Making of: CG for Star Wars

There was a short CG special effects sequence in Star Wars (the Death Star explanation at the Rebel briefing); here's how it was made.

Denver to Singapore in 5 minutes

Timelapse video of a trip from Denver to Singapore and back again.

I made a time lapse video of a weekend trip I did to singapore by hanging a point and shoot around my neck, taking a snapshot every couple minutes/hours.

Amazing surfing video of Matt Meola

It is difficult to watch this video of Matt Meola surfing and not think of the evolution of skateboarding, particularly the transition between freestyle skating and the invention of vert in the empty swimming pools of southern California. Most of the stuff he does looks impossible. (via matt's a.whole)

Update: Gah, the video has been pulled offline for some reason. Here's another one, not quite as good. You can also try YouTube.

Dressing like a grownup

The first episode of a new web series "about dressing like a grownup" called Put This On is about denim. Denim like a jean. Put This On is hosted by Jesse Thorn of The Sound of Young America and Adam Lisagor, the web's loneliest sandwich.

Worst cut to commercial ever

I was watching The Perfect Storm on The Weather Channel the other night and witnessed the worst cut to commercial in the history of television.

If you're not familiar with the film, this is *the* scene in the movie, the climax...when this huge wave overwhelms the Andrea Gail and all souls are lost at sea. Bravo, Weather Channel. Next time, have somebody view the movie before you chop it up randomly for ads.

Update: This one might be worse. With about two minutes remaining in extra time of a 0-0 match between Everton and Liverpool, ITV cut away to commercial and back just in time...to see the players celebrating the winning goal. I think "wankers!" is the appropriate response here.

This cut to commercial during Battlestar Galactica (spoilers! or so I'm told) is pretty bad as well. (thx, michael & gerald)

Butchering a side of beef

Video of a butcher breaking down a substantial piece of beef.

Meat Appreciation: A NYC Restaurant Honors the Whole Animal from SkeeterNYC on Vimeo.

Meet Shanna Pacifico, the chef de cuisine & butcher at Back Forty restaurant in New York City. She helped devise a sustainable meat program that brings in whole animals to make up their menu, where everything gets used and nothing goes to waste.

NSFV (not safe for vegetarians). (via serious eats)

Banner ads on flies

A company at a German trade show tied tiny banner ads to flies as a promotional stunt. This video footage is weee-eird.

The banners, measuring just a few centimetres across, seem to be causing the beleaguered flies a bit of piloting trouble. The weight keeps the flies at a lower altitude and forces them to rest more often, which is a stroke of genius on the part of the marketing creatives: the flies end up at about eye level, and whenever a fly is forced to land and recover, the banner is clearly visible. What's more, the zig-zagging of the fly naturally attracts the attention because of its rapid movement.

One marketing creative's stroke of genius is another person's animal cruelty.

The long zoom of cells

Awesome zoomable demonstration of the scale of cells, book-ended from macro to nano by a coffee bean and a carbon atom. See also Powers of Ten.

Levi's (sponsored by America)

This is a 36-second wax cylinder recording of Walt Whitman reading a few lines from his poem, America. You may recognize the recording from its use in Levi's new ad campaign:

I thought for sure that Ryan McGinley had directed this and the O Pioneers! commercial but it turns out he just (just!) did the photos for the print campaign. (via slate)

Update: The audio clip used in that commercial might not be Whitman after all. From the inbox:

The Walt Whitman recording that is being used by the Levi's commercial that you posted on the 28th is actually not Whitman, and is now considered by most audio archivists to be a hoax.

More information about this most interesting recording can be found in Vol. X, No. 3 of Allen Koenigsberg's Antique Phonograph Monthly magazine from 1992, pages 9-11.

Among things pointed out, one is that the speech on the soundtrack ends with the quote, "Freedom Law and Love," whereas the original printed version of the poem ends with "Chair'd in the adamant of Time."

Koenigsberg also points out that Whitman's last years were chronicled on a daily basis by his personal secretary, and being wheelchair-bound, such a visit for Whitman would have been difficult, unprecedented, and undoubtedly noted.

(thx, jack)

Star Guitar

Star Guitar music video. Music by The Chemical Brothers. Video directed by Michel Gondry.

The making of the Star Guitar music video.

Ever since this video blew my mind when I first watched it, I've wondered how it was made. Turns out Gondry tested the concept out on a sidewalk with oranges, shoes, videotapes, and drinking glasses. Alas, the making of doesn't cover the three months of post production required by the finished product, although the video isn't completely digital as you might expect:

The video is based on DV footage Gondry shot while on vacation in France. They shot the train ride 10 different times during the day to get different light gradients.

Still love that video.

Music videos of the decade

Antville has a list of the 100 best music videos of the decade, the first 50 or so are embedded right on the page. (via fimoculous)

How to shoot an anvil 200 feet into the air

If you've ever wanted to see someone shoot an anvil 200 feet into the air, you should watch this video. (And not just someone...a world champion anvil shooter.)

With gunpowder and a fuse. Just like Wile E. Coyote! (thx, rob)

First video from a plane, 1909

This short film was made in 1909 and depicts Wilbur Wright flying one of his airplanes around an open field. At 1:38, they attach the camera to the plane and shot what is thought to be the first video footage shot from a powered flying machine.

Then the plane started up again, followed a launching pad and took off: the camera was fixed for the first time on the ground that gave way...and the emotion was there, so great you could almost touch it! The image was as unstable as the cabin of the plane flying at low altitude, flying over the countryside and gradually approaching a town.

(via @ebertchicago)

Sand animation of Germany invading Ukraine

Kseniya Simonova won Ukraine's Got Talent 2009 competition with her dramatization of Germany's invasion of Ukraine during WWII, performed with sand on a giant lightbox. Sounds like the cheesiest thing, but this performance is amazing.

Watch until at least 1:06...that's when my mouth dropped open a bit. The entire audience was in tears by the end. (via @jessicadeva)

10/GUI

10/GUI is a new proposal for a way of interacting with personal computers using all ten fingers in a multitouch scheme. Very Minority Report.

(thx, david)

Drinking like Mad Men

Some folks from the web magazine Double X wondered what it would be like to drink as much in the workplace as the characters do on Mad Men. So they spent the day getting hammered and tried to do some work. The results are somewhat different than on the show.

The Botany of Desire documentary

PBS will be airing a two-hour-long documentary based on Michael Pollan's excellent The Botany of Desire (previously recommended here).

The tulip, by gratifying our desire for a certain kind of beauty, has gotten us to take it from its origins in Central Asia and disperse it around the world. Marijuana, by gratifying our desire to change consciousness, has gotten people to risk their lives, their freedom, in order to grow more of it and plant more of it. The potato, by gratifying our desire for control, control over nature so that we can feed ourselves has gotten itself out of South America and expanded its range far beyond where it was 500 years ago. And the apple, by gratifying our desire for sweetness begins in the forests of Kazakhstan and is now the universal fruit. These are great winners in the dance of domestication.

A five minute preview of the show is available on YouTube:

I've watched the whole program and it's a worthy companion to the book.

Update: PBS has put the whole thing online for free. (via unlikely words)

Rare hour-long Alfred Hitchcock interview

In 1973, Tom Snyder interviewed Alfred Hitchcock for the Tomorrow Show. Thought to be lost, the whole thing is now up on YouTube after being transferred from a VHS tape. Here's part one:

To follow: part two, part three, part four, part five, and part six.

Beyonce's Single Ladies covered by Pomplamoose

A good example of what Robin Sloan calls the production-as-performance video.

What I love about the approach is that it's showing us a complicated, virtuoso performance, but making it really clear and accessible at the same time. It's entertaining, but it's also an exercise in demystification -- which of course is exactly the opposite objective of every music video, ever. Their purpose has been to mystify, to masquerade, to mythologize in real-time.

The value of time off

Every seven years, Stefan Sagmeister closes his design studio for a year of focused R&D.

Every seven years, designer Stefan Sagmeister closes his New York studio for a yearlong sabbatical to rejuvenate and refresh their creative outlook. He explains the often overlooked value of time off and shows the innovative projects inspired by his time in Bali.

Bullets are slow

You're going to spend the next 10 minutes watching bullet impacts in super slow motion.

The really amazing part -- nope, not the instant bullet liquification (!!!) -- is how quickly other things happen after the bullet hits something. Glass seems to crack almost instantly, even at a million fps, making the bullets seem pokey in comparison.

Carl Sagan Auto-Tune (feat. Stephen Hawking)

Maybe you're tired of un-pop-music-like things being run through Auto-Tune, but I'm not quite there yet. This Auto-Tuned Carl Sagan mix is very nearly sublime.

From sketch to photo instantly (this is insanely awesome)

Wow. With PhotoSketch, you just draw a sketch, label each item, like so:

and then the system goes out, finds photos that match the sketched items and their labels, and automatically pastes it all together into one composite image:

The site is down right now but the paper is available for download and this video gives you a taste of how it works:

Again, wow. (via migurski)

Update: I've seen many references to Photosketch saying that it has to be fake (here's a sampling). But it's pretty obviously real. For one thing, here's the source code; try it out (Windows only). It was presented at SIGGRAPH Asia 2009; here's the listing of papers presented. The authors all have web pages on university sites and have published work using similar techniques and technology (Ping Tan and Ariel Shamir for example). And is what it does really that unbelievable? At the most basic level Photosketch is just find me a man that's sorta shaped like this, a dog that looks like this, and paste them together with a background that looks like this. That the results are so impressive (especially for a demo) is a testament to the team's execution and attention to the small details. Even if it turns out to be an elaborate hoax, I have no doubt that someone could actually build a working version of Photosketch...I mean, look at TinEye and Photosynth.

Philip Glass on Sesame Street

Loved this when I was a kid; all those shapes right there in those circles.

Amazing avalanche rescue video

A skier with a video camera on his helmet gets caught in an avalanche and then, four and a half minutes later, gets rescued. The good stuff starts around one minute in.

This was a decent sized avalanche. 1,500 feet the dude fell in a little over 20 seconds. The crown was about 1 - 1.5m. The chute that he got sucked through to the skier's right was flanked on either side by cliff bands that were about 30m tall. He luckily didn't break any bones and obviously didn't hit anything on the run out.

I had always assumed -- and this is likely based almost entirely on an episode of The Simpsons -- that you had options when buried by an avalanche...like digging yourself out or at least being able to move. Not so says the Utah Avalanche Center FAQ:

It doesn't matter which way is up. You can't dig yourself out of avalanche debris. It's like you are buried in concrete. Your friends must dig you out.

The FAQ contains a story by the director of the UAC about surviving an avalanche of his own; he confirms the concrete-like hardness of post-avalanche snow.

But after a long while, after I was about to pass out from lack of air, the avalanche began to slow down and the tumbling finally stopped. I was on the surface and I could breathe again. But as I bobbed along on the soft, moving blanket of snow, which had slowed from about 50 miles per hour to around 30, I discovered that my body was quite a bit denser than avalanche debris and it tended to sink if it wasn't swimming hard. [...] Eventually, the swimming worked, and when the avalanche finally came to a stop I found myself buried only to my waist, breathing hard, very wet and very cold.

I remembered from the avalanche books that debris instantly sets up like concrete as soon as it comes to a stop but its one of those facts that you don't entirely believe. But sure enough, everything below the snow surface was like a body cast. Barehanded, (the first thing an avalanche does is rip off your hat and mittens) I chipped away at the rock-hard snow with my shovel for a good 5 minutes before I could finally work my legs free.

Hammer vs. feather on the Moon

Nothing like a little science on the Moon, I always say.

Astronaut David Scott in 1971, from the Apollo 15 Lunar Surface Journal. Scott was part of the Apollo 15 crew, and applied Galileo's findings about gravity and mass by testing a falcon feather and a hammer. The film, shown in countless high school physics classes, is the nerdy, oft-neglected cousin of Neil Armstrong's space paces.

Bringing the oyster back to New York

Michael Osinski grows oysters out on Long Island, now an unusual pursuit in an area that used to support dozens of oyster companies...New York used to be the place for oysters (see also).

If you'd like to try them out, Widow's Hole sells their oysters to several NYC restaurants, including Gramercy Tavern, Union Square Cafe, and Bouley. Osinski achieved a bit of notoriety earlier this year when he wrote an article about his experience writing software for Wall Street firms called My Manhattan Project: How I helped build the bomb that blew up Wall Street. (via serious eats)

Robotic pancake sorter

This robot can sort pancakes at a rate of over 400 ppm (pancakes per minute).

The action gets going at about 1:15...don't miss the explanation of the pancake buffer shelf about 2/3s of the way through. (via eat me daily)

19th century movie in color

Each frame of this 19th century film by the Lumière brothers was hand-colored to create an early color moving picture. The color-shifting effect of the dress looks quite modern.

The dancing was inspired by Loie Fuller, a modern dance pioneer.

David Attenborough's favorite animals

I can't get this to work (because I'm in the US?) but the BBC has put up a collection of David Attenborough's favorite moments from his last 30 years of shooting nature documentary videos. More info here.

It has always been my hope that through filmmaking I can bring the wonder of the natural world into people's sitting rooms, inspire people to find out more and to care about the world we share.

(via @dunstan)

Weird neck exercise machine

My wife almost wet her pants at this part of a TV ad for the Neckline Slimmer. This odd little device reminds me a bit of the eye exercises that Speed Reader did on The Great Space Coaster. (Congrats if you get that reference.)

How to win at Scrabble

How to win at Scrabble if you're perhaps not that good at the words thing.

Scrabble isn't a game of who can get the best 6 letter words. It's a game of points and squeezing 2 letter terms into corners. Mehal Shah takes us through clean and sometimes dirty ways to win at Scrabble.

(via radar)

Federer between the legs shot at US Open

This is the most ridiculously implausible tennis shot you'll ever see.

Federer says "it was the greatest shot I ever hit in my life".

Michael Jordan's 23 most memorable moments

Michael Jordan is set for induction into the Basketball Hall of Fame this weekend and in honor of the best player ever, ESPN is counting down with video of his 23 most memorable moments.

Djokovic and McEnroe have a hit

Novak Djokovic, the clown prince of tennis, did his impression of John McEnroe after a victory at the US Open the other day and McEnroe came down from the booth to do his best Djokovic impression.

Al Franken draws map of USA

His US map is one of the best hand-drawn maps I've seen.

(via sippey)

Fire ant lifeboat

Watch as some fire ants built a lifeboat (out of themselves!) after the Amazon floods.

If I'm ever in a vegetative state after an accident or anything, just cue up a bunch of BBC nature videos and I'll be good.

The sling shot man

Rufus Hussey is a crack shot with a slingshot.

Rufus hit the big-time when he was invited to appear on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. After a bit of small-talk, Johnny asked, " I understand you're going to demonstrate your skill... is that right?" Rufus replied, "Sure! I'd rather shoot the beanshooter than shoot the bull." Soon Rufus was shooting a corncob from Johnny's hand.

(via reference library)

100 years of special effects

A wonderfully concise video tour of how special effects in film have evolved since 1900.

Anthony Bourdain's Disappearing Manhattan

A Continuous Lean recommends Anthony Bourdain's Disappearing Manhattan episode of No Reservations...with the pertinent YouTube embeds.

Fuck, it's worth a watch even if you have seen it ten times. Eisenberg's, Manganaro Foods, Keens, Le Veau d'Or, this show is like my NYC gastro-playbook. Watch it, love it, live it.

Grub Street has some textual CliffsNotes if you're not into the video. If I had one of them life lists, sharing a meal with Bourdain would probably be on it.

Acceleration

Somewhat related to the apple video from the other day is Jake Lodwick's Acceleration.

Federer's (nearly) flawless footwork

A New York TImes video explains Roger Federer's footwork and how it helps him be so effective and efficient on the court. Bonus: the creepy CG version of Federer makes him seem like even more of a robot. (via clusterflock)

Ecological apple

This is about as creepy as you can make an apple. (via clusterflock)

How a car's differential gear works

The video starts off with synchronized motorcycle riding but give it a minute.

Museum of Animal Perspectives

A bunch of videos that show the world from the perspective of several animals, including an armadillo, a wolf, a scorpion and a house fly. Here's a bison's view of moving with a herd:

(via @dunstan)

NYC parkour

Rocketboom recently profiled some parkour practitioners in NYC. Is 35 too late to take up a new sport?

Man in a van interview

Jimmy Tarangelo lives in Manhattan in a van down by the river.

He doesn't like paying rent, but he does like living in Manhattan. So what does he do? He lives in a van down by the river, literally. I spent a few hours with Jimmy and let him speak his mind.

Wrist-mounted flamethrowers

A man demonstrates a pair of wrist-mounted flame throwers in his garage.

This somehow does not end in tragedy, but I see a very painful sneeze in this fellow's future. (via minizud)

Celebrity GPS voices

I had no idea you could get celebrity voices for your GPS navigation device. There's Mr. T ("what does he say if you need to go to the airport?"), Yoda, KITT from Knight Rider, Michael Caine, Kim Cattrall, the Star Trek computer voice, Homer Simpson, Gary Busey, and Dennis Hopper.

And then of course you've got the mashups like Mr. T navigates Mr. Bean, Mr. T navigates Frogger, and Mr. T navigating in Mario Kart Wii.

You may even be able to get a Bob Dylan voice soon.

Widescreen vs pan and scan

This video features a number of directors talking about the difference between viewing films in widescreen vs. pan and scan. Martin Scorsese:

[Converting to pan & scan] is, technically, re-directing the movie.

Update: Thoughts from David Lynch about pan and scan taken from a 1997 interview:

I would like to see everything done letterboxed and with great sound. I'm not too interested in doing the commentary, you know, like a lot of people do. But in some strange way I kind of like pan-and-scan. Because you see things. It is a compromise, and in a couple of things you really say, "Why am I doing it?" But it's just an interesting thing that happens- another composition. It's not so bad, but I wish really that people could see the thing in a theater and that laserdiscs and videos didn't exist. Because on the big screen with the sound, you become inside the film, and that's the beauty of cinema. And it never happens on video, and it doesn't happen on laserdisc, either.

(thx, bill)

Life advice from old people

Seth Menachem takes his video camera out on the streets and collects Life Advice From Old People. Menachem is in the movie biz so he even got advice from Jon Voight and Errol Morris.

Helen Keller video

This 1930 newsreel footage shows Helen Keller and her companion Anne Sullivan demonstrating how Keller learned to speak.

Much is made of Keller's method of sign language, but I had no idea she could talk. (via gulfstream)

Update: Here's an audio clip of Keller giving a speech.

Damn nature, you scary!

I almost wet my pants laughing the other night watching this little bit on Family Guy:

The Midtown Games

It was so hot in New York City last week -- HOW HOT WAS IT? -- it was so hot that the first event of the Midtown Games was held in a fountain on 50th St.: a 50m freestyle swim.

Friday, August 14th at 1pm marked the opening event of the Midtown Games: Olympics, and was attended primarily by the city's punch-drunk, heat-stroked interns. With the blare of a foghorn the crowd closed in like a shield, trumpets sang out "Eye of the Tiger" and five swimmers in Speedos and caps leapt into the burbly water of a decorative fountain to swim its 50 metres or so in elegant racing style.

Burning car

The best part of this video of a car on fire is the sound. (via today and tomorrow)

The 2000s, summed up

Momus is first out of the gate with a summary of the 00s, what he calls a "mister narrative of the decade"...a one-man master narrative.

Other things that looked dead or dying this decade: I personally stopped going to the cinema. Why sit behind someone's head in a fleapit when you can download all you need to see and project it at home? Copyright effectively died, overtaken, de facto, by events on the internet. Magazines and newspapers ended the decade looking very unhealthy indeed, although books seemed strong. Young people got a lot less interested in cars, leading some to label Japan a post-car society. Detroit pretty much collapsed. The polar ice caps melted rapidly; climate change is a fact. Banks -- having invented what they thought were clever ways to spread risk around, and play with planet-sized sums of entirely fictional money -- looked pretty shaky.

Embedded in Momus's post is a video called Rise of the Rest, the title of which was borrowed from Fareed Zakaria.

From the video:

In ten years, the number one English speaking country in the world will be USA India China.

Don't text while driving

This is why you shouldn't text while driving. While you're at it, knock it off with the phone conversations, lipstick application, and crossword puzzles. NSFW or for the faint-of-heart.

While I was away

JD's girlfriend was not a good listener. He was leaving on a trip to Europe for two weeks. She wasn't aware he had left. Then the emails started.

(via that's how it happened)

Quentin Tarantino's top 20 movies

Quentin Tarantino talks about his 20 favorite movies that have been made since he became a director.

Here's the full list in handy text form:

Battle Royale
Anything Else
Audition
Blade
Boogie Nights
Dazed & Confused
Dogville
Fight Club
Fridays
The Host
The Insider
Joint Security Area
Lost In Translation
The Matrix
Memories of Murder
Police Story 3
Shaun of the Dead
Speed
Team America
Unbreakable

Interview Project

Interview Project features David Lynch traveling around the country and interviewing normal folks. (thx, youngna)

Update: David Lynch isn't travelling around...his son Austin and Jason S. are co-directing. (thx, eric)

Harrison Ford, family guy

Harrison Ford is concerned about his family. Like in every movie he's ever been in. (via cyn-c)

Hubble Ultra Deep Field in 3-D

Using redshift data, a 3-D animated view of the Hubble Ultra Deep Field was created.

A long walk across China

Man shaves head, walks across China for a year, grows beard & crazy hair, and takes daily photos and short videos of himself along the way, which he stitches into this.

Paris is Burning

Smashing Telly found the entirety of a documentary called Paris is Burning on YouTube.

This is a documentary about vogueing, and the extremely refined and detailed aesthetic sensibilities it reflects, shot in New York City around Chelsea, the Meatpacking District, and Harlem in the mid- to late-80s. The city has changed in dramatic ways since then, to say the least. The characters of the film are complete outsiders with, at the same time, a deep understanding of the world they are outside of.

Check out a recent example of vogue dancing.

High speed robotic hands

Wow. I had no idea that robots could move that quickly. (via justin blanton)

Insect flight patterns

Video composed of long-exposure photos of bugs buzzing around a streetlight.

(via snarkmarket)

Vol Libre, an amazing CG film from 1980

In 1980, Boeing employee Loren Carpenter presented a film called Vol Libre at the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference. It was the world's first film using fractals to generate the graphics. Even now it's impressive to watch:

That must have been absolutely mindblowing in 1980. The audience went nuts and Carpenter, the Boeing engineer from out of nowhere, was offered a job at Lucasfilm on the spot. He accepted immediately. This account comes from Droidmaker, a fascinating-looking book about George Lucas, Lucasfilm, and Pixar:

Fournier gave his talk on fractal math, and Loren gave his talk on all the different algorithms there were for generating fractals, and how some were better than others for making lightning bolts or boundaries. "All pretty technical stuff," recalled Carpenter. "Then I showed the film."

He stood before the thousand engineers crammed into the conference hall, all of whom had seen the image on the cover of the conference proceedings, many of whom had a hunch something cool was going to happen. He introduced his little film that would demonstrate that these algorithms were real. The hall darkened. And the Beatles began.

Vol Libre soared over rocky mountains with snowy peaks, banking and diving like a glider. It was utterly realistic, certainly more so than anything ever before created by a computer. After a minute there was a small interlude demonstrating some surrealistic floating objects, spheres with lightning bolts electrifying their insides. And then it ended with a climatic zooming flight through the landscape, finally coming to rest on a tiny teapot, Martin Newell's infamous creation, sitting on the mountainside.

The audience erupted. The entire hall was on their feet and hollering. They wanted to see it again. "There had never been anything like it," recalled Ed Catmull. Loren was beaming.

"There was strategy in this," said Loren, "because I knew that Ed and Alvy were going to be in the front row of the room when I was giving this talk." Everyone at Siggraph knew about Ed and Alvy and the aggregation at Lucasfilm. They were already rock stars. Ed and Alvy walked up to Loren Carpenter after the film and asked if he could start in October.

Carpenter's fractal technique was used by the computer graphics department at ILM (a subsidiary of Lucasfilm) for their first feature film sequence and the first film sequence to be completely computer generated: the Genesis effect in Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan. The sequence was intended to act as a commerical of sorts for the computer graphics group, aimed at an audience outside the company and for George Lucas himself. Lucas, it seems, wasn't up to speed on what the ILM CG people were capable of. Again, from Droidmaker:

It was important to Alvy that the effects support the story, and not eclipse it. "No gratuitous 3-D graphics," he told the team in their first production meeting. "This is our chance to tell George Lucas what it is we do."

The commercial worked on Lucas but a few years later, the computer graphics group at ILM was sold by Lucas to Steve Jobs for $5 million and became Pixar. Loren Carpenter is still at Pixar today; he's the company's Chief Scientist. (via binary bonsai)

Cory Arcangel's atonal YouTube cat video mashup

Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 is a set of pieces written for the piano by Arnold Schoenberg in 1909, some of the first western music to written in an atonal style. Cory Arcangel took a bunch of YouTube videos of cats playing the piano and fused them together into a performance of op. 11.

This project fuses a few different things I have been interested in lately, mainly "cats", copy & paste net junk, and youtube's tendency in the past few years to host videos that are as good and many times similar to my favorite video artworks. I think all this is somehow related.

Cory's no-bullshit statements about his art are just as entertaining as the work itself:

So, I probably made this video the most backwards and bone headed way possible, but I am a hacker in the traditional definition of someone who glues together ugly code and not a programmer. For this project I used some programs to help me save time in finding the right cats. Anyway, first I downloaded every video of a cat playing piano I could find on Youtube. I ended up with about 170 videos...

You can catch Cory's project in-person at Team Gallery in NYC and at Kunsthaus Graz in Austria.

Tron Legacy trailer

They're making a new Tron movie. And it looks like it might not suck! (via @dburka)

Update: The Tron Legacy trailer and Michael Jackson's Beat It match up pretty well, don't they?

You Are There

First broadcast on the radio in 1947, You Are There presented historic events as they would have been reported by modern news broadcasters. In 1953, the program jumped to television with Walter Cronkite as the host, who also hosted a brief revival of the show in the 70s.

The series also featured various key events in American and world history, portrayed in dramatic recreations, with one addition -- CBS News reporters, in modern-day suits, would report on the action and interview the characters. Each episode would begin with the characters setting the scene. Cronkite, from his anchor desk in New York, would give a few words on what was about to happen. An announcer would then give the date and the event, followed by a bold, "You Are There!"

Cronkite would then return to describe the event and its characters more in detail, before throwing it to the event, saying, "All things are as they were then, except... You Are There."

At the end of the program, after Cronkite summarizes what happened in the preceding event, he reminded viewers, "What sort of day was it? A day like all days, filled with those events that alter and illuminate our times... and you were there."

Here's a clip from an episode from the 70s version of the show about the siege of the Alamo. Cronkite reports and Fred Gwynne (Herman Munster) plays Davy Crockett.

What a fantastic idea for a show...I'd love to see a contemporary version of this. Well, not too contemporary; watching a CNBC-style presentation of the 1929 stock market crash wouldn't really be that fun.

The best film titles ever made

Perhaps someday I'll get tired of posting links to lists of good movie title sequences, but today is not that day. (via quipsologies)

Virtually delicious

Simple video of a burger, fries, and a drink, right? Well, just watch until about 28 seconds in.

Food stylists, your days are numbered...some intern at Pixar is gunning for your job. (via red)

Watching them swim

Get your Wednesday started off on the right foot: load this video up in HD, full-screen, let it buffer, and then just watch for awhile. You'll feel right as the mail.

The main tank [at the Okinawa Churaumi Aquarium in Japan] called the "Kuroshio Sea" holds 7,500-cubic meters (1,981,290 gallons) of water and features the world's second largest acrylic glass panel, measuring 8.2 meters by 22.5 meters with a thickness of 60 centimeters. Whale sharks and manta rays are kept amongst many other fish species in the main tank.

This tank is the second largest aquarium tank in the world.

Biomimicry

This was one of my favorite talks at PopTech in 2004: Janine Benyus on biomimicry. From her web site:

In Biomimicry, she names an emerging discipline that seeks sustainable solutions by emulating nature's designs and processes (e.g., solar cells that mimic leaves, agriculture that models a prairie, businesses that run like redwood forests).

CBS News Coverage of Apollo 11

For those of you who missed the show last night or if you just want a replay, the CBS News footage of the Apollo 11 Moon landing and Moon walk, presented by Walter Cronkite, is available on YouTube. The Moon landing video is here and the first of 7 videos of the Moon walk is here.

The giant Apollo 11 post

Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the launch of Apollo 11 and Monday is the same for both the first Moon landing and the first walk on the surface. In this entry, I've collected some of the best resources on the web related to the anniversary...articles, historical documents, audio, video, transcripts, photos, and the like. Enjoy.

We Choose the Moon is tracking the activities of the Apollo 11 mission as it happened 40 years ago. Very nicely done.

Housed on NASA's history site is a ton of resources about the Apollo 11 landing, including an annotated transript of the landing, which makes for really interesting reading. MP3 files are also available as are many, many video clips of the landing at the astronauts' time on the surface. Highlights: this video was shot out of the window of the lunar module from a height of 50,000 feet until one minute after touchdown and I've never seen Armstrong's first step on the Moon from this angle before.

For its July 21, 1969 issue, The NY Times used 96 pt. type to declare that MEN WALK ON MOON.

The landing was made four miles west of the aiming point, but well within the designated area. An apparent error in some data fed into the craft's guidance computer from the earth was said to have accounted for the discrepancy.

Suddenly the astronauts were startled to see that the computer was guiding them toward a possibly disastrous touchdown in a boulder-filled crater about the size of a football field.

Mr. Armstrong grabbed manual control of the vehicle and guided it safely over the crater to a smoother spot, the rocket engine stirring a cloud of moon dust during the final seconds of descent.

The Onion used larger type and took a more unadulterated and profane approach (love the video version).

John Noble Wilford, the Times journalist who wrote the front page story underneath the 96 pt. type -- "the biggest single story of my career" -- recounts his Apollo 11 experience and ponders the Apollo program's legacy in a great piece for the Times.

It then occurs to me that if Columbus and Capt. James Cook were alive, they might be less astonished by two men landing on the Moon than by the millions of people, worldwide, watching every step of the walk as it happens. Exploring is old, but instantaneous telecommunications is new and marvelous.

In just 1.3 seconds, the time it takes for radio waves to travel the 238,000 miles from Moon to Earth, each step by Armstrong and Aldrin is seen, and their voices heard, throughout the world they have for the time being left behind. In contrast to exploration's previous landfalls, the whole world shares in this moment.

The Apollo 11 mission in photographs: NASA Images is the comprehensive source for NASA photos of the Apollo 11 mission; the always excellent Big Picture has photos of the mission from a variety of sources; David Burnett shot photos of people watching the launch; Time looks at Apollo astronauts Now and Then; the NY Times collected photos from readers of their Apollo 11 moments; Life has several photo galleries: Buzz Aldrin Looks Back, Scenes From the Moon, Up Close With Apollo 11 (rare and never-published photos), and The World Watches; and Google's archive of Life magazine's Apollo 11 images.

A map of where Armstrong and Aldrin walked during their 2+ hours on the surface. That same map superimposed on a soccer pitch and on a baseball field. They didn't walk that far at all.

Explore the Apollo 11 landing site on Google Moon.

In piece published on the 40th anniversary of the Apollo 11 launch, Buzz Aldrin advocates not a return to the Moon but a mission to Mars with the objective of establishing a colony on the red planet.

Let the lunar surface be the ultimate global commons while we focus on more distant and sustainable goals to revitalize our space program. Our next generation must think boldly in terms of a goal for the space program: Mars for America's future. I am not suggesting a few visits to plant flags and do photo ops but a journey to make the first homestead in space: an American colony on a new world.

Robotic exploration of Mars has yielded tantalizing clues about what was once a water-soaked planet. Deep beneath the soils of Mars may lie trapped frozen water, possibly with traces of still-extant primitive life forms. Climate change on a vast scale has reshaped Mars. With Earth in the throes of its own climate evolution, human outposts on Mars could be a virtual laboratory to study these vast planetary changes. And the best way to study Mars is with the two hands, eyes and ears of a geologist, first at a moon orbiting Mars and then on the Red Planet's surface.

Video of John F. Kennedy's "we choose to go to the Moon" speech given at Rice University on September 12, 1962. Fewer than 7 years later, Apollo 11 achieved the goal that Kennedy laid out in that speech.

In a piece for New Scientist, Linda Geddes writes about possible future lunar parks and how they might be preserved.

Around these [landing sites] are scattered smaller artefacts and personal items, such as Neil Armstrong's boots and portable life-support system, scientific instruments and their power generators -- and, of course, the iconic US flag which remains planted in the moon's surface. Then there are the footprints and rover tread paths. Despite the passing of the years, these remain carved into the dust because the moon has no wind or rain to wash them away.

Anthropologist P. J. Capelotti of Penn State University in Abington has mapped out five "lunar parks". These cover the areas where the majority of the artefacts are concentrated and could be used as a basis for future preservation efforts. "Nobody's saying that the whole moon has to be off limits, but as people are starting to make plans for tourism and mineral extraction, or for putting a base there, they just need to be aware of them and work around them."

Since returning from the Moon, Neil Armstrong has been less and less willing to speak in public about his Apollo 11 experience. For the 40th anniversary, Armstrong will not take part in the NASA event to commemorate the landing. His only appearance related to the anniversary will be a 15-minute lecture at a Smithsonian Institution event on Sunday night. I found this event on the National Air and Space Museum site...maybe that's it? If so, then Armstrong's lecture will be webcast live on the NASA TV site that evening.

Popular Science shares a list of ten things you didn't know about the Apollo 11 Moon landing.

7. When Buzz Aldrin joined Armstrong on the surface, he had to make sure not to lock the Eagle's door because there was no outer handle.

Moonwalk One is a documentary film about Apollo released in 1970 to little fanfare, even though it won an award at the Cannes Film Festival. The film was commissioned by NASA but with so much Apollo activity and information happening in the late 60s and early 70s, no one was interested in distributing or seeing the film and it was soon forgotten. Recently, the only remaining 35mm print of the film was located under the director's desk, restored, and offered for sale on DVD in time for the 40th anniversary.

To get a feel of what it was like in the Soviet Union during the Apollo 11 mission, Scientific American interviewed Sergei Khrushchev, son of former Russian premier Nikita Khrushchev. The reaction was somewhat more subdued than in other parts of the world.

Of course, you cannot have people land on the moon and just say nothing. It was published in all the newspapers. But if you remember [back then] when Americans spoke of the first man in space, they were always talking of "the first American in space" [not Yuri Gagarin]. The same feeling was prevalent in Russia. There were small articles when Apollo 11 was launched. Actually, there was a small article on the first page of Pravda and then three columns on page five. I looked it up again.

Eat Me Daily explores the food consumed on the mission.

The Apollo crew even dined on thermo-stabilized cheddar cheese spread and hot dogs during the moon mission, bringing at least a bit of America in July to the sterile flight craft. And yes, there was bacon - foreshadowing the current bacon craze, the first meal eaten by man on the moon was none other than bacon cubes, coated with gelatin to combat crumbs.

The issue of the New Yorker published just after the Moon landing is worth a look: much of the Talk of the Town section is devoted to the landing and there's also a Letter from the Space Center. (Subscribers only.)

The main NASA site has an interactive feature to explore the landing site and Eagle (Eagle was the name of the lunar module).

Finally, there's still some good stuff to be had on the old telly on Monday. The History Channel has As It Happened: Man on the Moon at 8pm ET:

This special takes viewers back to July 1969 to experience the actual CBS News/Walter Cronkite coverage of man's first lunar landing. Using minimal editing and leaving the original footage untouched viewers will feel as if they are watching the CBS coverage in July of 1969. While today we know the outcome of Apollo 11's mission it was not a given then. This will become evident watching Walter Cronkite and his colleagues as they watch the historic lunar mission unfold before them.

and Moonshot, a two-hour documentary about Apollo 11, at 9pm ET. Turner Classic Movies is airing a bunch of Moon-related movies all day, including A Trip to the Moon (a 12-minute film from 1902) at 8pm ET and the excellent For All Mankind (newly out on Criterion Blu-ray) at 8:15pm ET. The Discovery Channel has When We Left the Earth, a one-hour documentary on the mission, at 10pm ET. If none of that tickles your fancy, try episode 6 of the excellent From the Earth to the Moon (available for the insanely low price of $12 on Amazon) or In the Shadow of the Moon on DVD.

[If you enjoyed this post, you should post it to Twitter.]

Update: Tom Wolfe, author of The Right Stuff, writes that landing on the Moon killed NASA.

Everybody, including Congress, was caught up in the adrenal rush of it all. But then, on the morning after, congressmen began to wonder about something that hadn't dawned on them since Kennedy's oration. What was this single combat stuff -- they didn't use the actual term -- really all about? It had been a battle for morale at home and image abroad. Fine, O.K., we won, but it had no tactical military meaning whatsoever. And it had cost a fortune, $150 billion or so. And this business of sending a man to Mars and whatnot? Just more of the same, when you got right down to it. How laudable ... how far-seeing ... but why don't we just do a Scarlett O'Hara and think about it tomorrow?

July Moon is a forthcoming documentary about some lost NASA tapes. Surely not these NASA tapes?

The computer source code that ran Apollo 11's Command Module and Lunar Module has been released.

A recently discovered photo clearly shows Neil Armstrong's face on the Moon through his visor.

He was the first man to walk on the moon, taking that one giant leap for mankind -- yet most of the famous shots are of his fellow astronaut Buzz Aldrin, as it was Armstrong who manned the stills camera.

New Scientist overlaid the Apollo lunar excursion maps on top of cities in Google Earth. Neil and Buzz didn't even leave Trafalgar Square on their trip to the Moon.

Tectonic plate timelapse

Timelapse video of the shift of the Earth's tectonic plates from 400 million years ago to 150 million years into the future. (via kk)

NASA releases restored Apollo 11 moon walk video

NASA is restoring and improving the video footage of the Apollo 11 mission and this morning they released some of those videos, including Neil Armstrong's first step on the Moon, Aldrin's first step, and the raising of the American flag.

Update: The tapes containing the original footage were erased to record satellite data. The restorations are being sourced from broadcast TV footage.

Seven hours of Feynman lectures online

With a little help from Bill Gates (who secured the rights using personal funds), Microsoft is presenting a series of lectures on physics by Richard Feynman. The lectures, shown in seven hour-long segments, were recorded by the BBC at Cornell University in 1964. Lecture titles are as follows:

Law of Gravitation - An Example of Physical Law
The Relation of Mathematics and Physics
The Great Conservation Principles
Symmetry in Physical Law
The Distinction of Past and Future
Probability and Uncertainty - The Quantum Mechanical View of Nature
Seeking New Laws

(thx, dan)

What fast looks like

People like to go fast and film themselves doing so. Modern technology offers a variety of ways to both go faster than ever before and record that speed for posterity. But for something to look fast on video, there needs to be a frame of reference for the viewer -- something to hurtle past or whoosh by -- and maybe even a hint of danger. Here are a selection of videos of people doing just that: traveling at high speeds in cars, on train tracks, through the air, and down mountains in close proximity to traffic, large rocks, and thin atmospheres. Most of these videos are filmed from a first-person perspective so that when you watch them, you can imagine that you're the one zooming along.

In 1976, Claude Lelouch mounted a camera on the front of his Mercedes-Benz 450SEL 6.9 and drove through the streets of Paris -- running red lights, jumping curbs and possibly reaching speeds upwards of 120 mph -- before reaching his date near the Sacré Coeur. The result is the film C'était un rendez-vous, 8 uncut minutes of insane urban driving.

Base jumpers equipped with wingsuits can glide very fast very close to the ground. Perhaps the most insane videos on the page...they're not doing 1200 mph or anything, but they are awfully close to the ground with few safety options if they slip up.

The lads at Top Gear took the Bugatti Veyron to its top speed of 253 mph on a test track. The test driver seems to have had what I would term a religious experience at the top speed.

Two gents in powder-blue suits speed down a California hill on skateboards. Holy crap!

240 mph on a Suzuki Hayabusa motorcycle. Oh, and he does a wheelie from 70 to 140 mph. (Note: Wikipedia says the bike has an "electronically restricted" top speed of 188 mph. Either the owner a) removed the restriction, or b) tweaked the speedometer to display higher than normal speeds.)

In 1960, Joseph Kittinger reached a speed of 714 mph after jumping from a helium balloon at an altitude of 102,800 feet.

A French TGV train reaches a top speed of 357 mph in a 2007 test.

A camera mounted on the external tank records the launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis in May 2009. There's not a lot to whoosh past here, but at an eventual 18,000 mph, the pace at which the Shuttle leaves the Earth behind is astounding.

While skydiving, both of Michael Holmes' chutes failed as his helmet camera recorded his crash landing into some thick bushes. (He lived.)

Footage of Alex Roy and David Maher on the road as they sped across the entire United States in just over 32 hours, an unofficial world record. There is a book and a blog of the experience.

Passenger seat and road-side views of a Lamborghini Murcielago doing 219 mph on the 202 freeway in Mesa, Arizona.

World's fastest

Video that showcases the world's fastest people in several disciplines: clapping, sprinting, undressing, Rubik's Cubing, gun shooting, and stamping.

The stamping champ is kind of incredible and if you haven't seen the cup stacker, check her out and here's one that's even faster. Stacking gear is available if you'd like to join in.

Eternal Moonwalk

This is pretty awesome: a bunch of videos strung together to make it seem like one long moonwalk. In tribute to Michael Jackson, of course. What's amazing is that for the 4-5 minutes I watched, there was not a single decent moonwalk...just people shuffling backwards. (via vsl)

Update: Matt Zoller Seitz analyzes Eternal Moonwalk and finds much to love about it.

Eternal Moonwalk is also an incidental tutorial in the basic properties of cinema. It returns motion pictures to their origin point, when the medium's core appeal was the chance to watch strangers performing, their bodies moving from Point A to Point B, their familiar or amusing actions serving as an emotional connection point, a reminder that we're members of the same species inhabiting the same small world.

Sixty Symbols videos

From the folks who brought you The Periodic Table of Videos, Sixty Symbols is a series of videos on the symbols used in physics and astronomy. (via snarkmarket)

No one dies in GI Joe

Did you notice that no one ever died in the GI Joe animated series? Slate's Adrian Chen presents the video evidence.

The first war between G.I. Joe and Cobra (1985-86), as documented in the G.I. Joe animated series, was the most violent conflict in history never to result in a single casualty. Through a combination of terrible aim, superhuman jumping ability, and impossibly reliable parachutes, every combatant escaped even the most dire of situations without so much as the angle of his beret askew.

Usain Bolt still fast

Yesterday he ran 200m in 19.59s on a wet track with a headwind, winning by an absurd margin. (via biancolo)

Smelting iron ore in a microwave

Holy crap, did you know that you can smelt iron ore with a microwave?

This video shows part of an attempt to build a toaster from scratch.

Finding ways to process the raw materials on a domestic scale is also an issue. For example, my first attempt to extract metal involved a chimney pot, some hair-dryers, a leaf blower, and a methodology from the 15th century -- this is about the level of technology we can manage when we're acting alone. I failed to get pure enough iron in this way, though if I'd tried a few more times and refined my technique and knowledge of the process I probably would've managed in the end. Instead I found a 2001 patent about industrial smelting of Iron ores using microwave energy.

Microwaves, as we all know, are just so much more convenient -- and so I tried to replicate the industrial process outlined in the patent using a domestic microwave. After some not-so-careful experimentation which necessitated another microwave, followed by some careful experimentation, I got the timing and ingredients right and made a blob of iron about as big as a 10p coin.

(via mr)

Feynman on trains

Richard Feynman explains how trains stay on their tracks.

Hint: it's not the flanges. (via jb)

Top 50 movie trailers

IFC lists the 50 greatest trailers of all time. Trailers are like episodes for Law & Order for me -- ten minutes after viewing and I can't remember a thing about them -- so I don't really have any favorites, but this list seems like a solid collection.

Update: They also polled a number of experts to weigh in on their favorites. The article led me to the Golden Trailer Awards, an annual awards show for the best movie trailers and posters. This year's winner was the trailer for Star Trek (I'm guessing it's trailer 1).

Uncanny babies

The only thing creepier and more irritating than those E*TRADE babies are these Evian rollerskating babies. (thx, bb)

Previously on Lost

A Bolivian TV station was duped into airing screencaps showing a plane crash from Lost thinking that it was the crash of Air France Flight 447 somehow photographed in widescreen from inside the plane.

In their rush to air exclusive photos of Flight 447's destruction, no one in this newsroom stopped to ask the logical questions, such as: 1) How did the camera survive? and 2) Why are the photos in wide-screen format?

The answers, of course, are: 1) Because the footage is from Lost. And, 2) because the footage is from Lost.

First trailer for HBO's The Pacific

As a follow-up to the excellent Band of Brothers, HBO, Steven Speilberg, and Tom Hanks have teamed up to make The Pacific, a 10-part miniseries about the fighting in the Pacific during WWII from the perspective of a group of US Marines. The first trailer for the series has been released:

(via sarahnomics)

Update: So of course HBO made YouTube remove the video of the trailer. But they put up a smaller crappier version on their own site so it's all ok, right? (Why do media companies not like people spreading their advertising around? That's the fucking goal, yes?) Anyway, in the meantime I changed the link to the video above with a new one that hasn't been removed yet. And if that one gets removed, you can probably find the newest ones here. (thx, greg)

How to tie a tie, shine your shoes, etc.

Garra has a fun and informative series of lifestyle how-to videos for men, including how to tie a tie (6 ways), perform a bit of table magic, wear a scarf, iron a shirt in 3 minutes, and shine a pair of shoes. See also how to bull your shoes and Bowmore's other videos. (thx, youngna)

Hodgman and Obama nerd it up

Video of John Hodgman's speech at the Radio & TV Correspondents' Dinner.

With Obama in attendance, Hodgman wonders if our Commander in Chief is indeed as nerdy as we've hoped.

Trailer for Cold Souls

Cold Souls = Being John Malkovich - John Malkovich + Paul Giamatti. Sort of.

Update: Perhaps this could be a sequel?

2012 trailer

This movie just looks amazing. And horrible. A must-see trailer in HD if you like, as I do, watching the Earth being destroyed.

Update: And here's a totally sweet trailer for 2012: It's a Disaster. (thx, javier)

Can't get enough of Auto-Tune the News

Is installment #5 the best Auto-Tune the News yet? Shawty!

Immersion: Porn by Robbie Cooper

You may remember Robbie Cooper's projects Alter Ego (photos of gamers and their in-game avatars) and Immersion (kids filmed with an Interrotron while playing video games). Cooper's new project is like Immersion, except with people watching porn. The video stills can be found in the July issue of Wallpaper but an 18-minute video is available on their web site.

In a film of startling power and unsettling intimacy -- produced exclusively for wallpaper.com -- video artist and photographer Robbie Cooper shoots back at active porn aficionados lost in ecstatic release and hears how their passion developed. Be aware that this is not easy titillation and some of you may find the footage shocking. But the film does throw up any number of questions about voyeurism and exhibitionism and makes clear the incredible nakedness of the solo sex act.

NSFW because it turns out that watching people watching porn at the office is no easier to explain to your boss/co-workers than actually watching porn at the office.

19th century bike tricks

In 1899, Thomas Edison filmed some very contemporary looking bike tricks.

This seemed fake when I first watched it but here it is at The Library of Congress.

Gay Talese spends $2800 on shoes

And he's got several pairs of them. In this video, the noted writer shows off his suits and talks about "dressing up for the story" as a young reporter.

Ames' Window

This is one of the freakiest optical illusions I've ever seen.

(thx, veronica)

The Moon in HD

HD video of the Moon from 13 miles above the surface taken by Japan's KAGUYA probe. The probe's orbit has been decaying since it began circling the Moon and will crash on the surface at 18:30 GMT on June 10.

Chris Burden's Big Wheel

In a piece from 1979 called Big Wheel, artist Chris Burden took a massive 19th century iron flywheel and set it spinning with the rear wheel of a small motorcycle. The flywheel spins for *three hours* on a single charge.

A description of the work from the NY Times:

Several of his larger works present a characteristic blend of purity, violence and monumentality now aimed at demonstrating simple principles of motion or mass in breathtakingly sculptural ways. In "The Big Wheel," Burden uses a motorcycle's rear wheel to set a three-ton iron flywheel, the survivor of a 19th-century factory, into a fast and furious spin that lasts about three hours. The contrast is wonderful: this old, simple Goliath of a wheel, man's first "machine," powered by a modern David -- small, complex and delicate.

Following shots

From Matt Zoller Seitz, Following: a collection of movie clips where the camera follows a character through their environment.

See also Seitz's The Substance of Style series on Wes Anderson's influences.

Update: See also The Explanation by Seitz, Cool Guys Don't Look at Explosions, and Jad Abumrad's selection of movie clips with great music. And a shot that should have been included in Following: the lovely opening to Birth. (thx, dan & matt)

Live Donkey Kong record attempt

Steve Weibe is trying to break Billy Mitchell's Donkey Kong record live. As in right now! The pair's exploits were chronicled in the documentary King of Kong. (via waxy)

Update: The score to beat is 1,050,200 points. (Oops, Wiebe just died as I was typing this. He's got two guys left.) Wiebe owns the second highest score with 1,049,100 points.

Update: He just died again. He's at ~370,000 with one guy left. Not looking good.

Update: Last guy. 457,000. Not looking good.

Update: He finally got it going but ended up short of the record with 923,400. Word is he's got two more chances to break it today.

Update: No dice...didn't break the score with any of his games.

Khaaan! Agaiiin!

While discussing this morning's post about Khaaan! at the breakfast table with us, Ollie showed his growing dramatic range as an actor by reenacting the scene.

It's no chicken dance, but it's not bad.

100 movie lines in 200 seconds

Video of 100 of the best movie lines in 200 seconds...or what it would look like if SportsCenter put together a highlights package for popular movies.

Khaaan!

Artist Daniel Martinico took William Shatner's finest moment as an actor and stretched it out into a 15-minute video.

You'll notice the crowd gets quiet after the first few seconds. It draws you in, forces you to pay attention, even if it's just staring at the back and forth eye tics on Shatner's face for a minute at a time. "In that moment everyone responds to it," Martinico says. There's laughing at first, but then people get into the rhythm of it and study the various little muscles as they pull and twitch on Kirk's face. "It's a phenomenal range in just a few seconds."

Here's the first two minutes of the video.

It's pretty mesmerizing, even small and at poor quality. (via greg)

Bach Bach Revolution

Two women play Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor on a giant piano at FAO Schwarz.

If that's too much for you, just start with chopsticks or caper around like an idiot and knock over toddlers. (via cyn-c)

The other drama

During the TV coverage of the NBA playoffs, the NBA is running commercials showing great moments in playoff history that have been edited to isolate the players from the crowd. There's Bird stealing the inbound pass, Dr. J's improbable behind-the-backboard reverse layup, and Kobe lobbing the ball to Shaq for a thunderous dunk.

The Kobe/Shaq clip is worth a closer look because although the NBA picked this clip because it represents a dramatic moment in the NBA playoffs involving two of the best players in history on a storied team, what it actually shows is how dysfunctional Shaq and Kobe's relationship was even then, in their first championship season.

Bryant creates 95% of the offense here by crossing Pippen over and throwing a perfect lob to O'Neal. O'Neal throws it down and the camera follows him as he heads down the court yelling in celebration, totally blowing right past Kobe, who has his hand out to high-five Shaq. Kobe half-heartedly grabs at O'Neal's forearm as he passes; Shaq doesn't even notice. From his celebration, you'd think Shaq had made an amazing play, but Kobe made that whole thing happen. And if you look at the box score for the game, it was clearly Bryant's game: he had 25 points, 11 rebounds, 7 assists, and 4 blocks to O'Neal's 18/9/5/1.

The unedited clip of the play¹ shows an awkward ending to this awkward moment. After celebrating with the Laker bench, Shaq looks for Kobe and the two finally acknowledge the play together. But it's a brief moment; they slap hands and go their separate ways, foreshadowing Shaq's departure four years later.

[1] What's also striking about the clip is that it shows just how much Kobe has improved the mechanics of his game since then. Even though he makes a great play here, he's still got those jittery feet that characterized his early career, at times looking like a dog skittering around on freshly polished linoleum. Any stuttering footwork is now long gone, replaced by the silkiest and smoothest of movement. ↩

Update: fxguide has a good look at how these commercials were made from a technical standpoint.

Usain Bolt speeds to record in 150 meters

Yesterday, Usain Bolt broke the unofficial record at the rarely contested distance of 150 meters, running it in 14.35 seconds on a temporary surface set up in Manchester's city center. This sounds made up, but here's the video.

(via biancolo)

The sleeping man never fails

From a new collection of pieces by Mark Twain, a reading by John Lithgow and drawing by Flash Rosenberg of chapter 2.

Kobe and LeBron puppets

I love this Nike commercial featuring puppets of Kobe Bryant and LeBron James where Bryant is heckling James about his three championship rings.

The chalk one is pretty good as well.

Floating frogs (with video!)

If you've got a 16 tesla magnetic field, you can levitate a frog.

The levitation trick works because giant magnetic fields slightly distort the orbits of electrons in the frog's atoms. The resulting electric current generates a magnetic field in the opposite direction to that of the magnet. A field of 16 teslas created an attractive force strong enough to make the frog float until it made its escape.

Best part: it doesn't kill the frog. (via afrooz)

Update: Video of the levitating frog:

See also levitating strawberry, levitating grasshopper, and levitating water droplets. (thx, jesse)

Pakistani fetish wear

In this video, the NY Times profiles a pair of Pakistani brothers who run a business in Karachi designing and manufacturing bondage and fetish wear. As you'll see in the video, many of the firm's employees are unaware of what they're making. (thx, andrew)

Supertrain!

Supertrain was a massively promoted and extremely expensive 1979 NBC adventure drama that lasted only a few episodes before being cancelled. Along with the US boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics, the superflop nearly bankrupted the network.

The show featured an "atom powered steam turbine" train that could travel from NYC to LA in 36 hours. Infrastructurist has posted links to the awful and campy pilot episode of the show. Here's part one to get you started. I love that the train's crew is right out of a 1970s disco and the board of directors are bona fide 1890s railroad magnates. This thing is a train wreck. (Layered narrative again! Bam! (Again!))

Baseball cards: not for kids anymore

The Baseball Card Movie is a nice nine-minute film that introduces the viewer to a world where adults pay up to $500 for a pack of cards (aka cardboard crack) and act very superstitiously about opening them.

Thw whole sports memorabilia thing is an odd world. There's a story about major league pitcher Barry Zito buying his own autographed cards on eBay:

He once made it a practice to buy his own autographed baseball cards on eBay; when asked why he bought them at auction for high prices rather than acquiring unsigned cards and signing them himself, Zito replied, "Because they're authenticated."

Possibly apocryphal but Zito would likely have a difficult time selling self-signed cards because they're not authenticated.

Faux Wes Anderson commercial

For a student project (a fake Wes Anderson film festival), Alex Cornell and Phil Mills shot a promotional short in the style of The Royal Tenenbaums.

More information on how it was made is here. (thx, alex)

Update: Here are the rest of the materials for the film festival. This is an awesome project.

Catfish noodling

Noodling is the practice of catching catfish by letting them latch onto your arm.

To begin, a noodler goes underwater to depths ranging from only a few feet to up to twenty feet, placing his hand inside a discovered catfish hole. If all goes as planned, the catfish will swim forward and latch onto the fisherman's hand, usually as a defensive maneuver in order to try to escape the hole. If the fish is particularly large, the noodler can hook the head around its gills.

This video captures some noodling fishermen in action.

(via that's how it happened)

Update: There's a documentary on noodling called Okie Noodling. (thx to many)

Live Space Shuttle Launch

Live on NASA TV right now: the launch of the Space Shuttle Atlantis, tasked to repair the Hubble telescope. Looks like if the weather holds, lift-off is around 2:01pm. (via @noahkalina)

Punch-Out for Wii

Punch-Out is coming to the Wii (@ Amazon)...the teaser commercial features Isiah Whitlock, Jr., who played Clay Davis on The Wire, as Little Mac's trainer. It's worth watching to hear Whitlock's comparison of comebacks and yo-yos. (thx, rob)

Waves in slow motion

Absolutely gorgeous slow motion HD video of a large wave from under the water...you can clearly see the intricate and powerful architecture of the wave.

Nice surfing shot too...but the wave is mesmerizing.

Free running

Free running is like parkour except that the former is more expressive than the latter. Whereas parkour is the efficient movement through space, free running adds acrobatic flair for aesthetic purposes. One of the more talented practictioners of free running is Levi Meeuwenberg; here's a demo reel he made of his stunts.

Popular Science recently examined the physics of the jumps involved in both sports.

However, by bending and rolling, the time of impact can be increased to as much as 0.3 or 0.4 seconds. By decreasing his velocity over this extended period of time, the force is substantially reduced. Applying the above calculation with an acceleration time of 0.4 seconds we now get Fground = 2000 N (460 pounds). It's still a significant force but as you can see in the video quite manageable for someone with the proper skill, strength and technique.

I'm behind on my Ninja Warrior, but Meeuwenberg did quite well on a recent appearance, advancing further on the show than any other contestant. (via justin blanton)

Quimby The Mouse, gone fishin'

A short video animation of Quimby the Mouse by Chris Ware. (via waxy)

Update: Vimeo has pulled the video offline. (thx, paul)

Update: The video is back online again.

Jane Jacobs video

The CBC has a clip of Jane Jacobs talking about Toronto and Montreal from 1969. In it, she makes the distinction between the two urban organizational forces at work in Toronto, a sort of "civil schizophrenia": the vernacular spirit ("full of fun") and the official spirit ("stamp out fun"). I also found a video on YouTube about Robert Moses and his difficulties with Ms. Jacobs which concludes with a cheeky update of Arnold Newman's iconic photo of Moses.

Madison Avenue Cookware

Madison Avenue Cookware. The only thing that cooks better is a woman.

The site, which seems to be down right now, is actually a promotional site for Mad Men.

Gene Kelly tap dancing on roller skates

Video clip from It's Always Fair Weather of Gene Kelly dancing with roller skates on.

The good stuff starts around 2:00. As David says, "putting Kelly on roller skates is like adding polish to wax".

The Factory in a box

So, this happened: video of Andy Warhol painting Debbie Harry on an Amiga computer.

Update: AmigaWorld did an interview with Warhol about his Amigas (he owned two at the time).

The thing I like most about doing this kind of art on the Amiga is that it looks like my work.

(thx, paul)

The Happy Gilmore tee shot tested

Sport Science recently tested to see whether professional golfer Padraig Harrington could drive the ball further than normal by employing a Happy Gilmore swing.

The good stuff doesn't get going until around 3:00. The running swing technique increased Harrington's distance by an average of 30 yards but his accuracy suffered. The split-screen view of his stationary and running swings is amazing...it's the same swing.

Moving photography

For the cover of Esquire's June issue, photographer Greg Williams shot ten minutes of video footage of Megan Fox, from which the best stills were selected for the cover and inside the magazine.

As resolution rises & prices fall on video cameras and hard drive space, memory, and video editing capabilities increase on PCs, I suspect that in 5-10 years, photography will largely involve pointing video cameras at things and finding the best images in the editing phase. Professional photographers already take hundreds or thousands of shots during the course of a shoot like this, so it's not such a huge shift for them. The photographer's exact set of duties has always been malleable; the recent shift from film processing in the darkroom to the digital darkroom is only the most recent example.

Esquire's moving cover reminds me of two other things.

1. Flickr encourages their members to think of short videos as long photos. When he guest edited kottke.org last year, Deron Bauman wrote about short video as a contemporary version of the photograph. Matt Jones argued that looping short video is the real long photography. So maybe the photograph of 10 years from now might not even be a still image.

2. In order to get the jaw-dropping slow-motion footage of great white sharks jumping out of the ocean, the filmmakers for Planet Earth used a high-speed camera with continuous buffering...that is, the camera only kept a few seconds of video at a time and dumped the rest. When the shark jumped, the cameraman would push a button to save the buffer.

Clear all tabs

There's just too much good stuff on the internet today. So rather than flood the site with a bunch of posts, I'm going to clear out my tabs and round them up here.

Dear Prudence: "I cheated on my wife while sleepwalking. What do I do now?" I've heard quite a few weird/bad things about Ambien in the past few months. Also, paging Emily Gould from The Awl, please A this Q.

Rocketboom covers Single Serving Sites in their spin-off series, Know Your Meme.

The Big Picture peers into North Korea with a collection of photos of the dictatorship taken from neighboring China.

Maira Kalman visits Ruth Bader Ginsburg at the Supreme Court, illustrating the story beautifully as usual.

I return to the court to hear Justice Ginsburg speak to law students. And in answer to the question "How does it feel to be the only woman on the court?" she answers simply, "Lonely."

The Society of Publication Designers has been busy posting nominees for their upcoming annual awards on their blog. Last year's winners are here. (thx, david)

Jamie Zawinski has used his keyboard so much over the past eight years that he's carved grooves into the M and N keys (with his fingernails?) and completely worn through part of his Alt key.

Auto-Tune

The voice modulation technology isn't just for pop songs anymore. Check out Blake tries to talk to Jack about the homepage:

Babies crying in Auto-Tune is pretty hilarious: Baby T-Pain 1, Baby T-Pain 2.

But Auto-Tuning the News takes the prize.

Pay particular attention to Katie Couric at 1:20. Awesome. (thx, matt)

Update: Whoa, Martin Luther King's I Have A Dream speech run through Auto-Tune. (thx, matthew)

Update: Winston Churchill + Auto-Tune = [you don't need me to tell you the answer to this].

Parkour on a bicycle

Street rider Danny MacAskill starts off by riding his bike across a narrow fence about four feet in the air...and the video only gets better from there.

Stunning. I want to see MacAskill in the next Bond film. (via waxy)

Update: See also Ryan Leech. (thx, courtney)

Pumping up with flammables

Did you know that you can fill a flat tire using starter fluid and a match?

I've watched this about ten times and it's still amazing. (via dunstan)

David Simon interview

Short video interview of David Simon.

You know, newspapers are gonna say, "We already let the horse out of the barn door. How can you charge for content? Information wants to be free." All that bullshit. As I remember, there wasn't an American in America 30 thirty years ago who paid for their television. Television was free 30 years ago. Now everybody's paying 16 bucks a month, 17 bucks a month, 70 dollars a month.

Related: the NY Times recently ran the poignant story of a interracial Baltimore couple who turned to The Wire for comfort when the husband underwent treatment for cancer.

Also related: read David Simon's HBO pitch for The Wire from Sept 2000.

Disturbin' Strokes

The intro to Diff'rent Strokes set to some disturbing music is "far more creepy than I thought it would [be]". (via cyn-c)

What's up?

Sprint would like to show you a video of what's happening right now. (via swiss miss)

Wes Anderson, annotated

Matt Zoller Seitz has completed his five-part look at Wes Anderson's influences.

Part 1: Bill Melendez, Orson Welles, and Francois Truffaut
Part 2: Martin Scorsese, Richard Lester, and Mike Nichols
Part 3: Hal Ashby
Part 4: J.D. Salinger
Part 5: The Royal Tenenbaums, annotated

Seek out the video links in the right sidebar; they're better than just reading the text. From the Salinger segment:

Detractors say Anderson's dense production design (courtesy of regular collaborator David Wasco) overwhelms his stories and characters. This complaint presumes that in real life our grooming and style choices aren't a kind of uniform -- visual shorthand for who we are or who we want others to think we are. This is a key strength of both Anderson and Salinger's work. Both artists have a knack for what might be called "material synecdoche" -- showcasing objects, locations, or articles of clothing that define whole personalities, relationships, or conflicts.

The fifth part, where Seitz annotates the beginning segment of The Royal Tenenbaums with text, images, and video, is particularly fun to watch.

Birdhouse

The introduction video for Birdhouse is just really fantastic; the best iPhone app intro video in the universe probably.

Open-mindedness

This video explains how to counteract the "you're not being open-minded" argument that atheists and scientists sometimes get when confronted by those who believe in the supernatural.

Trying to suggest that a lack of explanation is evidence that supernatural powers are at work is actually a contradiction. In effect what it's saying is, "I can't explain something, therefore I can explain it."

(via buzzfeed)

The Evolution of Religions

Jared Diamond lecture on the evolution of religions.

Oh, Mercury

How surreal is it to see a cannonball floating in liquid?

Magnetic snakes

Taking a bit of code from here and a snippet from there, Robert Hodgin made an animation of 3-D snakes in Processing. Check out Hodgin's use of constraints to spur the invention of a way to keep the snakes from overlapping.

I had no interest in adding a complete 3D physics library because my needs at this time are fairly simple. I am not worried about environment... I just want the snakes to crawl over each other. I decided to try magnetic repulsion despite thinking it probably wouldn't work well enough. The thinking is this: Take each segment of a snake (200 segments each), and check its distance to every single other segment of every other snake on screen. Stupid, right? Yeah, pretty much. But with some optimization and only checking the segment distances if the snakes in question are close enough for overlap to be possible, I got it to run at 60 fps with 10 snakes.

Actually, when you get right down to it -- the atoms in snakes' bodies, that is -- magnetic repulsion isn't that far off from how matter achieves its electromagnetic opacity. Hodgin also made a video in which the snakes react to music. I wonder if this one's gonna end up in iTunes. (via waxy)

Infographic Little Red Riding Hood

A wonderful little animation by Tomas Nilsson of my favorite fairytale, the one with wolves and woodsmen. This one's all zippy infographics and diagrams.

The music gets to be a little much.

via Ektopia

Wool lights

Sometimes, the quickest way to a woman's heart is a bunch of sheep illuminated with LEDs and herded into meaningful patterns. This is what you city folk have been missing.

Swiss mountain cleaners

Switzerland is more than cheese, alps, and a blonde serving cocoa. It's also the home of the slightly neat-freak mountain cleaners.

via swissmiss

Tilt-shift my heart

Peculiar little video by Keith Loutit for a song called "Clementine." Utilizes tilt-shift photography to achieve its miniature look.

via Nothing for X

Stuff about Fluff

Archibald Query was the inventor of the pasty, sticky, somewhat offensive "creme spread" known as Marshmallow Fluff. The sugar shortage during World War I cost Query his confection. He sold the recipe to H. Allen Durkee and Fred Mower, two candymakers who quickly figured out that combining it with peanut butter creates the "Fluffernutter," which in turn creates sandwich-obsessed mobs of thieving children. The Fluffernutter may soon be the state sandwich of Massachusetts, even though it was almost legally banned from school lunches back in 2006.

Marshmallow was originally used as a throat-coating precursor to the lozenge, but these days it's molded into everything, from cereal squares to baby chickens and moon pies.

This Croque Madame is a fancy, sweet version of a fried ham-and-cheese, made with Nutella and Fluff on cinammon-raisin bread. Yum.

Shot clock reads 60 Minutes

Lebron's full-court shot on 60 Minutes makes me grin like a 4-year-old with a fistful of candy.

You're toast

Eno is an antacid produced by GlaxoSmithKline. It's globally distributed, mainly across South America, India, and the Middle East, and it's available as sachets and tablets in both Lemon and an ambiguous "Regular" flavor.

Ogilvy & Mather produced a stunning print advertisement for the company, featuring a gun made of food. Quite an improvement over Eno's commercial from the 80s, although if the packets made me seem as effervescent as the actor, perhaps I'd take some on my down days.

via Coloribus

"Thank You, Vocoder"

"Vocoders are an instantly recognizable synthesizer sound, having been used in popular music since the 1960s. They allow you to 'talk like a robot', which while fun, is often not musically useful."

This from "Introduction to Vocoders," proves the point that the vocoder does not, in fact, turn a song into music. The voice analyzer/synthesizer system that was originally developed in the 1930s to facilitate early telephony has now become a seemingly inescapable accessory to popular music.

Rapper Ice Cube also awkwardly reflected on the negative effects of vocoders on rap:

"Records sales really not concerned to me as much as doing it my way. And doing the kind of records I want to do. Without some A&R dude trying to tell me to go find T-Pain and get you a voice box. Ya know, all this stupid stuff that they do that mess up a lot of records, mess up a lot of artists."

This clip of T-Pain v. His Vocoder is the audio equipment equivalent of Stephen King's Christine, and it certainly backs up Mr. Cube's claim.

Update: Turns out that the actual device Mr. Pain uses to alter his voice box is referred to as an Auto-Tune, and it's the weapon of choice for Cher, Kanye, and T-Pain, who seems just as oblivious as this author was. The two machines are entirely different.

Thx jason freeman

Refresh (p)age

A refreshing take on aging, from across the pond, as expressed by 74-year-old Agnes McGroarty:

When Agnes - who already has an MP3 player - went into a music shop to ask about iPods, a young sales assistant couldn't have been more helpful.

She joked: "It may come as a surprise to some that someone my age has a Bose sound system and MP3 player instead of a gramophone. I think older people should challenge attitudes and we should all have respect for individuals, whatever their age."

Nowadays, it's quite likely that grandma and grandpa will be updating their status updates on Facebook during their games of Bingo. There are even email services available to connect tech-savvy seniors with Internet penpals across the globe.

A less friendly view comes from Tremendosaur, who believes that it's win, lose, or draw when it comes to Old People vs. Technology.

Quick soil

Metafilter feeds our needs for time-lapse photography and nutrition by linking to a full plate of time-lapse vegetation growth. Beans may be good for the heart, but pepper plants know how to shake it.

Ansel Adams' key to photography

In a short video clip, Ansel Adams explains that visualization is the key to making photographs. (via lens culture)

Michael Kontopoulos

From artist Michael Kontopoulos, a video of machines that almost fall over.

A system of sculptures that is constantly on the brink of collapse. My intention was to capture and sustain the exact moment of impending catastrophe and endlessly repeat it.

I do this too, only I use chairs and my own body and frequently tip over and hurt myself. Anything for my art.

Kontopoulos also did something called Conversation Piece, inspired by legendary film editor Walter Murch.

Film editor Walter Murch, who edited many of Francis Ford Copolla's films, developed a theory about edits while working on The Conversation (1974). He noticed that in many cases, the best place to make a cut was when he blinked. Subsequently, Murch wrote about the human blink as a sort of mental punctuation mark: a signifier of a viewer's comfort with visual material and therefore, a good place to separate two ideas with a cut.

Fascinating. (via this is that)

Old school films

A/V Geeks have put online dozens of videos copied from old 16mm school films they rescued from dumpsters. Some of the titles include:

Alcohol Is Dynamite (1958)
Appreciating Our Parents (1950)
Bookkeeping and You (1947)
Case of the Missing Magnets, The (1960)
Destruction: Fun or Dumb? (ca. 1970s)
Food Doesn't Fly - Lunchroom Manners
Great Annual Bathtub Race (1970)
Nuclear War - A Guide To Armageddon (BBC, 1982)
Shake Hands With Danger (1980)

Michael Lewis on Big Think

Speaking, as we briefly were, of Big Think, they have several short video interviews of Michael Lewis about the current financial crisis and other things. Worth a look see.

How to write like an architect

How to hand print letters like an architect (with a pen). It's a little different if you're using a pencil. (via rebecca's pocket)

Flocking birds

Beautiful video of birds flocking on and around some power lines.

It's worth clicking through to view it in HD. (via siege)

Reality TV cliches

We get it, you're not here to make friends.

The auteurs of comedy

Famous directors takes on famous comedy routines. Wes Anderson does Who's on First, Michael Moore does The Ministry of Silly Walks, and Tarantino does the I'm Crushing Your Head bit (the best one).

The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces

A tantalizing 10-minute clip of an hour-long video called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces.

The clip shows an analysis of the plaza of the Seagram Building in NYC and what makes it so effective as a small urban space.

A busy place for some reason seems to be the most congenial kind of place if you want to be alone. [...] The number one activity is people looking at other people.

The video was adapted from a book of the same name by William H. Whyte, who is perhaps most well known as the author of The Organization Man. The video is largely out of print -- which is a shame because that clip was fascinating -- but I found a DVD copy for $95 (which price includes a license for public performance). (via migurski)

World building

Nice short film of a man building a Matrix-like world with a tool resembling Google SketchUp and a Minority Report interface. (via waxy)

YouTube, remixed

Thru You is a site that showcases remixed YouTube videos...the singing from one video combined with the drums from another and the piano from a third and so on. I was skeptical but these are really well done. Do I even need to say that this reminds me of Christian Marclay's Video Quartet? (via sfj)

Nature's Great Events

If you liked Planet Earth, you should probably check out Nature's Great Events. Narrated by David Attenborough and currently airing in the UK on BBC1 and BBC HD, the series consists of six 50-minute shows, each of which features a large-scale annual event, like the spring thaw in the Arctic Circle and the sardine run along the coast of South Africa. The series was shot in HD using many of the techniques seen in Planet Earth.

If you're in the UK, you can check out the first three episodes on the BBC site. In the US, Discovery will be airing the show sometime in the spring under the title Seasons of Survival (apparently Nature's Great Events isn't dramatic enough for the American audience). No word on whether Attenborough's expert narration will also be replaced as it was in Planet Earth.

In the meantime, some HD clips of the show are available on YouTube. This slo-mo video of a grizzly bear shaking the water off its fur is fun to watch but this too-short clip of an extraordinary coordinated attack of dolphins, seals, sharks, and birds on a massive school of sardines is the gem.

(via we made this, who call the series "mind-blowingly good")

2009 movie preview video

During the closing credits of the Academy Awards, a clip was shown previewing some movies that will open in 2009. None of them look like they'll win any Oscars so I presume this was paid advertising and not editorial on the part of the program. Fun though! (via /film)

Happy Up Here

Royksopp just pushed out the video for Happy Up Here, the first single from their forthcoming album, Junior.

Somewhat related: did you know that Amazon sells vinyl? I had no idea.

Smart blocks

From the recent TED conference, a demo of Siftables, blocks that are smart. What I find most interesting about Siftables is that the blocks form a computer that doesn't need instructions but it doesn't seem like a computer at all, i.e. the Holy Grail of computing. (via peterme)

Abbey Road cliche on repeat

Fun timelapse video of a day in the life of the Abbey Road crosswalk depicted on The Beatles album of the same name. (via buzzfeed)

Eames' A Communications Primer

From 1953, A Communications Primer by Ray and Charles Eames.

The film covers information theory, language, feedback, etc. The audio from a punchcard machine -- used to "check its pulse" -- is pretty great and starts around 17:00. (via infosthetics)

Garrett Lisi's Theory of Everything

You may remember reading the New Yorker article on Garrett Lisi, a surfer, physicist, and snowboarder who came out of nowhere in 2007 to present a plausible Theory of Everything, "a unifying idea that aims to incorporate all the universe's forces in a single mathematical framework". I do but I missed this visualization of Lisi's theory posted by New Scientist in late 2007. You may want to break out the bong for this one. (thx, matt)

Datamoshing

Two is a trend: Kanye West's video for Welcome to Heartbreak uses the same video compression technique used in Chairlift's Evident Utensil. The videos were done by two different directors at around the same time, which probably means that neither originated it. Does anyone know what the Patient Zero is for this technique? This Radiohead video for Videotape comes close but doesn't use the compression artifacts to cleverly cut between scenes...which is the real artful moment here. (thx, andrew & demetrice)

Update: Here are a few candidates: Takeshi Murata, paperrad, and Mark Brown. (thx, matthew, simon & justin)

Update: Aha, the technique is called datamoshing. (thx, daniel)

Update: There's a bit of datamoshing in this 2005 David O'Reilly clip and even more in a 2005 video made by Kris Moyes (Moyes briefly uses the same technique in this 2008 video for Beck). In 2004, Owi Mahn & Laura Baginski made a video called Pastell Kompressor in which they manipulated the compression keyframes in some timelapse videos. Sven König's two projects, aPpRoPiRaTe! and Download Finished! originate around the same time (2004/2005). The technique itself seems pretty simple...just ignore the compression keyframes during playback. (thx, philip & sven)

JPEG jaggies music video

I never got around to watching the video for Chairlift's Evident Utensil last week because the main visual technique -- the use of video compression artifacts -- seemed self-evident and gimmicky, the kind of thing you don't need to see once you've heard the premise. But the video is actually really nice and they use the compression in a non-obvious and clever way.

Like the Silver Surfer

Surfing Google Earth using a Wii Fit Balance Board. (via quantified self)

Bye bye Dubai

I didn't watch the clip he links to but I can't imagine anything is more entertaining than David Galbraith's scathing goodbye to Dubai. He opens with:

Short of opening a Radio Shack in an Amish town, Dubai is the world's worst business idea, and there isn't even any oil. Imagine proposing to build Vegas in a place where sex and drugs and rock and roll are an anathema. This is effectively the proposition that created Dubai - it was a stupid idea before the crash, and now it is dangerous.

What's the biggest problem with Dubai? It doesn't have the cultural bedrock needed to support a destination city.

It looks like Manhattan except that it isn't the place that made Mingus or Van Allen or Kerouac or Wolf or Warhol or Reed or Bernstein or any one of the 1001 other cultural icons from Bob Dylan to Dylan Thomas that form the core spirit of what is needed, in the absence of extreme toleration of vice, to infuse such edifices with purpose and create a self-sustaining culture that will prevent them crumbling into the empty desert that surrounds them.

New Simpsons intro

After 429 episodes, The Simpsons finally get a new intro sequence...in HD and Dolby Digital 5.1 no less. (via fimoculous)

Chemistry is fun

A collection of really interesting chemistry videos. (via spurgeonblog)

On Walt Whitman

An American Experience documentary about Walt Whitman is available for free online. (via snarkmarket)

Andrew Stanton interview

Video interview with Pixar's Andrew Stanton, director of Finding Nemo and Wall-E. Among other things, he talks about two things that enabled the success of Pixar: the creative egalitarian dictatorship of John Lasseter and the ability of Steve Jobs to protect everyone from any outside business pressures and just create.

Old school breakdancing

Soviet Army dance ensemble + Run DMC = the invention of breakdancing in the mid-1900s.

Here's the same thing mixed with Fatboy Slim's Weapon of Choice. Reminds me of the previously featured but still awesome video of Al Minns and Leon James doing the Charleston to Daft Punk. Here are two more videos that track the origins and breakdancing and hip-hop dancing in a slightly more formal manner: one, two.

Lo Heads

Rapper/producer 88-Keys is a Lo Head, an obsessive collector and wearer of Ralph Lauren Polo clothing and accessories. He's been wearing nothing but Polo every single day since 1993. This interview with rapper and Lo Head Rack-Lo functions as a sort of Lo Head manifesto.

A lot of street dudes have paved the way and paid a hefty price for all of you to even be able to rock Lo and all those other name brands as well. Other names like North Face, Benetton, Gucci, Spyder, Gortex, Louis Vutton and the list goes on - Lo-Life's did it all first. So let me school ya'll for a second. This Lo movement officially started in 1988. And even before 1988, the movement was in development. Have ya'll ever heard of Ralphies Kids or USA (United Shoplifters Association), that's the foundation right there. Those are basically the two crews that Rack-Lo united as Lo-Life's to form voltron on the Hip Hop world. And a lot of you dudes probably weren't even born then. So what the fuck are you really saying? So I'm just making it clear that if your going to rep that Lo shit and be apart of a fashion institution there's a certain way to do it. Word, it rules and laws to this shit. This aint no fly by night shit where u wake up one morning and decide to rock Lo like Kayne West did. That shit there is a fairy tale a lot of heads are living.

Kanye defended his status as a Lo Head in the song Barry Bonds from his Graduation album.

The Ascent of Money

The Ascent of Money is a two-hour documentary about the evolution of money and finance. The whole thing is available for viewing on PBS's web site for free.

"Everyone needs to understand the complex history of money and our relationship to it," he says. "By learning how societies have continually created and survived financial crises, we can find solid solutions to today's worldwide economic emergency." As he traverses historic financial hot spots around the world, Ferguson illuminates fundamental economic concepts and speaks with leading experts in the financial world.

The series is based on Niall Ferguson's book of the same name (an Amazon and NY Times bestseller) and will air in an expanded 4-hour version later this year. (via lined & unlined)

Protection from success

Elizabeh Gilbert talks about how to keep being creative in the face of success. In particular, she mentions erecting a "protective pyschological construct to protect you from the results of your work".

And just so you don't end up wondering about it for half the talk like I did, Melissa Gilbert played Laura Ingalls on Little House on the Prairie. Elizabeth Gilbert is a writer. (via john hodgman)

How Pixar hires

In a 10-minute video, Randy Nelson, the Dean of Pixar University, talks about how Pixar hires. One thing they look for is people who are interested rather than interesting.

The Beatles' last concert

Video of The Beatles' last public performance in three parts: one, two, three. They performed on top of the group's own building with an audience situated on rooftops and down on the street. (via the year in pictures)

A pair of links about Ira Glass

The first is a three-part manifesto from 2004 about how he got his start in radio, how to effectively tell stories, and how to realize when your story isn't working.

Force yourself to do a lot of stories. This is the most important thing you can do. Get yourself in a situation where people are expecting work out of you, or where you simply force yourself to do a certain number of stories every month. Turn the stuff out. Deadlines are your friend.

The Gel Conference just posted a video of Glass speaking at the 2007 conference in which he "describes the elements of a good story".

America's quiet ports

The current inactivity at Port of Long Beach is indicative of larger problems in the highly coupled global economy. Americans are buying fewer goods, including those made abroad, so no new goods are coming in to the port and those that have already arrived are sitting on the docks, including 165+ acres of Toyota cars. Because Americans are not buying foreign goods, China has slowed production. Slowed production means that they don't need cardboard boxes for packaging. Since we ship our used paper to China for recycling into cardboard boxes, hundreds of tons of paper are sitting on the docks, unshipped. The strengthening of the dollar abroad means that American made goods aren't selling and the ships hauling them are unable to leave the port. Nothing is selling anywhere so everything sits in the now-constipated port.

How to edit a film

A short lesson in film editing in the form of a scene from the film Modern Romance, featuring Albert Brooks and Bruno Kirby. The director of the film that comes in about halfway through is real-life producer/director James L. Brooks. (thx, dave)

Wonderwall techno

We all had a healthy laugh earlier in the month when someone took the vocal track from Van Halen's Runnin' With The Devil and ran it through Microsoft Songsmith, creating an automatic and unusual musical accompaniment for David Lee Roth's tortured vocals. Since then, people have done this with all sorts of songs and they're all pretty bad. Surprisingly, Wonderwall by Oasis works really well as a techno song. (thx, rob)

Four hours of baby play packed into two minutes

Excellent timelapse video of a baby playing with his toys. The camera angle and the way he moves through the room consuming his toys makes it look like an amoeba in a petri dish. (thx, curtis)

Flying over glowing cities

Timelapse video of a cross country flight at night, flying above clouds glowing with city lights.

My advice to you is to make the video full screen, put in your headphones and enjoy the soothing ride. (via migurski)

Jump London

Jump London, a 2003 documentary about parkour, is available in its entirety on Google Video. (thx, sacha)

The T-Mobile Dance

Go on, see if this T-Mobile commercial doesn't make you smile. They did a good job in making it look organic and building to greater and greater coordination. Great commercial...it shows exactly what mobile phones are for.

Update: Here's a short movie of the filming on Flickr by someone who just happened to be there. (thx, matt)

Presidential inauguration videos, 1901-2005

A MetaFilter user has tracked down video for all of the Presidential inauguration ceremonies for the past 100 years. Here's McKinley's from 1901, Teddy Roosevelt (1905), JFK (1961), and Reagan (1981).

Flight 1549 simulation

The BBC did a flight simulation of US Airways flight 1549 that shows what the water approach looked like from the cockpit. (thx, david)

Video footage of Hudson River plane crash

I'm still fascinated by the water landing of US Airways flight 1549 on the Hudson River late last week. Here are a few more things I've seen related to it over the last couple of days.

First the videos. Someone visiting the Bronx Zoo caught the plane on video, flying low in the sky just after the bird strike. A Coast Guard video monitoring station got a shot of the plane just after it splashed down...you can see the spray from the impact flying in from the left of the video just after the 2:00 mark.

Soon after the plane hits, the camera zooms in and you can see just how quickly people get out and onto the wings. And then this video shows it most clearly:

Look how low and level and steady Sully guided that thing in! Amazing!

The NY Times has a couple of good pieces in their extensive crash coverage. I loved reading what various passengers had to say about the crash, lots of little moments of heroism in there.

The life raft attached to the plane was upside down in the river, just out of reach. Mr. Wentzell turned and found another passenger, Carl Bazarian, an investment banker from Florida who, at 62, was twice his age. Mr. Wentzell grabbed the wrist of Mr. Bazarian, who grabbed a third man who held onto the plane. Mr. Wentzell then leaned out to flip the raft. "Carl was Iron Man that day," Mr. Wentzell said. "We got the raft stabilized and we got on." A man went into the water, and the door salesman and the banker hauled him aboard. He curled in a fetal position, freezing.

The Times also comes through with the 3-D flight graphic I asked for the other day but they upped the ante with a seating chart of the plane where you can click on certain passengers' seats to read their thoughts. Mark Hood in seat 2A described the landing:

When we touched down, it was like a log ride at Six Flags. It was that smooth.

The whole thing is still so amazing. Looking at the underside of the plane as they lifted it from the water last night, you can see the damage to the bottom of the plane and just how close they all were to being flung all over the place or sinking quickly or a number of other different outcomes.

How to get out of a car without showing your knickers

Good advice for Hollywood starlets, pop singers, and socialites: a video on how to get out of a car without showing your knickers. Slightly NSFW.

The metal that remembers

Video of Nitinol wire, a shape memory alloy which returns to a pre-determined shape when heated.

Balloon animal coitus

This is NSFW if very squeaky balloon animal sex is not safe to view at your workplace. Unsafe perhaps, but hilarious. (via siege, also NSFW)

Bernstein conducts Shostakovich with YouTube vocals

Leonard Bernstein conducts Shostakovich's Symphony No. 5 while comments from YouTube commenters are read. (via the rest is noise)

Missed conception

Sperm travels up a dark tunnel and then...saying more would ruin the ending. Just watch:

I seriously LOL'd at the reveal. Slightly NSFW, I guess. (via house next door)

Update: The video was down earlier for some reason but now it's back up.