Watch as a giant albino python opens a door and comes right on in, thank you very much.
Bored of being in a dark room, she flips on the light, opens the door and bails. This particular episode takes place at 1am. This is why we keep doors locked with her around. We don't need her harassing the neighbors.
Maybe don't watch this if you want to sleep tonight. (via @daveg)
This might be the dumbest thing on YouTube, which is saying quite a lot.
Or maybe not...maybe running up flowing lava isn't the worst thing you can do with your life and limbs.
If you slow down the Seinfeld theme by 1200%, it sounds like the soundtrack to a bad 80s sci-fi movie.
You may also enjoy Justin Bieber at 800% slower.
Ok, it's no NFL bad lip reading but this fake commentary by a British broadcaster of a baseball game is still pretty hilarious.
He runs in to bowl...Mork and Mindy, that's going for six! No! Caught by the chap in the pajamas with the glove that makes everything easier. And they all scuttle off for a nap.
DJ BC took the Beastie Boys and mashed them up with The Beatles.
He did more than 40 songs...get them all here. (via ★glass)
Are those your drums? The Late Show host likes drums so much that when musical guests finish up their sets on the show, Letterman often asks the drummer about them.
(via @hodgman)
This is great...Daft Punk's Get Lucky as it would have sounded in every decade from the 1920s to the 2020s.
This is what singles should be from now on...you get the original song, a 30s jazz version of the song, a 1800s classical version, an 80s new wave version, and so on.
People love Jerry Seinfeld so much that we will watch him driving cars and drinking coffee with other comedians. Wait, that actually sounds fantastic!
All the season one episodes are available on YouTube, featuring Ricky Gervais, Alec Baldwin, Michael Richards, and Larry David. (via devour)
Here are a few clips from Christian Marclay's The Clock that have been surreptitiously filmed and uploaded to YouTube and Vimeo.
The clips are crappy bootlegs that cut off part of the screen, but I still totally get sucked in after 30 seconds of each clip.
The first season of Sesame Street aired in 1969-1970 and this photo of the cast dates from then:
The giveaway is Oscar the Grouch's orange fur...it would switch to green for the second season. Here's the first 15 minutes of the first episode:
And here's part 2, part 3, and part 4.
Sesame Street is insane, BTW. They aired 130 60-minute episodes over six months for that first season and over its 43 seasons, the show has averaged 100 episodes per season. A truly amazing combination of quantity and quality.
Baltazar Ushca is the last ice miner of Ecuador's Mt. Chimborazo. Dozens of men, including Ushca's brothers, used to mine Chimborazo's glacial ice but commercial ice production has rendered the arduous process obsolete.
Also, it appears that the rocks and grass aren't separated from the ice before it goes into the blender?
This film was apparently shot in NYC in 1939. Features scenes in Midtown, Chinatown, Harlem, and more locales around the city.
(via @UnlikelyWorlds)
Watch as a crew from WMTW News 8 in Maine is preparing to do an update on a missing man when the man in question just saunters up right behind them.
The first 55 seconds of this video is like a real life version of the moonwalking bear test. (via devour)
Angels pitcher Robert Coello's unique pitch has knuckleball movement but is thrown with a fastball grip & pitching motion and has a bit more speed on it than a typical knuckleball. His catchers and opposing hitters call it the WTF pitch.
Physicist Alan Nathan, a professor at the University of Illinois who studies baseball and has a particular interest in the knuckleball, hadn't ever seen a pitch like Coello's. His preliminary theory on the pitch: His thumb on the underside of the ball exerts backspin, counteracting the tumbling effect his top fingers put on the ball and balancing the torque so perfectly that the pitch has a knuckleball effect with superior speed (around 80 mph).
Be sure to wait for the slow motion at the end of the video.
This is a video of a pair of Kenyan high schoolers competing in a high jump contest, skillfully using a throwback technique rarely seen these days.
Cool, right? They're using a scissors-jump technique that was popular in international competitions prior to the early 1900s, when landing areas were sand pits rather than the huge foam pads you typically see today. Various techniques followed the scissors-jump, with each making higher jumps possible until Dick Fosbury invented his Flop in 1968. All international competitors use the Flop today.
Interestingly though, the Fosbury Flop is not the instantly disruptive innovation I'd always thought it was. Fosbury started sailing over the bar backwards as a senior in high school in the mid-1960s. He refined his invention for years until his gold medal at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics attracted the attention of other jumpers, who recognized the potential of the technique. But if you look at the progression of high jump world records, there was no huge jump (sorry) in record heights because of the Flop. Ten years after the Flop's big-stage debut at the Mexico City Games, the world record holder Vladimir Yashchenko still used the straddle technique. And in the 1980 Olympics, three high jump finalists didn't use the Flop. Like most new promising technologies, the Flop took time to catch on, even though 45 years on, it's the clearly superior technique. (via @dunstan)
Here's an unfortunately short bit of circus riding by Tim Knoll. You often see a lot of the same tricks in bike videos, so Knoll's style mix of flatland, street, and circus riding is refreshing. I do get nervous when he stands on his handlebars or plays limbo with a row for semi-trucks. Be careful, Tim Knoll!
(thx, alex)
When Commander Chris Hadfield covered David Bowie's Space Oddity on board the International Space Station:
how were the intellectual property rights handled?
The song "Space Oddity" is under copyright protection in most countries, and the rights to it belong to Mr Bowie. But compulsory-licensing rights in many nations mean that any composition that has been released to the public (free or commercially) as an audio recording may be recorded again and sold by others for a statutorily defined fee, although it must be substantively the same music and lyrics as the original. But with the ISS circling the globe, which jurisdiction was Commander Hadfield in when he recorded the song and video? Moreover, compulsory-licensing rights for covers of existing songs do not include permission for broadcast or video distribution. Commander Hadfield's song was loaded onto YouTube, which delivers video on demand to users in many countries around the world. The first time the video was streamed in each country constituted publication in that country, and with it the potential for copyright infringement under local laws. Commander Hadfield could have made matters even more complicated by broadcasting live as he sang to an assembled audience of fellow astronauts for an onboard public performance while floating from segment to segment of the ISS.
We live in a world where sending a guitar into space is trivial while ironing out rights agreements is the tough part. (via waxy)
And why should Boards of Canada have all the fun? Sigur Ros has a new album coming out as well, to be released the week after on June 18. Two singles from Kveikur are already out:
And the album can be pre-ordered on iTunes, at Amazon, or direct from the band.
Oh hello new Boards of Canada single. Nice to see you.
Sounds goooood. The entire album will be out on 6/11 in North American (6/10 in the UK) and is available for pre-order on iTunes and at Amazon.
[SORTA MAD MEN SPOILERS! but not really] I don't know if Ken Crosgrove dancing on the latest episode of Mad Men is the best thing that's ever been on the show, but it's definitely in the top 10. And it might be even better with a little Daft Punk.
And it might be best with the Crazy in Love cover from Gatsby...just load up that this YT video while watching the animated GIF and you're all set. (This is how Millennials watch TV, BTW...it's all animated GIFs with YouTube video soundtracks. Civilization is gonna be juuuuuuust fine.)
This is possibly the best three-minute demonstration of anything I've ever seen. Derek Sivers takes a shaky video of a lone dancing guy at a music festival and turns it into a lesson about leadership.
A leader needs the guts to stand alone and look ridiculous. But what he's doing is so simple, it's almost instructional. This is key. You must be easy to follow!
Now comes the first follower with a crucial role: he publicly shows everyone how to follow. Notice the leader embraces him as an equal, so it's not about the leader anymore -- it's about them, plural. Notice he's calling to his friends to join in. It takes guts to be a first follower! You stand out and brave ridicule, yourself. Being a first follower is an under-appreciated form of leadership. The first follower transforms a lone nut into a leader. If the leader is the flint, the first follower is the spark that makes the fire.
I got this link from @ottmark, who astutely notes its similarity to Kurt Vonnegut's three types of specialist needed for revolution.
The rarest of these specialists, he says, is an authentic genius -- a person capable of having seemingly good ideas not in general circulation. "A genius working alone," he says, "is invariably ignored as a lunatic."
The second sort of specialist is a lot easier to find: a highly intelligent citizen in good standing in his or her community, who understands and admires the fresh ideas of the genius, and who testifies that the genius is far from mad. "A person like this working alone," says Slazinger, "can only yearn loud for changes, but fail to say what their shapes should be."
On Twitter, Jeff Veen shortened the three personas to "the inventor, the investor, and the evangelist".
From the AIGA, a lovely short film on type designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. I love the bit about starting a typeface design with the O, H, and D. Elsewhere, Hoefler recommended other potential starting points:
Work out the B, the ampersand, and the bullet before you get too far: you'll have to confront decisions about thinning strokes, intersections, and shapes without any counters, which might inform what you do on the other letters.
(via daring fireball)
Why go to medical school when you can just read this Medical School tumblr blog? Includes posts on open heart surgery, sickle cell anemia, and a simple suturing demonstration:
You've heard of Weird Twitter but now there's Weird Ocean. This square mile of water in the Lembeh Strait has some of the strangest and most unique marine life on the planet.
Includes an appearance by the always delightful cuttlefish. (via @Colossal)
In the 1980s, crack babies were all over the news. They were supposed to have severe mental and physical problems, overwhelm our schools and health care institutions, and cost us billions of dollars. None of this happened because the media latched onto some limited preliminary research and blew it all out of proportion.
Retro Report has gone back to look at the story of these children from the perspective of those in the eye of the storm -- tracing the trajectory from the small 1985 study by Dr. Ira Chasnoff that first raised the alarm, through the drumbeat of media coverage that kept the story alive, to the present where a cocaine-exposed research subject tells her own surprising life story. Looking back, Crack Babies: A Tale from the Drug Wars shows the danger of prediction and the unexpected outcomes that result when closely-held convictions turn out to be wrong.
This video was produced by a new news organization called Retro Report, which revisits old news stories with a sober eye..."a smart, engaging and forward-looking review of these high-profile events". In addition to the crack babies story, they've also explored the New York garbage barge and the Tailhook scandal.
Back in April, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (aka a NASA satellite with a bitchin' camera) took photos of the Earth along a swath of land 120 miles wide by 6,000 miles long, from Russia to South Africa. Then they stitched it into a mesmerising 15-minute video:
Feel free to put on some Sigur Ros while you watch. (via the atlantic)
Daft Punk + goats who yell like people = not the funniest thing you've seen in your life but it hits a certain spot, that's for sure.
(via @thebakerruns)
From XKCD, a chart of the memes that various star systems are just hearing from the Earth's light-speed communications.
This is the meme version of Contact's opening credits scene, which is one of my favorites:
Claude Friese-Greene shot these scenes in color around London in 1927.
(thx, rob)
Update: This footage was taken from the British Film Institute's YouTube channel and it turns out there's tons of color footage Friese-Greene shot around Britain in the 1920s. Like farm laborers in Devon in 1924, a busking family in Scotland in 1926, the docks in Cardiff in 1926, and much more. (via @magnakai)
Perfect for a slow Friday afternoon. Have a good weekend everyone.
A nice short analysis by filmmaker Steven Benedict of the themes expressed and techniques used by Steven Spielberg in his films.
Marine scientist Cassandra Brooks narrates a time lapse video of her two-month journey on an Antarctic icebreaker. High points: the ice ramming at 2:35 and the fishing penguins at the end.
Brooks blogged her journey for National Geographic. If you want to fall down the rabbit hole of how icebreakers are designed and how they differ from usual ships, Wikipedia is a good place to start.
For a ship to be considered an icebreaker, it requires three traits most normal ships lack: a strengthened hull, an ice-clearing shape, and the power to push through sea ice.
Damn! Watch this railroad tanker car instantly implode:
I couldn't find too much information on the source of this clip, but it appears to be part of a safety training video on the perils of improperly steam cleaning tanker cars. In the clip, the tanker car is filled with steam and the safety valves are disabled. The steam cools, then condenses, the pressure inside drops, and the pressure difference is big enough to crumple that huge railcar like a napkin.
Update: See also "sun kink", when railroad tracks buckle in intense heat:
An explanation of the effect can be found here. (thx, will)
The Peregrine Falcon is the world's fastest animal1; it can reach speeds of more than 240 mph during dives. It uses that speed to kill other birds in mid-air. Here's a video of a Peregrine diving and killing a duck, shot with a camera mounted on the falcon's back.
It's cool watching her fly around, but the exciting part starts right around 2:45. The acceleration is incredible. The same bird does a longer and faster dive in this video (at ~0:55):
Here's what the Peregrine's dive looks like from an observer's point-of-view:
Our family had a lively discussion about Peregrine Falcons around the dinner table a couple of weeks ago...I can't wait to show the kids these videos when I get home tonight. (via @DavidGrann)
[1] Although Joseph Kittinger and Felix Baumgartner might quibble with that. ↩
Many Russian cars are outfitted with dashboard cameras to protect drivers against insurance fraud. These cameras have caught all sorts of crazy happenings -- car accidents, low-flying jets, insurance scam attempts, meteors, and plane crashes
-- leading many to believe that Russia is a place where crazy shit pretty much happens constantly.
But Russia's dash cams have also captured many more tender moments -- people hopping out of their cars to help old ladies across the street, looking after little kids who wandered into the street, pushing cars out of snowbanks, etc.
I love the hell out of this video. Russia, you're alright. (via devour)
In Lambert's Cafe in Sikeston, MO, they just throw your bread to you from across the restaurant.
You've heard of oobleck, yeah? It's a non-Newtonian fluid made of corn starch and water that doesn't act like a normal fluid. Like, for instance, you can run on top of it:
Cooking Issues ran across a video of a cook preparing noodles made from a non-Newtonian batter. Watch as the batter solidifies when he slaps more batter into the sieve and then drains out of the bottom.
Love the technique here. See also the noodle-making robot, power of noodles, Korean honey candy, and, my favorite, flatbread tossing:
(via @Ianmurren)
Yesterday morning, a 747 cargo plane taking off from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan crashed soon after taking off. A dash cam caught the entire thing on video:
It is amazing how quickly a powerful and fast jet airplane turns into a leaden hunk of metal. (via @VictorGodinez)
Steven Spielberg is doing a sequel to Lincoln called Obama and he got Daniel Day-Lewis to play the lead. I knew Day-Lewis was good, but this is bonkers.
In complete defiance of its parents, NASA's Solar Dynamics Observatory has stared directly at the Sun for the past three years. Here's a video of those three years made from still images taken by the SDO.
During the course of the video, the sun subtly increases and decreases in apparent size. This is because the distance between the SDO spacecraft and the sun varies over time. The image is, however, remarkably consistent and stable despite the fact that SDO orbits the Earth at 6,876 miles per hour and the Earth orbits the sun at 67,062 miles per hour.
The video notes say the animation uses two images per day...it would be nice to see the same animation with a higher frame rate. (via ★interesting)
Cars were moving too fast through an intersection in the town of Poynton in England, so they took out the stoplights & walk signals and replaced the intersection with an unusual double roundel design. The result is a mixed-use space with slower moving car traffic and safer pedestrian traffic.
(via digg)
Burn this guy at the stake because he's a witch! You can't separate out the water from Coca-Cola with a simple water filter. Coke is elemental, inviolable. It's The Real Thing. Coke Is It. A Coke is a Coke.
(via digg)
What happens when you wring a washcloth out in zero gravity? Something cool.
Commander Hadfield is the best. I love when he casually lets go of the wireless mic and it just floats there right in front of his face. (thx, dusty)
Dove employed Gil Zamora, a FBI-trained forensic sketch artist, to help with an interesting experiment about self-perception. Zamora first sketched a series of women as they described themselves (they were hidden from his view) and then he sketched portraits of the same women based on descriptions by people who had met them. The difference between the two drawings, self-described vs. peer-described, were striking.
Major League Combat is a sport that combines juggling, rugby, Capture the Flag, and maybe Quidditch? I can't make out how you score, but keeping your juggle from end-to-end seems important.
Weird sport or the weirdest sport? It's definitely up there with chessboxing. (thx, benjamin)
Watch as wingsuit pilot Alexander Polli flies through a hole in a mountain. And it's not that big of a hole either.
Watching this, I kept seeing an image of Wile E. Coyote wearing an Acme-brand wingsuit smacking into the side of the mountain. (via stellar)
Starting with cubes of four simple materials (bone, tissue, 2 types of muscles) and one simple rule (faster bots have more offspring) results in a surprising amount of complexity among walking robots.
(via buzzfeed)
Filmed at 780 fps with a Phantom Flex from the back of a moving SUV, James Nares' Street depicts people walking New York streets in super slow motion.
The film runs 60 minutes (depicting about three minutes of real time footage), Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore did the soundtrack, and it's on display at The Met until the end of May.
If you're compiling a list of the least cool brands, Kmart deserves serious consideration. But you've got to give them props for this daring ad touting free home shipping of out-of-stock merchandise.
I almost shipped my pants laughing at this. (via ★interesting)
The term of art for time lapse videos in which the camera moves is hyperlapse. In playing around with the hyperlapse technique, Teehan+Lax developed a system to make hyperlapse videos using Google Street View. Like this one:
This video would be a lot better without the first 15 seconds (sippy cups? talking? who cares?) but the rest of it is pants-wettingly amazing.
I remember tearing baseballs apart as a kid and seeing the rubber core, but I guess I had forgotten that a baseball is mostly a leather-covered yarn ball. See also how footballs are made and homemade soccer balls. (via @marklamster)
NPR's Planet Money talked to Ed Herr of Herr Foods about how potato chip manufacturing has changed since 1946, when the company was housed in a barn on his family's land.
Herr estimates that if they currently made chips the way they did back in the 1940s, they'd cost about $25 a bag.
Someone built a robotic goalkeeper and then someone else had the bright idea to pit reigning best player in the world Lionel Messi against it:
Iker Casillas, your job is in jeopardy. But maybe not quite yet...by the final attempt, Messi seems to have figured out how to send the goalie the wrong way, at least for an instant. (via digg)
The other day I posted a video about how differential gears work to help cars go smoothly around curves. Trains don't have differential gears, so how do they manage to go around curves without slipping or skidding? Richard Feynman explains:
Ha, it looks like I've posted this one before as well. Can never get enough Feynman. (thx, kerry)
I've posted this before, but it's so good, here it is again: a super-simple explanation of why differential gears are necessary in cars and how they work.
(via @stevenstrogatz)
Leigh Singer gathered more than 50 clips from movies that break the fourth wall (where the characters acknowledge they're in a movie).
Sadly my favorite broken fourth wall moment didn't make the list: Billy Ray Valentine in Trading Places getting a commodities lesson from the Dukes. (via zupped)
If you need a little pick-me-up, try this video of two nonagenarians racing each other in the 100-meter dash. Seems like there's gonna be a clear winner from the start but...
Both men were born in 1918; if the video were filmed this year, that would make them 95. (via @gavinpurcell)
Dustin Cohen made a lovely little film about shoemaker Frank Catalfumo, who has been making and repairing shoes in Brooklyn since before World War II.
Frank Catalfumo is a 91 year old shoemaker and repairer in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He first opened the doors to F&C Shoes in 1945 and continues to work five days a week alongside his son Michael. If you're ever in the area, make sure to stop by the shop and listen to one of Frank's amazing stories about life in Brooklyn back in the day.
This is an episode of Computer Chronicles from 1995 showing what you could do on the internet.
(via mental floss)
Vice made a 24-minute documentary film about Cody Wilson, who is designing a semi-automatic weapon that can be printed out on a 3-D printer. You just download the plans, print it out, and there you go.
"Gun control is a fantasy" indeed.
Well, this is interesting. Graphene is a substance discovered relatively recently that has a number of unusual properties. In 2004, physicists at the University of Manchester and the Institute for Microelectronics Technology in Russia used ordinary scotch tape to isolate single-layer sheets of graphene. Once isolated, the sheets could be tested for the unusual properties I mentioned. The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for this work.
In 2012, a group of researchers at UCLA discovered they could make single-layer sheets of graphene by coating a DVD with graphite oxide and then "playing" the disc in a plain old DVD drive. And then in a happy accident, they found that graphene has unusually high supercapacitance properties, which could mean that graphene could be used, for example, as a mobile phone battery that lasts all day, charges in a few seconds, and can be thrown into a compost bin after use.
(via io9)
It does what it says on the tin.
My favorite part is how it shoots the airplane out at the end. "Be gone, good sir, I am quite done with you!" (thx, Alex)
There's prior art, but this image toaster is still pretty cool.
Toastagram? Toastr? I foresee BERG putting out a smaller version of this, perhaps printing out the day's news on a small-crumb cocktail bread; they'll call it Little Toaster. (via sly oyster)
If it's got wheels, extreme sports enthusiasts will do tricks on it. The push scooter your five-year-old rides at the playground is no exception:
If they ever to a Back to the Future reboot, they know who to call for the downtown Hill Valley chase scene. (via @DavidSimkins1)
A Danish TV show called Dumt & Farligt (which translates as Stupid & Dangerous) films all sorts of crazy things at 2500 frames/sec with a super HD camera. You may have seen the first video from last April...here's a follow-up that just came out:
The highlights for me were the bottle of red wine in the microwave and the rocket-powered drying rack from the first video and the bottle of Diet Coke shot with a bullet and gas leak in a camper. The Diet Coke scene is almost cinematic, the way the bottle's clothes are blown off and "arms" flap around as the bottle spins, wobbles, and finally falls to the ground. (via digg)
Watch as Ludovic Woerth & Jokke Sommer fly through a hole in a building in central Rio de Janeiro that looks not much more than 15 feet wide. Jesus.
And speaking of Jesus, another pair of wingsuiters flew under the arms of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio a few years ago. (via @rands)
A nascent trend on YouTube is to take contemporary dramas and imagine what their 1995-style opening credits sequences might look like. The first one appears to be this Walking Dead one, followed by Breaking Bad, which is the best of the bunch:
The Game of Thrones one is pretty great as well:
These seem to be a variation on the recut trailers meme, e.g. The Shining as a romantic comedy or Toy Story as a horror film. (via @aaroncoleman0)
New York Day is a film by Samuel Orr that crams a whole NYC day into about three and a half minutes.
Orr is using Kickstarter to raise funds to make a longer version (~20 min.) of the film. (via @dhmeyer)
This is a clip from Samsara, a 2011 film directed by Ron Fricke, who was the director of photography for Koyaanisqatsi. The chicken picker machine hoovering up chickens and depositing them into drawers is one of the most dystopian things I've ever seen.
The whole film doesn't look this depressing, but this short clip really gives full visual meaning to the mass production of food. (via @colossal)
While ice climbing in Wales, Mark Roberts gets hit by some ice and falls more than 100 feet...and his helmet cam caught the whole thing.
He was not seriously injured but that fall went on for way longer than I expected. (via @DavidGrann)
9 minutes and thirty nine seconds of Ron Swanson dancing to Daft Punk. Years from now this video could be the basis of a religion.
Broadcasters are starting to experiment with using footage taken from cameras worn by in-game referees. Here's footage from a rugby ref's vantage point:
And from a hockey ref:
PRIDE Fighting Championships has been using ref cams since at least 2004. Also: roller derby, girls high school basketball, and paintball. (thx, david)
Poignant video profile of Ralph Baer, the inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console gaming system. He's still inventing at age 90.
Your endurance challenge for today: see how much of this video of the final round of the 2012 O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship you can watch before flinging your computing device across the room.
For bonus points, see if you can get through some of the comments...they are PUNishing. (Gah, I've been infected.)
This is a clip from the BBC series Edwardian Farm that shows how rope was made in the olden days.
The entire series is available to watch online.
Here's a video that shows how scientists believe the human face has changed over the past 7 million years:
I don't want to stand in the way of all science, but I am completely on board with the banning of all research into the creation of a dancing dog robot that throws cinder blocks with ease. Oops, I am too late. And now this is happening.
This place isn't too far from me in Boston, so if anyone wants to meet up for a little Terminator 2 style future saving, let me know.
Since the Sun moves relative to the other stars around it at about 45,000 miles/hr, if you change the frame of reference from the Sun to the surrounding stellar system, you get planetary motion that looks something like this:
I would take this video with a grain of salt though, especially when it says things like "the Sun is like a comet, dragging the planets in its wake"...the planets don't lag behind the Sun. Better to think of the thing as a conceptual schematic: resembling reality but not really accurate. (via @pieratt)
Update: There's a new version of the video that addresses some of the concerns raised about the first video:
(thx, john)
Update: Phil Plait from Bad Astronomy has posted a pretty thorough takedown of this video.
However, there's a problem with it: It's wrong. And not just superficially; it's deeply wrong, based on a very wrong premise. While there are some useful visualizations in it, I caution people to take it with a galaxy-sized grain of salt.
And the TED Prize ("awarded to an extraordinary individual with a creative and bold vision to spark global change") this year goes to this guy, who invented a machine for separating Oreos:
Congratulations! (thx, brad)
Tony McCabe demonstrates how to jump on eggs without breaking them.
If this is what Britain was like in the 70s, it's possible that Monty Python's Flying Circus was a documentary. (via @scottlamb)
Wearable computing is heating up. Jawbone and Nike are vying for your wrists, Google and Lat Ware want your face, Fitbit owns the hips, and Apple might want to make your shoes smarter. But one of the most intriguing demos I've seen, if the footage in the video is to be believed, is the Myo gesture control armband.
It's an eye-popping demo. The copy on the site reads "unleash your inner Jedi" and you pretty much do look like Obi-Wan using the thing. Which is to say, like a crazy person cosplaying Star Wars in the middle of the street. Adam Lisagor called Google Glass a "Segway for your face" back in April. The Segway was another great idea on paper that failed in part because of human vanity. Segways weren't cool...you looked like a dork riding one. You're gonna look like a dork wearing Google Glass. You're gonna look like a dork unlocking your car with a swipe of your Myo-enabled arm.
But the uncool factor can be overridden in various ways. Nike can make anyone wear anything, especially if it's packaged like a watch with superpowers. A few years ago, you looked like a dork wearing headphones in public but Apple made it cool. Beats By Dre made wearing huge over-the-ear headphones in public cool a few years later. You look like a dork wearing a Bluetooth headset and talking to yourself, but they are cheap and useful enough that it doesn't matter. Mobile phone usage in public used to appear very strange...for awhile it was difficult to tell the brokers-in-a-hurry from the mentally unstable homeless folks muttering to themselves.
That's the challenge for Google Glass and Myo: are these things useful enough and cheap enough to overcome that dork factor or can they somehow be made cool? Because if they aren't and you can't, no one wants to be seen using a Nintendo Power Glove in public and no amount of extreme sports dubstep transitions can save you.
What are all those models in the J.Crew catalog doing anyway? By cleverly piecing together narratives from catalog photographs, Meghan O'Neill imagines that they are solving crimes, misbehaving on honeymoons, and such. Here's the most recent episode:
(via @sippey)
A popular option for moving companies to offer in Japan is, not only to transport your belongings, but to pack them and unpack them for you.
I'd move to Japan just so I'd never have to pack up my own apartment again... except I'd have to pack up my apartment to get there. (via @ohheygreat)
You've gotta wait for it. Nope, not that one. Not that. Or that. THAT. THAT'S THE SHOT.
Literally unbelievable. Totally lucky but unbelievable. (via @DavidGrann)
Is it permissible to squee about Westeros?
Squee! I still miss Sean Bean though. I wouldn't mind a little Six Feet Under Late Ned action. Maybe bring him back as a White Walker or something. They're headless zombies, right? Hello?
The electric lighbulb, the phonograph, and the movie camera were invented (or significantly improved upon) by Thomas Edison, so lets give him credit for one more: LOLcats:
This short film was shot at the world's first movie studio, The Black Maria, located in West Orange, NJ. The entire building was built on a turntable so that the building could rotate with the sun for the best lighting conditions. (via "robin sloan")
This is really simple: these are goats who sound like people. You have probably seen this before, but if you're anything like me, you'll want to watch it at least once a day for the rest of your life.
Michael Jordan just turned 50 and so Deadspin's Emma Carmichael asked former Cavs guard Craig Ehlo what it was like to guard Jordan in his prime. Sometimes Jordan would tell Ehlo what he was going to do ahead of time and still score.
Usually, Ron Harper would start on him, then I would come in and go to him, and Ron would go to Scottie Pippen or something like that. I always felt very lucky that Coach Wilkens had that faith in me to guard him. Michael was very competitive when he got between the lines. He was never a bad talker or too arrogant, but it was just like what Jason [Williams] said: He'd tell you. He only did that to me one time, from what I remember. It was his 69-point game, and things were going so well for him that I guess he just went for it. We were running up the court side-by-side and he told me: "Listen man, I'm hitting everything, so I'm gonna tell you what I'm gonna do this time and see if you can stop it. You know you can't stop it. You know you can't stop this. You can't guard me.
"I'm gonna catch it on the left elbow, and then I'm gonna drive to the left to the baseline, and then I'm gonna pull up and shoot my fadeaway."
And sure enough ...
Ehlo famously guarded Jordan during The Shot:
See also Michael Jordan Has Not Left the Building and Jordan's top 50 greatest moments.
This Reddit group is collecting links to full-length movies and TV shows that are available on YouTube. Like this unauthorized copy of Django Unchained:
See if you can get through the whole thing before it gets taken down.
Update: David reminded me that you can actually watch full-length movies and TV shows on YouTube for a rental fee. (thx, david)
Google is making a wearable headset called Google Glass and here's a look at how the heads-up display is going to work.
Maybe it's the jetlag talking, but that looks pretty fricking great. But I have a feeling that Glass is going to be a Segway for your face.
With the northeast still smarting from their two+ feet of snow, it's worth watching this two minute video to see how those trillions of flakes were born.
For more, this recent 16 minute Radiolab segment looks into whether perfect snowflakes exist.
There's a blizzard bearing down on the northeastern United States and here's some essential information you need to know if you live in an affected area:
But seriously, you should follow @EricHolthaus for the latest storm info. (Ok, so we have our first celebrity Twitter weatherman. Weather and climate are going to become a lot more important in American pop culture...at what point do Gawker or Buzzfeed launch their climate verticals?)
What a day! First we were delighted by a madcap U-turn video that is probably fake, we learned there's such a thing as windless kite flying, and now we're learning that competitive wood planing is a thing. In Japan, the best wood planers gather each year to see who can shave the thinnest shaving off of a piece of wood. My literal jaw literally dropped when I saw how thin the shavings are:
9 microns! A micron is one-millionth of a meter or one-thousandth of a millimeter. For reference, the diameter of a red blood cell is 8-9 microns, a cloud water droplet is about 10 microns across, and an average human hair is about 100 microns across. How do you get such a thin shaving? A really sharp blade. Like maybe a knife sharped with .025 Micron Polycrystalline Diamond Spray? (via @Colossal)
Remember the guy who rode the alleged 100-foot wave? Here's a video of some other tow-in surfers from that same location (Nazare, Portugal) on the same day. The waves aren't quite as big as 100 feet, but the sequence starting at 1:52, where the guy falls off his board and swims like hell to get out of the way before the whole ocean crashes down on top of him (watch the top of the wave), gives you a real sense of how insane this sport is.
Great use of high definition and slow motion. (via @alexismadrigal)
From the 2013 Windless Kite Festival, Spencer Watson does a routine to an orchestral version of the Rolling Stones' Paint It Black.
(via @dunstan)
This is straight out of an episode of Mr. Bean or Austin Powers: a driver in a tiny car tries to make a U-turn on an even tinier street in Naples and gets stuck. Traffic starts backing up. A crowd gathers. A gang of motorcyclists shows up. A church procession is blocked from going down the street. Eventually the priest gets involved in moving the car.
This better be real because it's one of the most improbably cinematic things I've ever seen. (via @DavidGrann)
Update: WHY CAN'T WE HAVE NICE THINGS??! This is probably a fake.
Republic had presented the video of the jam so become "viral" on the web. In fact, the movie is the result of a staging. residents hired as extras, 24 hours and no camera but only iPhone and iPad to shoot. These are the ingredients of the video style "Benvenuti al Sud" that drove him crazy social networks and turned the spotlight on the town in the province of Naples.
Stupid Fiat. (thx, pb)
In January, I linked to a piece in the New Yorker about master pickpocket Apollo Robbins.
One day, over lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in a Las Vegas strip mall, Robbins demonstrated his method on me. "When I shake someone's hand, I apply the lightest pressure on their wrist with my index and middle fingers and lead them across my body to my left," he said, showing me. "The cross-body lead is actually a move from salsa dancing. I'm finding out what kind of a partner they're going to be, and I know that if they follow my lead I can do whatever I want with them."
Robbins was recently a guest on the Today show and the amount of criminal shenanighans he pulls off in this four minute video is astounding:
(via digg)
A collection of starlings is called a murmuration and when they roam the skies together, it's beautiful:
This video is more artistic than the one I linked to in 2011, but the birds are super close in the older one:
This didn't feel like 8 minutes at all, which I guess, at my age, is the whole point.
(via @mrgan)
In a report from 1967, Walter Cronkite takes us on a brief tour of what they imagined the home office would be like in the 2000s.
In the 21st century, it may be that no home will be complete without a computerized communications console.
Cronkite also toured the kitchen and living room of the future.
(via viewsource)
This video of artist Li Hongbo demonstrating the complexity of his paper sculptures will blow your mind. More wild images at Dominik Mersch Gallery.
(via ★stellar)
David Friedman profiles Martin Goetz, who received the very first software patent granted by the US Patent Office in 1968.
Former three-term mayor of NYC Ed Koch died this morning at 88. Worth reading are obituaries by Robert McFadden in the NY Times:
Mr. Koch's 12-year mayoralty encompassed the fiscal austerity of the late 1970s and the racial conflicts and municipal corruption scandals of the 1980s, an era of almost continuous discord that found Mr. Koch at the vortex of a maelstrom day after day.
But out among the people or facing a news media circus in the Blue Room at City Hall, he was a feisty, slippery egoist who could not be pinned down by questioners and who could outtalk anybody in the authentic voice of New York: as opinionated as a Flatbush cabby, as loud as the scrums on 42nd Street, as pugnacious as a West Side reform Democrat mother.
"I'm the sort of person who will never get ulcers," the mayor - eyebrows devilishly up, grinning wickedly at his own wit - enlightened the reporters at his $475 rent-controlled apartment in Greenwich Village on Inauguration Day in 1978. "Why? Because I say exactly what I think. I'm the sort of person who might give other people ulcers."
Koch, New York City's dominant political figure of the 1980s and the architect of what remains its governing political coalition, stayed politically relevant through his long political twilight, courted aggressively by figures including Presidents George W. Bush and Barack Obama for his role as a proxy for pro-Israel Democrats willing, but not eager, to cross party lines.
But Koch's later years of quips, movie reviews, and presidential politics remain secondary to his central legacy, which is in New York's City Hall. Tall and gangly with a domed, bald head and a knowing smile, Koch was New York's mayor and its mascot from 1978 to 1989. Through three terms, he repeated one question like a mantra: "How'm I doing?" At first, the answer was clear to observers who had watched the city slide toward bankruptcy: exceptionally well. Koch managed New York back from the brink, drove hard bargains with municipal unions, cut jobs where he had to and reduced taxes where he could. He presided over a boom in Manhattan, and spent his new revenues on renewing the south Bronx.
But as the Koch administration moved its third term, the mayor lost his momentum. As Wall Street boomed in the 1980s, Koch took advantage of the new revenues to double New York City's budget and offer tax breaks to real estate developers. But the largesse couldn't buy him friends: he clashed with black leaders and his old allies among Manhattan's liberal democrats. New York became famous for its racial tensions and rising crime. He courted the Democratic Party bosses of Queens and the Bronx only to be tarnished by the corruption scandals that surrounded them.
Here's the trailer for Koch, a documentary on the former mayor that coincidentally opens today in limited release:
The Perennial Plate videos always make me jealous, and this beautiful cut of a "day" in India is no exception. This is gorgeous and you should watch it on full screen.
Carlin Isles is one of the world's fastest men at the 100 meters but that wasn't good enough to make the US Olympic team. So he looked for other sports in which to make his mark and settled on rugby sevens. The difference in speed between him and the other players on the field is startling.
I saw this video back in December and didn't think much of it, aside from "wow, that dude is fast". But on Twitter the other day, Robin Sloan suggested it was Kottke-esque. Now that I've watched it again, I think I know what he was getting at.
People in tech talk a lot about innovation and disruption but there's a lot of hand-waving that happens when you attempt to pinpoint what those things mean. One of the reasons I enjoy following sports -- and in particular the sporting world's outliers (Messi, Jordan, Billy Beane, Rodman, Magnus Carlsen, Vonn, Belichick, Federer, knuckleball pitchers, Barry Sanders, Serena, etc.) -- is that you can see innovation and disruption in action, more or less directly. When Carlin Isles takes a pass from one of his teammates and blazes past the other team, it's clear he's playing an entirely different game than the other 13 players on the field and profiting handsomely from it...innovation results in disruption.
(Oh, and it's not that Isles is necessarily any good at rugby...that remains to be seen. But the combination of speed and size that he brings to the game is a disruptive innovation and opposing teams will have to change the way they play when he's on the field.)
Update: Like I said, it remains to be seen whether or not Isles has a big impact on rugby, but Jonah Lomu was a star rugby player who had a long-lasting influence on the game:
Lomu in his prime was not quite as fast as Isles (10.13s vs 10.8s in the 100 meters) but at 6'5" and 276 lbs, he had a brutal combination of pace and size. (via @dan_connolly)
Paperman accompanied Wreck-It Ralph in the theaters last year but was released online yesterday. The short film is nominated for an Oscar in part because of its aesthetic: it's a CGI-animated film from Disney that looks like it's hand drawn.
Director John Kahrs told Cartoon Brew that the origin of Paperman "really came out of working so much with Glen [Keane] on Tangled." After looking at the work of Keane -- a classic Disney animator who worked on The Little Mermaid, Beauty and The Beast and Aladdin, among many other projects -- Kahrs found himself with a new appreciation for traditional animation and drawing techniques. "I thought, Why do we have to leave these drawings behind? Why can't we bring them back up to the front of the image again? Is there a way that CG can kinda carry along the hand drawn line in a way that we haven't done before?"
The answer was yes. It just required a technology that no one had actually created yet.
Reminds me a bit of what Wes Anderson did with th stop motion animation in Fantastic Mr. Fox...he went back to a more traditional look that made the whole thing look less polished than it might have with newer techniques.
Well, this is amazing (in the way that things requiring a ton of organization, commitment, and time are amazing, not in the way life-saving vaccines are amazing). Artist etoilec1 drew the Gangnam Style video, the entire thing, and presented it as a flipbook. Here's his original Youtube where he says he had to remove the music because of copyright, so the embed below will likely not last long. Visit etoilec1's page for several Dragon Ball Z flipbooks.
(via ★stellar)
Help Lord Grantham find his cigars, puff up pillows for Anna, and spy on other staff for Lady Mary in this "tastefully exciting" SNES version of Downton Abbey.
In June 1985, 17-year-old LL Cool J and his DJ Cut Creator played a gymnasium at Colby College in Waterville, Maine with maybe 120 people in attendance. At this point, his debut album hadn't even come out yet and rapping/scratching was not widely known, so LL and CC give the unenthusiastic audience a little demonstration of what it's all about.
This is amazing. The footage was digitized from VHS by the show's organizer's son and he adds more information about it in the comments:
LL was paid $500 for the show. Since he was the only rap act, he was worried it would a be short performance, so my dad suggested he fill it in with the scratching and beat boxing.
LL was signed to Def Jam. My dad tried to get RUN DMC, but could not afford them, so Def Jam told him he should bring up LL Cool J.
(via @sampotts)
This robot with a chainsaw for an arm makes a few cuts into a log and, voila, chairs.
More info here. What's so terrifying about furniture making? Now imagine this robot with tiny chainsaws on its arms leading a army of BigDog-mounted noodle-slicing robots and sleep well tonight, suckers! (via @curiousoctopus)
The People are Awesome videos usually come out in October (2010, 2011), but I'll accept it a couple months late. Four and a half minutes of people doing awesome things.
(via ★acoleman)
One of Sean Wilson's chicken laid a huge egg and when he cracked it open, it contained another egg.
Not even a hoax! As the curator of the egg collection at London's Natural History Museum explains, the double egg is rare but real and results from a fully formed egg being pushed back into the ovary, where another egg forms around it. Here's another double egg and a report of a Texan double egg. (via colossal)
Now that the giant squid has been observed alive in its natural habitat (the video footage is rather underwhelming IMO):
it's the perfect time to re-read David Grann's 2004 piece about giant squid hunters.
O'Shea is one of the few people in the world who have succeeded in keeping not only coastal but also deep-sea squid alive in captivity. Unlike an octopus, which, as he put it, "you can't kill, no matter how hard you try," a squid is highly sensitive to its environment. Accustomed to living in a borderless realm, a squid reacts poorly when placed in a tank, and will often plunge, kamikaze-style, into the walls, or cannibalize other squid.
In 2001, during a monthlong expedition at sea, O'Shea caught a cluster of paralarval giant squid in his nets, but by the time he reached the docks all of them had died. He was so distraught that he climbed into the tank, in tears, and retrieved the corpses himself. "I had spent every day, every hour, trying to find the paralarvae, and then they died in my grasp," he told me. For two years, he was so stricken by his failure that he refused to mount another expedition. "I knew if I failed again I would be finished," he recalled. "Not just scientifically but physically and emotionally."
He couldn't stop wondering, though, about what had happened in the tank. His wife, Shoba, a computer scientist who was born in India, told me that sometimes in the middle of an unrelated conversation he would suddenly say, "What did I do wrong?" O'Shea became determined to correct what he called "my fatal mistake," and began a series of painstaking experiments on other species of juvenile deep-sea squid. He would subtly alter the conditions of captivity: tank size, intensity of light, oxygen levels, salinity. He discovered that the tank in which he had stored his paralarvae during the expedition had two lethal flaws: it had a rectangular shape, which, for some reason, caused the squid to sink to the bottom and die; and its walls were made of polyethylene, a plastic compound that, it turns out, is toxic to deep-sea squid. "Knowing what I know now, I feel like a fool," he said. "It was like walking them to their execution."
I enjoyed every minute of this behind-the-scenes piece by Stephen Rodrick on the making of Paul Schrader's The Canyons.
Lindsay Lohan moves through the Chateau Marmont as if she owns the place, but in a debtor-prison kind of way. She'll soon owe the hotel $46,000. Heads turn subtly as she slinks toward a table to meet a young producer and an old director. The actress's mother, Dina Lohan, sits at the next table. Mom sweeps blond hair behind her ear and tries to eavesdrop. A few tables away, a distinguished-looking middle-aged man patiently waits for the actress. He has a stack of presents for her.
Here's a scene from the movie:
By now, you've seen a billion instances of people taking daily pictures of themselves and editing them into time lapse movies set to music. Well, this one is a bit different. It features an unhappy young man who, over the course of three years, transitions into a more confident and happy young woman.
This video makes me happy. And there are dozens of other examples and tutorials on YouTube of people switching sexes. What a boon for those who struggle with their sex/gender to be able to see other people who are going through and have gone through similar situations.
Take footage of NFL players, coaches, and officials talking, dub it poorly with alternate dialogue, and you get a bit of genius.
Let's not beat around the bush: this is the best thing ever. (via @gavinpurcell)
Some YouTube commenters claim to have found the cameraman in the TV footage, looking out the window at around 13:03. This video is posted with healthy skepticism, but also an unbridled joy in amazing timing. (via digg)
Update: Andy Baio synched the two videos up and it seems legit.
The owner of this cockatiel taught it how to sing dubstep.
Nice try, bird, but this is still the best dubstep video of all time. (via stellar)
Keith Ratliff posted dozens of videos showcasing high-powered guns on his popular YouTube channel, FPSRussia. Last week, he was found dead with a single shot to the head, surrounded by several guns...but not the gun that killed him.
The news, coming amid a national debate about gun control, rippled across the blogs and social networking sites where his videos were popular. Tributes on Facebook and Twitter came from fans stunned that such a well-armed expert had not been able to defend himself.
"For him not to pull out that gun and try to defend himself, he had to feel comfortable around somebody," his wife, Amanda, told a television channel in Lexington, Ky., where he used to live. "Either that or he was ambushed."
Here's a FPSRussia video showing off a fully automatic shotgun that can shoot 300 rounds per minute even after being submerged in water:
And this drone with a machine gun on it is terrifying:
(via the atlantic)
Update: Just to clarify because I'm getting a bunch of mail about it, Ratliff was a gun nut and the owner of that YouTube channel, but he was not the person in all those videos...he was more like the producer/camera operator.
Also, that quadricopter machine gun thing is CGI and a commercial for a video game. Soon enough though.
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