If you're attempting to enjoy beer and are without your bottle opener but you have your chainsaw, this will come in handy:
Didn't spill a drop! See also opening a beer bottle with a piece of paper, opening a beer bottle with a cigarette lighter, and opening a beer bottle with an iPad power brick.
In the spirit of conservation, Joe Smith shows us how to use a paper towel properly.
(via df)
A bunch of cute kids review Bangarang by Skrillex.
What is dupstep?
I've never heard of that.
Daddy loves dubstep.
A couple of the kids were asked what "the drop" meant:
I think the drop is when you drop being sensible.
When it gets really quiet and then it gets really really really loud. BANG!
(via ★interesting)
The person who made Wes Anderson From Above and Tarantino From Below has put together a supercut of distinct sounds from Darren Aronofsky's films.
(via ★interesting)
In this short film by Sarah Klein and Tom Mason, Ken Burns shares his thoughtful perspective on what makes a good story.
Abraham Lincoln wins the Civil War and then he decides he's got enough time to go to the theatre. That's a good story. When Thomas Jefferson said "we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal", he owned a hundred human beings and never saw the hypocrisy, never saw the contradiction, and more importantly never saw fit in his lifetime to free any one of them. That's a good story.
Over at the Atlantic, Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg has an interview with the filmmakers.
This time lapse covers more than 1000 years and shows the shifting national borders of Europe.
There's also a slowed-down version that shows the year and some annotation of events. (via ★interesting)
As a tribute to Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, James Winters and his family made this parody of the video Sabotage with kids playing all the roles.
Charming, although I might have gone with squirt guns instead of the more realistic item.
(via @moth)
Taken from the Studio Stories series included on the Blu-ray versions of Toy Story 1 & 2, here's a short story about how Toy Story 2 was almost erased before the film could be rendered for theaters.
Woody's hat disappeared. And then his boots disappeared. And then as we kept checking, he disappeared entirely. Woody's gone.
(via tested)
Update: Over at Quora, Oren Jacob (the guy in the video) explains in more detail what happened.
First, it wasn't multiple terabytes of information. Neither all the rendered frames, nor all the data necessary to render those frames in animation, model, shaders, set, and lighting data files was that size back then.
A week prior to driving across the bridge in a last ditch attempt to recover the show (depicted pretty accurately in the video above) we had restored the film from backups within 48 hours of the /bin/rm -r -f *, run some validation tests, rendered frames, somehow got good pictures back and no errors, and invited the crew back to start working. It took another several days of the entire crew working on that initial restoral to really understand that the restoral was, in fact, incomplete and corrupt. Ack. At that point, we sent everyone home again and had the come-to-Jesus meeting where we all collectively realized that our backup software wasn't dishing up errors properly (a full disk situation was masking them, if my memory serves), our validation software also wasn't dishing up errors properly (that was written very hastily, and without a clean state to start from, was missing several important error conditions), and several other factors were compounding our lack of concrete, verifiable information.
The only prospect then was to roll back about 2 months to the last full backup that we thought might work. In that meeting, Galyn mentioned she might have a copy at her house. So we went home to get that machine, and you can watch the video for how that went...
From British Council film, a short film from 1945 that shows how a bicycle is designed and manufactured.
(via stellar)
Lorena Galliot came to NYC from France and didn't know what a hipster was. So she took to the streets of Williamsburg to find out.
(thx, phillip)
86-year-old Brendon Grimshaw has lived alone on a tiny island in the Seychelles since 1962. He bought it for £8000 and has spent those years introducing trees and 120 giant tortoises back to the island.
(via ★interesting-links)
From PBS Off Book, a quick look at the thinking behind the opening titles for TV shows and movies, including Zombieland, Mad Men, and Se7en.
See also Art of the Title and A Brief History of Title Design. (via devour)
This might be the coolest thing a sitting President has ever done. Aside from, maybe, freeing the slaves or The New Deal or winning WWII.
Update: And an amazingly depressing excerpt from a speech Obama gave earlier in the day:
But we only finished paying off our student loans -- check this out, all right, I'm the President of the United States -- we only finished paying off our student loans about eight years ago.
If you mix calcium carbide and water, it produces acetylene. Acetylene is extremely flammable and can launch 55-gallon drums into the air when ignited.
(via ★aaroncohen)
Frans Hofmeester filmed his daughter Lotte once a week for the past twelve years and produced this time lapse film. We've seen this kind of thing before (Kalina, etc.) but the use of short snippets of video instead of still photos adds something.
Hofmeester has also filmed his son in the same manner for the past nine years. (thx, david)
This is an episode of Mad Men, incompletely downloaded from BitTorrent.
The video captures an episode of the popular TV show in the act of being shared by thousands of users on bittorent. The video simultaneously acts as a visualisation of bittorrent traffic and the practice of filesharing and is an aesthetically beautiful by product of the bittorrent process as the pieces of the original file are rearranged and reconfigured into a new transitory in-between state.
(via waxy)
This is great...BBC America made this promo of kids narrating the Planet Earth nature documentary in place of David Attenborough.
(via boing boing)
Shot with a Phantom Flex at 2500 frames per second, this video shows stupid things happening in super slow motion, including Coke bottle & chainsaw and flour and candle. And lots of fireworks.
I was completely unprepared for what happened with the microwave and the bottle of red wine. (via devour)
This video is a visualization of the how ships moved goods and people around the world from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century.
Here's more on how it was done.
This shows mostly Spanish, Dutch, and English routes -- they are surprisingly constant over the period (although some empires drop in and out of the record), but the individual voyages are fun. And there are some macro patterns -- the move of British trade towards India, the effect of the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and so on.
There are times in the video when a single nation dominates all of the shipping traffic...the British in the early 1800s and the Dutch from the mid 1830s on.
Primer is one of my favorite films of the past ten years and is available on YouTube in its entirety.
The first episode of Girls, an eagerly awaited HBO series by executive producer Judd Apatow and writer/director Lena Dunham, is available for free on YouTube (HBO disabled embedding for some dumb reason). HBO plans to do this with Veep next week as well.
Reporting for Marketplace, Rob Schmitz shows how iPads are made by Foxconn workers in Shenzhen.
(via daring fireball)
I don't think this has anything to do with the actual invention of the football helmet, so consider this a more hilarious alternate history. Watch as the inventor of a new type of safer helmet gets kicked in the head, repeatedly bonked in the noggin with a baseball bat, and runs himself into a wall, over and over again.
(via ★dunstan)
In this video, Erlend Lavik compares the relatively spare visual style of The Wire with that of other TV programs.
(via @uxprinciples)
Caine is nine years old, lives in LA, and built his own arcade out of cardboard boxes in the back of his father's auto parts store.
You've go to watch until at least 3:10 when he explains how to check the validity of the "Fun Pass" using the calculators located on the front of each game. So so so good! (via ★interesting)
Alive Inside is a documentary that follows social worker Dan Cohen as he discovers that music can "awaken" people suffering from degenerative memory loss (Alzheimer's, etc.). Here's a clip in which a man goes from a near-coma state to talking about his favorite songs after listening to music for awhile on headphones.
(via ★swissmiss)
I did not know how much I had missed A Show with Ze Frank until I just watched the first episode of the new series:
I just caught myself waving my hands in the air. Sing it, Brother Ze.
A collection of scenes featuring movie stars before they were stars...like Nicolas Cage in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Renee Zellweger in Dazed and Confused.
They missed one of my favorites...James Earl Jones as Lieutenant Zogg in Dr. Strangelove. (via devour)
Since Google released the video for their augmented reality glasses the other day, people have been busy making videos that show a more realistic (or cynical) portrayal of how the glasses might work. Here are a couple of the better ones. First a version of the glasses with Google ads:
And this one gives new meaning to the phrase "banner blindness":
While not specifically about Google Glasses, this concept video by Keiichi Matsuda is also worth a look:
I will also direct your attention to the second episode of Black Mirror, a UK drama series by Charlie Brooker.
A satire on entertainment shows and our insatiable thirst for distraction set in a sarcastic version of a future reality. In this world, everyone must cycle on exercise bikes, arranged in cells, in order to power their surroundings and generate currency for themselves called Merits. Everyone is dressed in a grey tracksuit and has a "doppel", a virtual avatar inspired by Miis and Xbox 360 Avatars that people can customise with clothes, for a fee of merits. Everyday activities are constantly interrupted by advertisements that cannot be skipped or ignored without financial penalty.
(via jake & stellar)
Jim Henson made this pitch video to sell The Muppet Show to CBS. It starts a bit slow but stick with it.
There's also a scene with Kermit right at the end which unfortunately didn't make it into the clip.
After Leo's powerful speech, Kermit appears from off-screen against a CBS logo and shrugs, "What the hell was that all about?"
And just because, here's the opening theme song of The Muppet Show. (via @gavinpurcell)
Google has shared a bit about their augmented reality glasses project (more at the NY Times).
A video released by Google on Wednesday, which can be seen below, showed potential uses for Project Glass. A man wanders around the streets of New York City, communicating with friends, seeing maps and information, and snapping pictures. It concludes with him video-chatting with a girlfriend as the sun sets over the city. All of this is seen through the augmented-reality glasses.
The glasses look a little strange, like Geordi La Forge's visor...they might go over a little better if they looked more Warby Parkerish.
The Intimacy 2.0 fashion garments become see-through when the wearer's heart rate increases.
I think my pants are broken. They should be fully transparent at the moment... (via ★warrenellis)
Now available in its entirety on YouTube, a 95-minute documentary on physicist Richard Feynman called No Ordinary Genius.
The excellent film on Andrew Wiles' search for the solution to Fermat's Last Theorem is available as well (watch the first two minutes and you'll be hooked).
This is expertly done...a panoramic time lapse view out the rear window in Rear Window, stitched together from scenes in the film.
More information on how it was made. (via ★interesting)
Kinect Star Wars has a Galactic Dance Off mode where you can "dance to modern songs remixed with Star Wars lyrics". After watching 30 seconds of this, you may not be able to get "I'm Han Solo" out of your head. It features dance moves like "The Speeder", "Chewie Hug", and "Trash Compactor".
Kind of amazing, but not surprising, that the Star Wars universe has come to this. As one YouTube commenter noted:
I just felt the death of Star Wars. It was as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
Here are some of the lyrics:
I'm feeling like a star,
you can't stop my shine
I'm loving Cloud City,
my head's in the skyI'm solo, I'm Han Solo,
I'm Han Solo.
I'm Han Solo. Solo.Yeah, I'm feeling good tonight,
Finally feeling free and it feels so right, oh.
Time to do the things I like,
Gonna see a Princess, everything's all right, oh.No Jabba to answer to,
Ain't a fixture in the palace zoo, no.
And since that carbonite's off me
I'm livin' life now that I'm free, yeah.Told me to get myself together
Now I got myself together, yeah.
Now I made it through the weather,
Better days are gonna get better.I'm so happy the carbonite is gone.
I'm movin' on.
I'm so happy that it's over now.
The pain is gone.I'm putting on my shades
to cover up my eyes
I'm jumpin' in my ride,
I'm heading out tonightI'm solo, I'm Han Solo,
I'm Han Solo.
I'm Han Solo. Solo.I'm picking up my blaster,
put it on my side.
I'm jumpin' in my Falcon
Wookie at my side.I'm solo, I'm Han Solo,
I'm Han Solo.
I'm Han Solo. Solo.
It's at this point that Lando comes on and gets jiggy. Amazing. (via ★ironicsans)
If I hadn't seen it on the official Emmentaler web site, I would have thought this video about cheese producers using geckos to produce better cheese was fake.
Pesky flies buzzing around our cows cause them stress. And this affects the quality of the milk. Which is why we quite simply put a gecko on our cows which gets rid of all these pesky flies -- by eating them. The result is milk that is smoother, and cheese that is smoother too.
(thx, urs)
Update: sigh This is likely an early April Fools joke or whatever. INTERNET, I THOUGHT WE HAD AGREED THAT APRIL FOOLS IS STUPID AND FOR STUPID PEOPLE AND EVEN IF THAT IS NOT THE CASE TO CONFINE THE STUPIDITY TO ONE DAY, APRIL FIRST, AND NOT DO ANYTHING BEFOREHAND. God, I hate April Fools Day. Fuck you.
If you've never seen the early seasons of The Simpsons, a good way to catch up might be to watch this:
Just a quick hack to experiment what happens if you watch a lot of The Simpsons episodes at the same time. It just took 10 lines of code and a few hours of processing.
About the video:
-Top to bottom: each row shows a season (from season 1 to season 10)
-Left to right: each column shows an episode (from episode 1 to episode 13)A total of 130 episodes is displayed, framerate is 25fps, thumbnails have been captured at 80x60px
I also enjoyed this minimalist representation of the Simpson family in Lego:
(via @TrevorBaum)
I followed a link to this video from Twitter. "Oh, a small jumping robot," I thought, "I bet it hops over a chair or something." Not even close. Check this out:
Boston Dynamics is at it again...they did the Big Dog and cheetah robots as well. What are the odds that they change their name to Cyberdyne Systems in the next few years? (via @jcn)
Update: I did a quick calculation...if a 6-ft-tall human could jump as high as this robot relative to its height, they could jump 315 feet into the air, high enough to land on the roof of a 30-story building. (If you ignore the scaling issues, that is.)
A pair of recent info visualizations look as though they were painted by Vincent van Gogh. Wind Map shows the realtime flow of wind over the United States.
Perpetual Ocean is a NASA animation of ocean currents around the world.
Would be cool to see both of these rendered through Stamen's watercolor filter.
Amazon announced recently that they bought a company named Kiva for $775 million. In cash. Kiva makes robots for fulfillment warehouses, of which Amazon has many. When I heard this news, I was all, robots are cool, but $775 million? But this short video on how the Kiva robots work made me a believer:
Also, pro-tip, it's pronounced ro-butt. (via ★interesting)
A recent 45-minute documentary on Lionel Messi, which starts with his discovery in Argentina and runs through the end of last season.
It's funny seeing Messi playing as a kid...the style is essentially the same, but in an even smaller package. (via @dens)
Allan Benton makes ham, some of the most delicious ham you'll ever taste. In a pair of documentaries, Benton talks about his approach to life, business, and ham. The first is short, just a couple of minutes, and offers a taste of Benton's daily schedule:
And this one is a more straightforward documentary look at Benton and his philosophy of ham.
Benton was interviewed by Esquire in 2009:
It's not the dollar that motivates me so much as the compliment.
and profiled by Gourmet in 2006, in which Benton takes a trip to some of the NYC restaurants using his products:
David Chang of Momofuku, the iconoclastic ramen and small plates bar, is a stalwart. He has been using Allan's bacon and ham since January 2005. When Allan and Sharon arrive, Chang beams. He genuflects. He stands tall by the stove and dishes a soup of cockles in a ham broth. He whisks a ham-skin-scented dashi into a pan of yellow grits, then tops them with a poached egg, crescents of ruby shrimp, and a thatch of crisp chopped bacon. And as Allan and Sharon fold their napkins, Chang exits the galley kitchen and joins them at the counter.
Allan, who has the countenance and intellect of a presidentialera Jimmy Carter, ducks his head and grins. He snags an afterthought of bacon with his chopsticks and drags it through a puddle of yolk. "I had no idea what you were doing with my bacon and ham," he says, his face twisting upward, the corners of his mouth gone vertical. "This is amazing, just amazing, especially for a purebred Tennessee hillbilly."
I get the Benton's ham every time I go to Ssam Bar. You can order hams and bacon from Benton's web site, which, with its odd URL (bentonscountryhams2.com) and default page title ("Network Solutions E-Commerce Web Site - Home"), is just as delightfully old timey as the rotary telephone in Benton's office.
Lionel Messi has scored 234 goals in his short career (he's only 24), making him the top goal scorer in all competitions for FC Barcelona. Here are all of them.
What strikes me about this video, aside from the crappy quality, is that the type of goals Messi scores are not generally what you see from other top scorers. Think of the booming balls of Ronaldo for instance, which may break the sound barrier on their way into the back of the net. Many of Messi's goals often don't look like much. They're chips and slow rollers and even the fast ones aren't that fast. But what's apparent in watching goal after goal of his is that what Messi lacks in pace, he more than makes up with quickness, placement, and timing. It's a bit mesmerising...I can only imagine how it feels as an opposing keeper to watch the same thing happening right in front of you. (via devour)
ps. I also enjoyed reading this piece by Simon Kuper on Barcelona's Secret to Soccer Success.
Barcelona start pressing (hunting for the ball) the instant they lose possession. That is the perfect time to press because the opposing player who has just won the ball is vulnerable. He has had to take his eyes off the game to make his tackle or interception, and he has expended energy. That means he is unsighted, and probably tired. He usually needs two or three seconds to regain his vision of the field. So Barcelona try to dispossess him before he can give the ball to a better-placed teammate.
Bless me Father Sloan, for I have committed a radical act on the Internet. I have watched this slow motion video of ballet dancers four times and loved, yes, loved the display of precise power and grace contained therein.
And playing a remix of Radiohead's Everything in Its Right Place over the video? I think they made this just for me. (via devour)
Perhaps inspired by 500 Years of Female Portraits in Art or this hat throbber, art.com made a video in support of their new iPad app.
This video shows a fourth grader trying a bigger ski jump for the first time. If you're a parent, I defy you to not tear up at least once while viewing. Oh, and the audio is essential.
#cryingatwork (via devour)
Here's what jumping rope looks like from the rope's perspective:
(via ★interesting)
Eating a flower gives you the power to spit fireballs. Bullets have faces. Stars make you invincible. In addtion to being video game, maybe Super Mario Bros is a surrealist masterpiece.
You've likely seen other videos taken from cameras attached to the Space Shuttle and its boosters, but this is one is exceptional in two regards: it's in HD and the sound has been remastered by Skywalker Sound.
Watch, and more importantly, listen to the whole thing...at the very end, you can see the second booster land a few hundred yards away from the first one. Who knew that being in space sounds like being trapped with a whale underwater in a tin pail? (via ★mouser)
Driverless cars is the type of innovation that may have unanticipated consequences. Sure, you can read Twitter while you're being spirited around by your robotic car, but driverless cars may also end private car ownership. And what will intersections look like when used exclusively by driverless cars? Perhaps a little like this:
"There would be an intersection manager," Stone says, "an autonomous agent directing traffic at a much finer-grain scale than just a red light for one direction and a green light for another direction."
Because of this, we won't need traffic lights at all (or stop signs, for that matter). Traffic will constantly flow, and at a rate that would probably unnerve the average human driver.
I wonder how people will abuse or have fun with driverless cars. Driver- and passenger-less car joyrides? Will they be hackable and if so, dangerous?
A dance crew performs while wearing Tron-like outfits in total darkness. It's like a wearable laser light show.
(thx, tuomas)
The first episode of the second season of Put This On is out (as funded on Kickstarter). The episode takes place in NYC and features a segment on Lo Heads, a subculture of Polo Ralph Lauren enthusiasts.
With roots in 1980s street gangs, these Polo Ralph Lauren enthusiasts have made "aspirational apparel" a lifestyle. They once had to boost their Polo from stores and fight to keep it on the streets. Today, their culture is worldwide, promulgated by hip-hop. Their hero is Ralph Lauren -- a working class New Yorker who understood that the fantastical power of style can be transformative. Dallas Penn from The Internets Celebrities, a dedicated Lo Head (and former member of the Decepts crew) with a collection of over 1000 pieces of Polo apparel takes us on a tour of this remarkable fashion subculture.
Watch as legendary animator Chuck Jones draws Bugs Bunny, one of the many characters he helped create during his long career.
It's amazing how the drawing looks nothing like a rabbit and then with a few quick strokes, he draws those cheeks and, boom, there's Bugs. You can also watch Jones draw Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, Pepe le Pew, and Daffy Duck. These are fascinating. (via ★interesting)
Ten Stone Baby is a British Pathe newsreel from 1935 that shows three-year-old Leslie Downes, a child so heavy that he is unable to walk. The video quickly turns surreal with the chipper atta-boy tone of the announcer playing while the boy scrambles for a chocolate bar that someone is dangling over his head.
Not sure what, but this is a metaphor for something.
Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around NYC and finds it's pretty easy...even if you're doing so right in front of a police station.
I recently spent a couple of days conducting a bike theft experiment, which I first tried with my brother Van in 2005. I locked my own bike up and then proceeded to steal it, using brazen means -- like a giant crowbar -- in audacious locations, including directly in front of a police station. I wanted to find out whether onlookers or the cops would intervene. What you see here in my film are the results.
This is a video of the earlier attempt he mentions. (via ★ironicsans)
The people who shot this video claim the iceberg exploded but it looks more like the collapsing ice caused the air and water to shoot out of that hole suddenly. Still cool though.
(via @polarben)
François Vautier installed an ant colony in his scanner and scanned it each week for five years. This is the resulting time lapse video:
Five years ago, I installed an ant colony inside my old scanner that allowed me to scan in high definition this ever evolving microcosm (animal, vegetable and mineral). The resulting clip is a close-up examination of how these tiny beings live in this unique ant farm. I observed how decay and corrosion slowly but surely invaded the internal organs of the scanner. Nature gradually takes hold of this completely synthetic environment.
(via ★colossal)
(via the awl)
Flesh and blood cheetahs are the fastest land animals, capable of traveling at more than 70 mph for shorts periods of time. This robotic cheetah can only do 18 mph but could probably go forever and ever until everything on the Earth has been caught and consumed by its steely jaws.
For reference, Usain Bolt's average speed over 100 meters is ~23 mph, so at least he's safe...for a little while. (via ★interesting)
I swear this is totally not made up: Ultimate Tak Ball is an indoor sport wherein you try to deposit a large soccer ball into a goal while the other team tries to stop you with stun guns. As in, you're running along and then the defender tasers you:
Even Lionel Messi might go down if confronted with a taser-wielding Pepe. (via ★kyleridolfo)
Ever since the World Cup in 2010, I've been watching a fair amount of soccer. Mostly La Liga, Premier League, and Champions League but a smattering of other games here and there. As my affection for the game has grown, I've mostly made my peace with diving. Diving in soccer is the practice of immediately falling to the ground when a foul has been committed against you (or even if one hasn't) in order to get the referee's attention. To Americans who have grown up watching American football and basketball, it is also one of the most ridiculous sights in sports...these manly professional athletes rolling around on the ground with fake injuries and then limping around the pitch for a few seconds before resuming their runs at 100% capacity. I still dislike the players who go down too often, lay it on too thick, or dive from phantom fouls, but much of the time there's only one referee and two assistants for that huge field and you're gonna get held and tackled badly so how else are you going to get that call? You dive.
Except for Lionel Messi. It's not that he never dives (he does) but he stays on his feet more often than not while facing perhaps the most intense pressure in the game. Here's a compilation video of Messi not going down:
In recent years, efforts have been made on various fronts to apply the lessons of Moneyball to soccer. I don't think diving is one of the statistics measured because if it were, it might happen a lot less. Poor tackles and holding usually occur when the player/team with the ball has the advantage. By diving instead of staying on your feet, you usually give away that advantage (unless you're in the box, have Ronaldo on your team taking free kicks, or can somehow hoodwink the ref into giving the other guy a yellow) and that doesn't make any sense to me. If you look at Messi in that video, his desire to stay upright allows him to keep the pressure on the defense in many of those situations, creating scoring opportunities and even points that would otherwise end up as free kicks. It seems to me that Messi's reluctance to dive is not some lofty character trait of his; it's one of the things that makes him such a great player: he never gives up the advantage when he has it.
Very interesting talk by Bret Victor on the power and effectiveness of organizing your work around a guiding principle. Victor's principle is "creators need an immediate connection to what they create" and he shows some really cool ways he's exploring that idea.
(via waxy)
This is the oldest surviving clip of an American football game, in which we see Princeton and Yale battle in 1903.
The game footage starts at around 2:00. It resembles the current game of football in name only...before the forward pass, yards and points were difficult to come by and the game seems more like rugby or 11-on-11 wrestling. (via sly oyster)
This footage from the British Pathe archive shows the Hindenburg flying peacefully around and then cuts to the mighty airship in flames as it hits the ground.
(via devour)
I needed a little beauty this morning and this certainly fit the bill...a snowboarder covered in LED lights shreds in the dark.
(thx, finn)
A Canadian man has been digging out his basement with scale-model RC construction equipment since 1997.
Yes, you read that right -- he's been digging out his basement for 15 years -- with nothing but little R/C tractors, diggers and even a miniature rock crusher! Amazing.
At an average rate of eight or nine cubic feet of earth moved each year, the process has been absolutely glacial. But what do you expect when every morning he drives his little excavator on its transport truck down to the basement, unloads it, and then uses it to dig out the basement walls.
Then Joe uses the excavators to load R/C trucks and they work their way up a spiral ramp to the basement window where the soil gets dumped outside.
Then, once it's outside, he uses bulldozers to consolidate the pile of excavated dirt.
This is so perfectly in the kottke.org wheelhouse that I can't even tell if it's any good or not: a mashup of Jay-Z and Kanye's Niggas in Paris and Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris.
(via ★davidfg)
Peter Sellers did four different spoken word versions of The Beatles' She Loves You: as Dr. Strangelove, with a Cockney accent, with an Irish accent, and with an upper crust English accent (my fave):
Yeah, Sellers is pretty good with accents. (via ★bump)
Turn up the sound for this one, a short video shot in Odessa, Ukraine of ice creaking and squeaking really really loudly.
It sounds like a pod of dolphins trying to mate with Skrillex. (via ★acoleman)
The NY Times has a short documentary film by Errol Morris on El Wingador, a five-time winner of the Wing Bowl. My favorite line from the film, uttered by an off-camera Morris:
Wait a second. That's cannibalism!
Though his several wins came early on in the competition's history, El Wingador is still competing in the Wing Bowl. In the 2012 competition, held today, El Wingador came in third while Takeru Kobayashi completely demolished the competition in his first attempt, eating 337 wings in the process.
From the This Must Be the Place series, a lovely short film about the Prime Burger Restaurant in midtown Manhattan. The restaurant opened in 1938 and one of the servers, Artie, has been there since 1952.
For many of the guys that work here, the restaurant is like a second home -- some of them have been slinging burgers, making shakes, and waiting on customers at this location for decades. Opened in 1938, the place hasn't been altered since the early '60s, and it looks all the better for it. Here the waiters and workers of Prime Burger discuss their views on their chosen profession, and the unique nature of the place itself.
(via @daveg)
Update: Over at Serious Eats, Ed Levine gives some advice on how to order properly at Prime Burger.
So why the need to order right? Because to keep up with the fast food chains, the DiMicelis started par-broiling their burgers. Par-broiling produces a less juicy burger. So when you order at Prime Burger specify you want your burger ($5.25 for a hamburger, $5.95 for a cheeseburger) made from scratch, and that you're willing to wait the extra few minutes.
This is a 1930 short film from avant-garde filmmaker Ralph Steiner that shows dozens of gears and other machinery at work.
(thx, matthew)
You've seen one washing machine self-destruction video, you've seen them all, right? Maybe not. Back in August, I posted this short video of a washer destroying itself (with some help from a brick) but this longer video is mesmerizing and almost poignant at times.
At times, it seems as though the washer is attempting to turn into the Picasso version of itself, a Cubist sculpture manifesting itself over time. (via @aaroncoleman0)
Designer Adam Ladd asked his five-year-old daughter for her impressions of several well-known logos. This is great:
(via stellar)
The Eames' Powers of Ten and Eva Szasz's Cosmic Zoom both came out in 1968 and were based on Kees Boeke's 1957 essay called Cosmic View. This seems like an incredible coincidence. I couldn't find anything online about which film came first or if there was any influence one way or the other, so I thought I'd ask if anyone knows anything about which came out first. Hit me at jason@kottke.org.
The Pronunciation Book channel on YouTube shows you how to say various words in American English in a straightforward fashion. Here's how to say Zegna, the men's clothing brand:
This is not to be confused with the Pronunciation Manual channel, which does the same thing in the same format but much funnier and more incorrect.
I could have embedded a dozen more...I have no idea why I think these are so funny but I just cannot stop laughing at them. Ok, one more:
And this one! Make it stop!!
The Bay of Fundy in Eastern Canada has some of the world's greatest tides...at times, high tide is 50+ feet higher than low tide. Here's a time lapse video of those tides in action.
Maybe I'm just way over-cautious but this guy does almost kill himself while bungee jumping off a bridge using a jury-rigged climbing rope and harness, right? This is just totally batshit crazy:
Skip ahead to about 1:30...everything before that is just filler. (via ★bryce)
Clip after clip of formerly intact objects (boats, planes, buildings) being destroyed in a matter of seconds.
(via @unlikelywords)
According to this YouTube video, Japanese do multiplication by drawing lines like this:
(via ★vuokko)
Adele's Rolling in the Deep has been covered thousands of times on YouTube...here's 70 of those performances cut together into one seamless song.
(via ★davidfg)
A collection of things that New Yorkers say. Like "where's the train?", "you have to go to Brooklyn, it's the law", and "tourists!"
Watch as John Scalzi's 13-year-old daughter sees an LP record for the first time.
This is... This is... What? What?! This is huge! This is like ten CDs in one. How many songs does it have on it?
I believe the record in question is from Jonathan Coulton. (via ★mathowie)
I don't know if the nudie playing cards are absolutely essential, but this trick is pretty neat.
(via @itscolossal)
The Fournitures Generales Pour Le Piano is a shop in Paris that sells parts for piano repair. The owner runs the shop himself, sells fewer and fewer parts each year, and dreams of building a one-string instrument which sounds like a piano, lute, and harp all at the same time.
See also the decline in piano quality over the last 100 years. (thx, judy)
This is mesmerizing: using Google Image Search and starting with a transparent image, this video cycles through each subsequent related image, over 2900 in all.
(via ★mattb)
Micro-Macro is a Powers of Ten-style video in which the various scales are depicted with food.
(via ★glass)
The sound and picture are poor, but the entirety of Errol Morris' A Brief History of Time is available on YouTube.
Featuring music from Philip Glass, the film is a documentary about Stephen Hawking and his ideas about the universe. Morris recently stated on Twitter:
Yes. I plan to re-release [A Brief History of Time]. (It was never properly color corrected and is one of my best films.)
The film is difficult, if not impossible, to find on DVD and isn't available on Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, or iTunes. And as far as I can tell, the soundtrack was never released either.
I have rarely in my life seen something as physically impressive as this performance of Swan Lake:
It's not just what she does, it's how rock-still she is while doing it. Just, wow. (via ★interesting)
Fotoshop is a new beauty product from Adobé (say aah-DOE-bay) that slims, gets rid of wrinkles, and can even lighten your skin color.
(via stellar)
Thirty Japanese giant hornets take on an entire hive of European honey bees and slaughter 30,000 bees in three hours.
Not having evolved alongside the giant hornet, European honey bees don't have a natural defense against them. But the Japanese honey bee does:
The Japanese honey bee, on the other hand, has a defense against attacks of this manner. When a hornet approaches the hive to release pheromones, the bee workers emerge from their hive in an angry cloud-formation with some 500 individuals. As they form a tight ball around the hornet, the ball increases in heat to 47 °C (117 °F) from their vibrating wings, forming a convection oven as the heat released by the bees' bodies is spread over the hornets. Because bees can survive higher temperatures (48 to 50 °C (118 to 122 °F)) than the hornet (44 to 46 °C (111 to 115 °F)), the latter dies.
(via ★aaroncohen)
This video, which takes its audio from a 2007 interview, takes a crack at defining it.
So, a dubstep or grime is kinda like this ultra slow, ultra dirty spawn of hip hop, but it's almost at a breakbeat speed, but it's at a halftime breakbeat speed. So it feels, like, abnormally slow, and just gives this really heavy feel.
Since the evolution of music has slowed since, say, the early 1980s, I thought it would be a long time before a popular genre of music came along that seemed, to my old ears, to be noisy garbage...but then dubstep came along. Industrial, happy hardcore, metal, punk, glitch, and even drum & bass I can appreciate, but dubstep makes me want to yell at children to get off lawns. And I actually like that door stopper noise!
This is kind of amazing: if you put a contact microphone on a hard surface and then process the sound in realtime, you can turn that surface into a touch screen...or a programmable musical instrument.
(via ★johnpavlus)
The quantum levitation videos I showed you a couple months ago are pretty cool, but scientists scienticiens at the Japan Institute of Science and Technology have upped the game by using QL CGI to build a real-world Wipeout track.
Say it with me: science!! Also, do Rainbow Road next! (via ★interesting)
Update: Say it with me: advertising! Or some other such nonsense. Several people have alerted me that this video is a fake...you can see vapor trails passing through walls, etc. Boo. Boo-urns. (thx, all)
A short time lapse of Comet Lovejoy appearing in the pre-dawn sky over the Andes. Wait for the last sequence...it's the best one.
Lovejoy was only discovered in Nov 2011 by an amateur astronomer. (via ★interesting)
A lovely short film by Ben Proudfoot about a letterpress company and a paper company who are scraping by next door to each other in Los Angeles.
Three guys ride on tiny paths next to steep rock faces and over narrow wooden bridges. I could only manage watching a minute of this...I almost threw up in fear.
(via ★interesting)
One of my favorite things on the internet is footage of old styles of dancing set to contemporary music. Like this:
See also Daft Punk Charleston and Russian dancing (w/ Run DMC). (via ★dunstan)
Get it while you can: an hour-long BBC documentary about Steve Jobs with on-camera interviews with Woz, Stephen Fry, Tim Berners-Lee, John Sculley and many others.
(thx, jteve)
An increasingly frustrated lizard plays a game called Ant Crusher on an Android phone. He's pretty good, but is no less hungry than before he started.
(via stellar)
At the beginning of this video, Ramesh Raskar, associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, announces calmly:
We have built a virtual slow-motion camera where we can see photons, or light particles, moving through space.
Yeah, no biggie.
When this came on right before the season finale of Boardwalk Empire, I shushed my talking wife so hard I nearly threw out my back.
April! April is coming!
Video of a Steve Jobs speech circa 1980. This was just recently donated and presented by the Computer History Museum.
(via @itscolossal)
Update: Well, that didn't last long..the Vimeo embed ist kaputt. But it's still available on the Computer History Museum's site. Perhaps we can persuade them to throw it up on their YouTube channel?
Before Ice Cube became a rapper, he studied architectural drafting at the Phoenix Institute of Technology, so he has some interesting things to say in this short appreciation of Charles and Ray Eames.
They was doing mashups before mashups even existed. It's not about the pieces, it's how the pieces work together. You know, taking something that already exist and making it something special. You know, kinda like sampling.
(via ★interesting)
Update: The NY Times has an interview with Ice Cube about the video.
Q: How are your drafting skills these days?
A: You don't want to live in nothing I draw. I got a certificate. For a year. In '88. I don't think I picked up a T-square since.
Occupy Wall Street went up to protest at Lincoln Center last night during a performance of Philip Glass' opera Satyagraha. New Yorker music critic Alex Ross was there and captured the protest on video, which included Glass himself reading the closing lines from the opera, amplified to the crowd by the people's mic. It is an amazing scene.
When the Satyagraha listeners emerged from the Met, police directed them to leave via side exits, but protesters began encouraging them to disregard the police, walk down the steps, and listen to Glass speak. Hesitantly at first, then in a wave, they did so. The composer proceeded to recite the closing lines of Satyagraha, which come from the Bhagavad-Gita (after 3:00 in the video above): "When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again." True to form, he said it several times, with the "human microphone" repeating after him. Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson were in attendance, and at one point Reed helped someone crawl over the barricade that had been set up along the sidewalk.
(via stellar)
The beginning of each episode of The Wire featured a short quote of dialogue from that episode...here are the characters saying all those quotes:
(via supercut.org)
The street skiing video has more narrative structure but the tricks pulled in this urban snowboarding video are just filthy.
(thx, river)
80-minute video of a conversation between Neil deGrasse Tyson and of an out-of-character Stephen Colbert "about science, society, and the universe". Someone needs to get this on YouTube or something...the video streaming is slooooow.
Update: Ah, here's a mirror on YouTube. (thx, aaron)
When dense briny water (left behind by newly formed sea ice) sinks, it freezes the water around it, forming an icicle that stretches to the sea floor. Then it freezes water and wildlife on the sea floor. David Attenborough narrates:
This is like street skating except with alpine skis down hilly city terrain. Includes jumps over hung laundry & parked cars, railslides down stairs, etc. Crazy.
(thx to @gnuhaus for the better embed)
I've been on the web for 17 years now, I'm a professional link finder, and I have never in my life seen anything like these guys performing on an Indian talent show. They *start off* by biting into fluorescent light bulbs and it just gets more nuts from there.
You never really see this much bleeding on American Idol... (via unlikely words)
In this 15-minute video, Terry Gilliam talks about how he does the cut-out animations that defined the Monty Python visual aesthetic. Gilliam's technique is all about simplicity and embracing constraint.
(via ★thoughtbrain)
On the 48th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, Errol Morris talks to Tink Thompson about "The Umbrella Man", a gentleman who was pictured in the Zapruder film standing with an open umbrella near where Kennedy was shot on a sunny day. The result is a nifty six-minute film.
For years, I've wanted to make a movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Not because I thought I could prove that it was a conspiracy, or that I could prove it was a lone gunman, but because I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence. Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?
The Updike piece from the New Yorker is available here (subscribers only, but the abstract is informative):
For example, "the umbrella man": though the day was clear and blowy, he can be detected, in photographs, standing on the curb just about where the assassination would in a few seconds occur, holding a black umbrella above him; seconds later he is again photographed, walking away, gazing tranquilly at the scramble of horrified spectators. His umbrella is now furled. Who was he? Where is he now?
The film pairs nicely with Morris' recent interview of Stephen King about the latter's new novel based on the Kennedy assassination.
This is Arnold Schwarzenegger doing the DVD commentary for Total Recall. Instead of adding any context to the film, he simply describes exactly what was happening in each scene.
I have three guesses as to what's going on here:
1. It's a fake from a really good impersonator.
2. Arnold is dumb and he's unaware of how dumb he is.
3. But my money's on this one: Arnold was contractually obligated to do the DVD commentary but when it came to it, he didn't really want to. So he torpedoed the whole thing and had some fun in the meantime. (via stellar)
This is not your typical sky time lapse...instead of looping through 365 days in one video, each day gets its own little movie in a grid.
A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds. From these images, I created a mosaic of time-lapse movies, each showing a single day. The days are arranged in chronological order. My intent was to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year.
Best viewed at YouTube in full-screen HD. (via data pointed)
Speaking of going fast, this is a lovely 22-minute documentary about a downhill skateboarding race in Teutonia, Brazil where the competitors reach speeds in excess of 70 mph on almost unbelievably rough pavement.
(via ★acoleman)
Rival protesting groups clashed with police and each other during Independence Day festivities in Warsaw, Poland and someone caught some of it on a camera mounted on a remote control helicopter.
This shorter video of police double-timing it down a narrow Warsaw street is almost cinematic. It reminds me of how the different camera views in the Madden NFL video games inspired the NFL broadcasting networks to invent camera systems to provide similar views. In the future, the news will look more and more like movies. (via @coudal)
One of the many micro-genres featured on kottke.org is the "going fast video". In that spirit, here's a car going 462 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats.
My favorite part is right around 30 seconds, when he hits the gas and you can see the dirt fly up from the rear wheels. Also, the driver's demeanor is an odd combination of frightened and bored, like Bill Murray on the elliptical in Lost in Translation. Help! (via devour)
Andreas Helgstrand at the World Equestrian Games 2006 wowing the crowds with his unconventional music choice.
Compare with the original. (via ★acoleman)
Michael J. Fox recently took the stage at his annual benefit for Parkinson's disease and played a familiar favorite: Johnny B. Goode. Marvin, get on the phone to your cousin!
And if that's not Mike Fox awesomeness for one day, here he is on a recent episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
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