you are reading this on).
So happy “e” day (February 7th, or 2/7).
Aesthetic images evoke an emotional response that transcends mere visual appreciation. In this work we develop a novel computational means for evaluating the composition aesthetics of a given image based on measuring several well-grounded composition guidelines. A compound operator of crop-and-retarget is employed to change the relative position of salient regions in the image and thus to modify the composition aesthetics of the image. We propose an optimization method for automatically producing a maximally-aesthetic version of the input image. We validate the performance of the method and show its effectiveness in a variety of experiments.
