kottke.org posts about video
I’d vaguely heard of Project Plowshare but good god, what a ridiculous and dangerous waste of time and money.
At the height of the Cold War, nuclear weapons were seen not only as devices of destruction, but also as tools for progress. Project Plowshare was a bold attempt to use atomic explosions for more practical purposes: from digging canals and creating harbors to reshaping entire landscapes. This project was designed to push the limits of what seemed possible, but instead turned into an environmental disaster.
This reminds me of that episode of the Simpsons when Homer buys a gun and uses it around the house for everything, like changing the TV channel and opening beer cans. If the only tool you have is a hammer…
This is so cool: in the early 1900s, a mechanical engineer named Louis Brennan invented a self-balancing train that ran on a single track. This video demonstrates how the train worked using a clever system of gyroscopes.
This is the Brennan Monorail, a train from the early 1900s that seemed to defy the laws of physics. Not only did it keep itself perfectly balanced on a single rail, but it mysteriously leaned into corners without any driver input.
It’s kind of incredible how well Brennan’s system worked. It’s ingenious. (via messy nessy)
As part of his Real Time series, artist Maarten Baas has created The People’s Clock, a timepiece that lives in Amsterdam’s Schiphol airport. To create the clock’s “workings”, Baas recorded more than 1000 volunteers moving as the clock’s hands over a 12-hour period. If you look carefully, you can see a single individual dressed in orange at the edge of the circle acting as the second hand:
Each of the installed clock’s faces is a looped video of that recording, synced to the current time. Here’s a quick behind-the-scenes video of how the clock was made:
See also Baas’s Sweeper’s Clock and Schiphol Clock.
I’d vaguely remembered that Hulu was adapting The Testaments, Margaret Atwood’s follow-up to The Handmaid’s Tale, as a sequel to the TV series of the same name, but I was surprised to find out that the show has premiered and is already three episodes in (a fourth will be available today).
The initial series lost its way after 2-3 seasons, but I still ended up watching the whole thing. I’ll probably give The Testaments a shot as well.
I’m so glad Steven Soderbergh unretired from filmmaking. His newest film, The Christophers, looks amazing. It stars Ian McKellen as a famous artist and Michaela Coel as his assistant — but of course there’s more to it. Reviewer David Sims calls it both a heist movie and “a meditation on the relationship between art and commerce”. I hope this one actually comes to Vermont so I can see it in the theater.
Coel and McKellen both have such great faces, don’t you think?
Almost three years ago exactly, Fred Again rolled into the NPR studios and did a Tiny Desk Concert.
When Fred again.. first proposed a Tiny Desk concert, it wasn’t immediately clear how he was going to make it work — not because he lacked creativity, but because translating purely electronic music at the Desk is a daunting task for anyone. How would an artist, whose performances take the form of DJ sets in front of massive audiences, curate an intimate and unique experience? But what the British songwriter and producer came up with is a reminder of what a Tiny Desk is at its best: an opportunity for artists to challenge themselves in such a way that it almost feels like they’re making new music, all while sticking to what feels true to them. For Fred again.. that meant re-learning the marimba, playing the vibraphone, singing at the piano and looping sounds and beats — all at the same time.
From a livestream recorded many years ago, this is Radiohead covering Joy Division’s Ceremony. The song was originally written by Joy Division but the version most people know is New Order’s — it was their first single. From Wikipedia:
“Ceremony” was one of the last Joy Division songs to be composed, with lyrics written by Ian Curtis. According to guitarist Bernard Sumner, the group wrote the song a few weeks before Ian Curtis died “to try and heal him through music” and keep him “involved in the band and involved in music and remind him of what … a great future he had”. Sumner concluded, “Unfortunately, it didn’t work”.
Just three versions of Joy Division performing the song exist, including one on the group’s compilation album Still.
Bill Hammack, aka The Engineer Guy, is an amazing engineering educator and in this video he explains how duct tape is designed to simultaneously do three things well: “a) adhere with light pressure, b) stay in place, yet c) be removable”.
Controlling the stickiness of tape is of utmost importance. In fact, a key element of engineering tape is controlling its stickiness — and only by doing that can tape be wound into a useful roll. If the tape sticks too tightly to itself, we could not use it.
Gotta be honest: I was not expecting Silly Putty to make a relevant guest appearance during his explanation. And I love the ramp & ball test for tape stickiness near the end…a very elegant and simple bit of engineering:
Pressure sensitive tape predates much of the most elementary molecular understanding of adhesion; tape has been mass produced since the early twentieth century. That engineers developed and refined tape without this knowledge is no surprise — recall that the purpose of the engineering method is to solve problems before we have full scientific knowledge.
From the Norwegian Consumer Council, a funny video that warns against the dangers of enshittification. It’s part of their Breaking Free initiative:
Digital products and services are steadily becoming worse. Software
becomes increasingly difficult and frustrating to use, websites and apps
are littered with ads and spam content, and useful features are removed,
degraded, or made subscription-only. This is part of a process called
enshittification.
Enshittification happens in stages: First a company attracts users by
providing a valuable service, often seemingly for free or at an artificially
low price. The company then exploits those users to draw in business
customers, and finally abuses its business customers and claws back all
the value for itself and its shareholders.
Enshittification is the result of a dysfunctional market, where companies
have been able to get away with mistreating and exploiting consumers.
Consumers are trapped in digital services, potential competitors are
shut out, and policymakers and regulators are unable or reluctant to
clamp down on anticompetitive, illegal and otherwise abusive behavior.
In practice, a handful of tech companies have become so powerful that
they do not have reason to fear any consequences.
I went into this video not knowing anything about how a mid-19th century sunshine recorder might work and was genuinely delighted by the reveal. If you’d like to be similarly surprised, stop reading now and just watch the video.
…
…
The sunshine recorder was invented in 1853 for measuring the duration of bright sunshine over a day. The contraption consists of a solid glass ball that acts as a lens, which focuses the light of the Sun onto a paper recording card, burning marks into it. As the Sun moves across the sky, the focus point moves across the recording card, burning a line into it. If it’s super sunny out, the focused beam burns right through the card. So simple! So clever! And so straightforwardly physical — here’s what a daily sunshine record looks like:
(via robert stephens)
Max Cooper’s music videos are always worth a look. This one, directed by Katia Schutz, is for a song called Pattern Index from his forthcoming album (Feeling Is Structure, May 8).
Cooper describes Feeling Is Structure as an “audiovisual album”, which I take to mean that each song will have an associated video released with it. A second video, Ebb and Flow, is already out too:
I thought the official video of Berghain by Rosalía (feat. Björk & Yves Tumor) was great — “I don’t even know what this is — classical pop? surrealist orchestral?” — and this recent live performance from the Brit Awards takes the song to the next level. I loved it. (via kenzie)
This has been out in the world for a while, but I just ran across it the other day: Bloody Murder is an unreleased track recorded during the studio sessions for Good Kid, M.A.A.D City. It samples Radiohead’s Everything In Its Right Place and it’s gooood. Available on YouTube and Soundcloud.
See also Dwells’ mashup of Everything In Its Right Place and N95.
For his recent London run of shows, Fred Again coaxed Daft Punk’s Thomas Bangalter out of his helmet and in front of the decks for a 2-hour collaborative DJ set. And you can watch the whole thing on YouTube.
The chess program available on Delta Air Lines’ seatback screens is an ELO monster that can beat almost all opponents on easy mode. This guy used a series of increasingly powerful bots to see just how good the Delta chess bot is. Can it beat a grandmaster-level bot? (via clive thompson)
This is a mindblowing time capsule of ordinary life: video of a group of friends taking the NYC subway to Coney Island in 1987. Because it was before mobile phones, they had to arrange to meet one of the group members in the first car of the train along the way.
The film was shot by Nelson Sullivan, a videographer who recorded the arts, music, and LGBTQ+ communities in NYC in this same ur-vlogging style.
Viewed today, Sullivan’s video record of his life represents a pre-Internet form of vlogging, while his frequently used technique of turning the camera to face himself clearly anticipates the modern selfie.
You can watch hundreds more of Sullivan’s films on YouTube, including a trip to McDonald’s (the most popular video on the channel), several RuPaul videos, a holiday party at Michael Alig & DJ Keoki’s apartment, and Keith Haring’s NYE party. Sullivan sadly died of a presumed heart attack two years later at the age of 41. (thx, caroline)
Would you like to watch a puppet DJ a chill set of French house music in a cool workplace meeting space? Trick question because of course you would. This went right into my Underscore collection. (via undermanager)
Some genius has taken an audio sample of the hum of a grocery store freezer, cleaned it up, and extended it into a 10-hour video. The freezer’s hum, variously compared to Brian Eno’s music and “an electrical gong bath”, went viral enough to warrant an article in the Guardian last month:
“Anyone noticed how nice the freezers sound in the eccy road co-op?” someone wrote on the Sheffield Reddit page in January. “It’s like all the fans have been carefully tuned to the calmest droning chord ever, it’s like being in an electrical gong bath.”
Earlier this week, another Redditor shared a video of the freezers in all their aural glory, later earning a huge second audience when reposted to X. A debate ensued. Was it tuned to C# major? Could you hear the opening of Nothing Compares 2 U somewhere in the electronic hum? “I think it’s developed a slight discordant edge over the last couple of months,” one Reddit user wrote. “It’s ageing like fine wine.”
A pair of hounds chase a hare across a snowy plain — will it get away? In Mario Kart terms, the dogs have the weight and max speed advantage while the hare is maxed out in acceleration, handling, and traction.
Ghost Elephants is a new documentary film directed by Werner Herzog for National Geographic. Here’s the trailer.
For over a decade, Dr. Steve Boyes, conservation biologist and National Geographic Explorer, has been in search of a mysterious, elusive herd of Ghost Elephants in the highlands of Angola, deep within its forests. From acclaimed director Werner Herzog (“Grizzly Man”), GHOST ELEPHANTS follows Boyes on an epic journey as he sets out with some of the best master trackers in the world, in pursuit of an animal long believed to be a myth.
From Peter Sobczynski’s rave review of the film:
The subject of Herzog’s fascination this time around is South African naturalist Dr. Steve Boyes, and while he seems perfectly staid and affable at first sight, he has an obsession within him that has consumed his life to such an extent that if he didn’t actually exist, Herzog might have had to invent him. The focus of his fascination is a species of giant elephant residing in the highlands of Angola, known as “ghost elephants” for their apparent ability to avoid detection. Indeed, not only has Boyes never actually seen one of these creatures with his own eyes, but he is not even certain that such creatures exist—the closest he has come is a massive elephant shot near that area in Angola in 1955, now on display at the Smithsonian.
Herzog, National Geographic, elephants, quixotic quest — who says no? Ghost Elephants is available to stream on Disney+ and Hulu.
The Shape of Paris is a balletic short film of skateboarder Andy Anderson zooming, grinding, spinning, and floating around Paris in the summertime. It is also beautifully shot by Brett Novak; Paris has never looked better. As a YT commenter put it: “bro wtf this is the cleanest footage I’ve ever seen. The cinematography and color grading is insane.”
Also, this is the first skate video I’ve seen with “trick acknowledgements” in the credits. Great touch. (via craig mod)
The Library of Congress recently discovered a copy of a “long-lost” film made in ~1897 by George Méliès called Gugusse and the Automaton (Gugusse et l’Automate), which “had not been seen by anyone in likely more than a century” and “was the first appearance on film of what might be called a robot”. It’s also one of the first science fiction films ever made.
You can watch a digitized copy of the whole film here (it’s only 45 seconds long):
And here’s the story of how the film was discovered.
Equally delighted was Bill McFarland, the donor who had driven the box of films from his home in Grand Rapids, Michigan, to the Library’s National Audio-Visual Conservation Center in Culpeper, Virginia, to have the cache evaluated.
His great-grandfather, William Delisle Frisbee, had been a potato farmer and schoolteacher in western Pennsylvania by day, but by night he was a traveling showman. He drove his horse and buggy from town to town to dazzle the locals with a projector and some of the world’s first moving pictures.
He set up shop in a local schoolroom, church, lodge or civic auditorium and showed magic lantern slides and short films with music from a newfangled phonograph. It was shocking.
“They must have been thrilled,” McFarland said. “They must have been out of their minds to see this motion picture and to hear the Edison phonograph.”
On the occasion of the release of her latest book, The Beginning Comes After the End, Rebecca Solnit sat down for an interview with David Marchese of the NY Times. Here’s the video version:
This is a great interview. Marchese’s first question is about how we find the positive in a world filled with grim news:
Even the right tells us something encouraging, if we listen carefully to what they’re saying. They tell us: You are very powerful. You’ve changed the world profoundly. All these things that are often treated separately — feminism, queer rights, environmental action — are connected, so they’re basically telling us we’re incredibly successful, which is the good news. The bad news is that they hate it and want to change it all back. There is a backlash, and it is significant. But it is not comprehensive or global.
And I loved this part (emphasis mine):
One of the great weaknesses of our era is that we get lone superhero movies that suggest that our big problems are solved by muscly guys in spandex, when actually the world mostly gets changed through collective effort. Thich Nhat Hanh said before he died a few years ago that the next Buddha will be the Sangha. The Sangha, in Buddhist terminology, is the community of practitioners. It’s this idea that we don’t have to look for an individual, for a savior, for an Übermensch. I think the counter to Trump always has been and always will be civil society. A lot of the left wants social change to look like the French Revolution or Che Guevara. Maybe changing the world is more like caregiving than it is like war. Too many people still expect it to look like war.
In 2017, city planner Jeff Speck gave a talk on the four ways to make a city more walkable:
In the typical American city, in which most people own cars and the temptation is to drive them all the time, if you’re going to get them to walk, then you have to offer a walk that’s as good as a drive or better. What does that mean? It means you need to offer four things simultaneously: there needs to be a proper reason to walk, the walk has to be safe and feel safe, the walk has to be comfortable, and the walk has to be interesting.
I know Speck is talking about cities here, but these four rules — useful, safe, comfortable, and interesting — get at something about living in rural Vermont that I’ve always had trouble articulating: for a place that’s so outdoors-oriented with so many trails and places to hike, a good walk can be difficult to find. I can walk out my door to take a walk that’s sorta safe (walking against traffic on the side of the road — some assholes don’t slow down or move over that much). Comfort is variable: cars kick up dust and my house is surrounded by pretty steep hills. I can’t really walk to anywhere useful, and there aren’t too many possible routes so the interest of the scenery, though beautiful in the summer, gets stale. So then I’m left with driving somewhere to walk, which always just bums me out.
Anyway, this explains why every time I get to walkable city (Tokyo, Rome, NYC, Paris), I am instantly like, yes!! This! This is a walk.
Related reading: Speck is the author of Walkable City (Amazon) and Walkable City Rules (Amazon). (via paul stout)
Ok, you know this is going to be a good one: De La Soul plays a Tiny Desk Concert.
The humor of De La Soul has always been one of its calling cards. When DJ Maseo tells the Tiny Desk crowd, “Ladies and gentlemen, we’re a new group called De La Soul,” he means it as a joke. But, in so many ways, one of the most influential groups in hip-hop is new: the duties have been reassessed, the focus has shifted and the newness of The Plugs is laid plain here at the Tiny Desk.
Here’s the setlist:
YUHDONTSTOP
Will Be
Much More
Stakes is High
Sunny Storms
Different World
Breakadawn
Pony Ride
A Quick 16 for Mama
Me Myself and I
Feel free to dance at your desk or in your kitchen or wherever you’re listening.
This video traces the history of Apple’s HyperCard from Vannevar Bush’s idea of the Memex to the Mother of All Demos to the Xerox PARC Alto to Bill Atkinson, the inventor of HyperCard, who said:
HyperCard is a software erector set. It lets people put things together without having to know how to solder.
There’s a ton of information about HyperCard at hypercard.org, including this HyperCard simulator that runs in your browser.
Last week, Nine Inch Nails released an album of remixes and unreleased session music from their Tron: Ares score called Tron Ares: Divergence. I’m listening to it now; pretty good so far.
Lumière, Le Cinema! is a new documentary film by Thierry Frémaux about Auguste & Louis Lumière and the early days of motion pictures — and includes 100+ newly restored films. It’s playing at MoMA at the end of this month; here’s their description:
Witness the birth of cinema with Thierry Frémaux’s Lumière, Le Cinéma! (2025), about the pioneering achievements of the French entrepreneurs Auguste and Louis Lumière in the late 19th century. Journey back to the 1890s, when the Lumière Company, with their astonishing new invention, the cinematograph, made it possible for audiences to voyage around the world in moving pictures for the first time. Featuring gorgeous new restorations of more than 100 comedies, dramas, and travelogues — some famous, some forgotten, and some never before seen — and set to an evocative score of period music by Gabriel Fauré, this wondrous documentary enables contemporary viewers to imagine an entirely new language of storytelling unfolding film by glorious film.
Just watching the trailer is wild — the restored footage from short films that are 120, 130 years old is astonishing. From a review in Collider:
From riding atop trains to showing off goofy vaudevillian acts or brief moments of comical violence, each clip speaks not only to what came before, but how these short pieces behave as the DNA for every genre, every facet of what we consider filmmaking to this very day. The biggest joy of all, of course, is the ability to see these films projected large and in all their restored glory, not simply segregated to being streamed on a small screen, or to suffer through damage that makes these segments feel all that more removed from the present. It’s as if many of these clips have been rescued from an island where they have been deserted for more than a century, carefully dusted off, and allowed finally to be seen in a context that their creators could only have dreamed possible.
Ann Ballentine bought an old candy factory building in Brooklyn in 1979. She filled it with working artists and became something of a fairy godmother to them all.
It entails someone who’s not as money driven, because you’re not gouging people for huge rents, and it requires being determined to do that over a long stretch of time.
This is a lovely little short film.
The details of Elizebeth Smith Friedman’s remarkable career sound a bit outlandish when you list them all together:
cracked thousands of codes and ciphers during WWI
did the same in WWII, helping to foil Nazi spy rings and protect Allied supply ships
chief cryptanalyst for the US Navy and the US Coast Guard
co-developed, with her husband, many of the principles of modern cryptology
broke mobster codes used by rumrunners bringing illegal alcohol into the US during Prohibition
testified in court against Al Capone
debunked the claim that Francis Bacon had secretly written Shakespeare’s plays
J. Edgar Hoover took credit for her “uncovering a Nazi spy ring operating across South America in 1943”, knowing that her wartime work was classified and she couldn’t correct him
From an NSA press release in 2020:
She began solving these encrypted messages and providing the Coast Guard with vital intelligence that supported their efforts to interdict smuggling. She also trained a small team in cryptanalysis to expand the crime-fighting intelligence effort. Elizebeth and her assistant solved about 12,000 coded messages between the so-called rum runners and smugglers, which resulted in 650 criminal prosecutions. In addition to criminals violating the Prohibition laws, some of the messages Ms. Friedman solved also enabled the arrest and conviction of a number of narcotics smugglers.
She had a personal role in some of the prosecutions. She testified as an expert witness in 33 cases, and frequently became the subject of newspaper and magazine articles. For a time, she was one of the most famous women in the country.
From a 2022 piece in the US Naval Institute’s Naval History magazine:
The Zimmermann Telegram, sent in code, changed the trajectory of life for the Friedmans, who possessed skills suddenly extremely valuable to the U.S. government. The military was desperate for codebreakers, and radio and wireless technology was changing the nature of war. There were possibly three or four persons in the whole of the United States who could break codes, and Elizebeth and William were two of them. Elizebeth was the first to decode military messages intercepted from the Mexican Army, working by counting the frequency of letters.
The Friedmans began operating as a team, developing strategies as they went along. For the first eight months of the war, they and their small team conducted all codebreaking for every part of the U.S. government, developing broader methodologies still in use today. Neither was particularly good at mathematics, but they operated on an intuitive level to devise techniques to discern patterns. Most importantly, their methods were scientific, which is to say the results could be replicated.3 The Friedmans worked feverishly to solve messages as they poured in. They decrypted messages from Scotland Yard revealing an intricate separatist plot by Hindu activists living in New York to ship weapons to India with German help. William was summoned to testify about how he broke the codes, but before he could take the stand, an Indian man in the gallery shot one of the defendants.
The Marshall Foundation:
While testifying against Al Capone’s liquor smuggling ring in New Orleans, Mrs. Friedman taught a lesson on the science of codebreaking and the use of mono-alphabetic ciphers right in the courtroom. Col. Amos Woodcock, director of the Bureau of Prohibition said that without the work of the cryptanalysis unit and the expert testimony of Mrs. Friedman, the case would not have been won.
Time magazine: How America’s ‘First Female Cryptanalyst’ Cracked the Code of Nazi Spies in World War II — and Never Lived to See the Credit:
But her biggest achievement was uncovering a Nazi spy ring operating across South America in 1943 — a feat that J. Edgar Hoover took full credit for on behalf of the FBI. Friedman, meanwhile, took her involvement to the grave.
From the National Women’s History Museum:
Smith met William Friedman, a geneticist at the estate. After spending time together, Smith brought William onto her team to help break the Shakespearean codes. They worked together to show there was no evidence that Bacon wrote Shakespeare’s plays, while growing closer professionally and romantically. The couple married in Chicago in May 1917, just after the United States entered World War I. Now using her married name, Smith Friedman worked with her husband at Riverbank to decrypt every single secret message sent to them by the Navy. Trailblazing her way through the field as an expert and teacher, Smith Friedman successfully trained the first generation of codebreakers for the military.
In 2017, Jason Fagone published a bestselling biography about Friedman, The Woman Who Smashed Codes: A True Story of Love, Spies, and the Unlikely Heroine Who Outwitted America’s Enemies (AMZN). That book was the basis for an hour-long PBS/American Experience documentary called The Codebreaker, which is available for rent at Amazon or as a free bootleg on Dailymotion. Here’s the trailer:
Older posts
Socials & More