kottke.org posts about video
The year’s best action sequence isn’t in a Marvel movie or prestige TV drama, it’s from the first episode of Planet Earth II, which aired in the UK over the weekend. In it, a group of snakes chase a small iguana, which seems at the outset to have a tiny chance of escape.
Good god, that was thrilling. We might have a new champion.
Update: I love Tony Zhou’s cut with the soundtrack from Mad Max: Fury Road (with temp music, he says). Be sure to watch to the end.
(via @philnicklin)
Update: Snoop Dogg narrates the snake/iguana chase as only he can.
With almost every election comes a push from some to change the way Americans elect their representatives in government. The problem is, there’s no perfect method of voting. The Exploratorium has produced a video that looks at how different voting methods fail in different ways, including through the spoiler effect, cyclic preferences, and the failure of monoticity. In short, every potential way of voting allows for some irrational outcome to arise out of the choices of individuals. So says Kenneth Arrow, who came up with Arrow’s impossibility theorem, explained in more layman’s terms here on Marginal Revolution.
Paradoxes such as the above have been known for centuries. What Arrow showed is that no decision mechanism can eliminate all of these types of paradoxes. (n.b. Arrow’s theorem actually applies to any mechanism for aggregating any rankings not just voting and not just preferences.) We can tamp down some paradoxes but only at the expense of creating others (or eliminating democracy altogether.)
More generally, what Arrow showed is that group choice (aggregation) is not like individual choice.
Also, think for a minute about how Arrow’s impossibility theorem might affect what Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Digg, and hundreds of other media companies and apps are trying to do in aggregating the world’s news and information by social media “voting”.
Leonardo DiCaprio and National Geographic teamed up to make a documentary about climate change called Before the Flood, available in its entirety on YouTube for a limited time.
Before the Flood, directed by Fisher Stevens, captures a three-year personal journey alongside Academy Award-winning actor and U.N. Messenger of Peace Leonardo DiCaprio as he interviews individuals from every facet of society in both developing and developed nations who provide unique, impassioned and pragmatic views on what must be done today and in the future to prevent catastrophic disruption of life on our planet.
Fisher Stevens, who you might remember from Short Circuit, also produced The Cove, which won an Oscar for best documentary in 2010.
Neil Halloran, creator of the excellent Fallen of World War II interactive visualization of the casualties of WWII, is working on a similar visualization about the possible effects of a global nuclear conflict. He recently uploaded an in-progress video of the project with a special 2016 election message at the end. Amazing and scary to see how much of a difference WWII made in the global death rate and how minuscule that would be in comparison to a global nuclear war.
Soli is a newish project by Google described as “a new sensing technology that uses miniature radar to detect touchless gesture interactions”. It’s pretty cool. A group at The University of St. Andrews has found another potentially more amazing use for the sensor: recognizing specific objects and materials.
RadarCat (Radar Categorization for Input & Interaction) is a small, versatile radar-based system for material and object classification which enables new forms of everyday proximate interaction with digital devices. In this work we demonstrate that we can train and classify different types of objects which we can then recognize in real time. Our studies include everyday objects and materials, transparent materials and different body parts. Our videos demonstrate four working examples including a physical object dictionary, painting and photo editing application, body shortcuts and automatic refill based on RadarCat.
More simply put, if you put an orange on the sensor, it knows it’s an orange…and the system can learn new objects as well. It’s a barcode scanner without barcodes. Watch the video…you’ll get the idea pretty quickly.
Never Happened is a short sci-fi film by Mark Slutsky about a pair of colleagues who have a fling on a business trip. Worth watching…a snack-sized Black Mirror. NSFW. (via df)
Rodney Alcala, who was convicted of killing seven women between 1971 and 1979 and possibly murdered many more, took time out during his killing spree to appear on The Dating Game. At the time, he was a convicted child molestor. The Bachelorette picked him over the other two contestants.
The Bachelorette, Cheryl, doesn’t pick up on any of this. In fact, she ends up choosing Alcala over the other two contestants despite his lackluster answers like, “Nighttime is the best time,” and “I’m a banana… peel me.” However, she cut things off immediately after their one date, claiming that she found him “creepy.”
Imagine if that happened today…the lawsuits and outcry would have shut the show down immediately.
Artist Annette Labedzki has been uploading videos of paint mixing to Instagram and YouTube to great interest. The video above, in which the view is halved and then mirrored, starts off slow but is particularly mesmerizing…I think my brain is addicted to symmetry. Georgia O’Keeffe’s name popped into my brain early on while watching it. (via @colossal)
It was the soup that got me early on. Parallel Studio made this and they are running The Unsatisfying Challenge over the next two weeks, looking for people to submit their own animations and videos of unsatisfying situations.
This was all over Twitter this morning without any context or credit going to the original creators, a trend I find unsatisfying. Thanks to Frank Chimero for finding the original.
From Jack’s Movie Reviews, an examination of the first Back to the Future movie, its stellar screenplay, and the high level of storytelling achieved by the filmmakers. As H. Perry Horton says:
Too often the BTTF trilogy is dismissed as mere popcorn escapism, but in reality it’s one of the smartest franchises of the last half-century and deserves to be regarded with a more analytical eye.
Totally planning on watching it this weekend with the kids…I don’t think they’ve seen it yet.
A company called Intralox makes omni-directional conveyor belts than can push objects in any direction, which allows for some unique capabilities.
If I had access to a time machine, I’d love to fetch Henry Ford and a few other assembly line innovators from the past and watch their reactions to these conveyor systems. (via @ThomasintVeld)
On Conan last night, Louis C.K. had some things to say about the 2016 presidential election.
If you vote for Hillary you’re a grownup; if you vote for Trump you’re a sucker; if you don’t vote for anyone, you’re an asshole.
Stanford biophysicist Manu Prakash is the inventor of the Foldscope, a small microscope that folds like origami, costs around a dollar, and provides “700 nanometer imaging”. Watch the video for examples — 700 nm is very small and the level of detail is incredible. Why do this? Prakash says:
It’s not just for scientists to figure out how the world works…We all start by being curious about the world. We are born with this and we really need to culture this, because fundamentally curiosity needs to be nurtured and kept alive forever.
You can read more about the Foldscope at the New Yorker or watch Prakash’s TED Talk.
He calls it the Foldscope, and it comes in a kit. (Mine arrived in a nine-by-twelve-inch envelope.) The paper is printed with botanical illustrations and perforated with several shapes, which can be punched out and, with a series of origami-style folds, woven together into a single unit. The end result is about the size of a bookmark. The lens — a speck of plastic, situated in the center — provides a hundred and forty times magnification. The kit includes a second lens, of higher magnification, and a set of stick-on magnets, which can be used to attach the Foldscope to a smartphone, allowing for easy recording of a sample with the phone’s camera. I put my kit together in fifteen minutes, and when I popped the lens into place it was with the satisfaction of spreading the wings of a paper crane.
You can’t currently buy a Foldscope but the website says that their Kickstarter campaign launches sometime this month, so stay tuned for that.
Update: You can now get your very own Foldscope on Kickstarter.
Photographer and filmmaker Mike Olbinski shot 85,000 frames at 8K resolution to make this 7-minute time-lapse film of storms of all shapes and sizes doing their thing. Just slip on the headphones, put the video on fullscreen, and then sit back & watch. A tonic for these troubled times. (via slate)
A visual tribute to the gorgeous cinematography of Roger Deakins, one of the all-time great cinematographers. Deakins has worked on a number of films with the Coen brothers (Fargo, The Big Lebowski, True Grit, No Country for Old Men) and a bunch of other films as well (Skyfall, Kundun, and the upcoming Blade Runner sequel).
In Iceland, geothermal vents and hot springs abound and you can use them to bake rye bread in a pot at fairly low temperatures for 24 hours. At a spa outside Reykjavik, they have something called the Rye Bread Experience where they take guests to see how the geothermal ovens work. Filmmaker Alison Grasso went on one of the tours and made a short film about it.
When I watch Black Mirror, particularly the newest Netflix season, I don’t think it’s primarily classic science fiction or about our relationship to technology.1 What I’m reminded of most strongly is The Twilight Zone and Roald Dahl’s Tales of the Unexpected, both of which appear on the list of movies, books, and TV shows that influenced Charlie Brooker while making Black Mirror.
I read Tales of the Unexpected when I was a kid, having exhausted all of the other Roald Dahl books in our small town library and one day randomly discovering that he’d written this book of short stories for adults. His use of horror and black comedy are evident in the most celebrated story, Lamb to the Slaughter, in which a woman murders her husband by whacking him in the head with a frozen leg of lamb and then serves the lamb to the police detectives who come round to investigate the death.
Anyway, what I didn’t know was that Tales of the Unexpected was also adapted into a TV show hosted by Dahl himself. I’ve embedded the Lamb to the Slaughter episode above and there are many more of the full episodes available on YouTube.
In his film Best of Luck With the Wall, director Josh Begley takes us on a journey across the entire US/Mexico border. It’s a simple premise — a continuous display of 200,000 satellite images of the border from the Pacific Ocean to the Gulf of Mexico — but one that delivers a powerful feeling of how large the world is and how meaningless borders are from a certain perspective.
The project started from a really simple place. It was about looking. It was about the pure desire to understand the visual landscape that we are talking about when we are talking about the southern border of the United States. What does the southern border of the United States actually look like? And in that sense it was a very simple gesture to try to see the border in aggregate. If you were to compile all 2000 miles and try to see it in a short space — what would that look like? In another sense it grew out of the discourses as you suggested. The way migration is talked about in our contemporary moment and in particular the way migration is talked about in terms of the southern border of the U.S. So part of this piece is a response to the way migrants and borders are talked about in our politics. And it’s also just a way of looking at landscape as a way to think about some of those things.
The online version of the film is 6 minutes long, but Begley states that longer versions might make their way into galleries and such.
NASA has uploaded a beautiful and relaxing 18-minute fly-through video of the International Space Station filmed in ultra high-definition 4K resolution. They used to a fisheye lens to film it, which means you get plenty of detail and depth of field.
At a recent concert in Chicago, Green Day frontman Billie Joe Armstrong noticed a kid in the audience holding a sign saying “I can play every song on Dookie” and pulled him up on stage to prove it. Aside from a slightly slow tempo, he did pretty well on When I Come Around.
P.S. Was thinking about this the other day: I don’t know that I would have picked Green Day as one of the 90s bands that has stuck around, still touring, still recording, still attracting new fans.
This video is a combination of two things I like very much: long zoom histories and how things are made. The first part of the video follows the story of graphite back to the Big Bang.
[Carl Sagan-eque interlude: “If you want to make a pencil from scratch, first you must invent the universe.”]
The second part shows how pencils are made. Most surprising discovery while watching: Henry David Thoreau (yes, that one) was a talented pencil engineer:
John’s thoughtful son David*, unemployed after graduating from college, started helping out with the family business. He developed new refining techniques that made Thoreau pencils less brittle, less greasy — at the time, they were the finest pencils America had to offer. The Thoreaus were able to offer a variety of pencils, from No. 1 (the softest) to No. 4 (the hardest). That numbering system survives today.
The best artists invent their own tools. (via the kid should see this)
Last year, back when he was only one of more than a dozen GOP candidates, I discovered Citizen Kane was one of Donald Trump’s favorite movies via a video filmed by Errol Morris.
Trump acquits himself pretty well on Kane and its lessons — although I would not characterize Kane’s fall as “modest” — and his commentary about the film is probably the first actually interesting thing I have ever heard him say. But I watched all the way to the end and he shoots himself in the foot in the most Trumpian & misogynistic way — it’s actually perfect.
Spurred by a recent re-watch of Citizen Kane, Anthony Audi digs deeper into Trump’s misunderstanding of the film and finds that the course of Trump’s life has followed that of Charles Foster Kane.
He understands instinctively that by controlling the press, he can shape opinions on a mass scale — bending the truth as he sees fit. Over time, and through his marketing savvy, he develops a powerful media empire. Because that’s not enough, he then turns his sights to politics, running for New York governor as a stepping-stone to the White House. At campaign rallies, Kane gleefully brags about his poll numbers, and vows to lock up his opponent Jim Gettys, whom he condemns as an establishment tool. “Here’s one promise I’ll make,” he finally thunders. “My first official act as governor of the state will be to appoint a special district attorney to arrange for the indictment, prosecution, and conviction of “Boss” Jim W. Gettys!”
Kane never gets to fulfill that pledge. Instead, he loses the election-his campaign derailed by a last minute sex scandal. His editors know what to do, and the following day their headlines scream: “FRAUD AT POLLS!”
The piece is entitled Donald Trump Modeled His Life on Cinematic Loser Charles Foster Kane. Consciously or not, Trump does seem to be following Kane’s playbook here, right down to the fascism.
Specifically, Citizen Kane was a vision of what fascism might resemble in America. Both men knew better than to expect Hitler or Mussolini on our shores. They knew that our demagogue would be glossier, more entertaining-more American; and the man they conjured, inspired by real-life plutocrats like William Randolph Hearst, happened to look an awful lot like Donald Trump.
Read the whole thing…this is right up there with the best explainers of why Trump is the way he is. And part 2 is coming soon, an interview with Morris about Trump’s love of Kane.
Update: Audi’s interview with Morris was posted a couple of weeks before the election. Morris says Trump suffers from Irony Deficit Disorder.
Somehow he identifies clearly with Kane. Kane is Trump. And it’s not the kind of identification that I would make if I were Trump. Of course that issue — if I were Trump, what would I do, what would I think, what would I say? — it’s one of those counterfactuals I’m probably not equipped to address. But, if I were Donald Trump, I would not want to emphasize that connection with Kane. You know, a megalomaniac in love with power and crushing everything in his path. The inability to have friends, the inability to find love. The moral that Trump takes from Kane — I mean, it’s one of the great lines that I recorded. I ask, “Do you have any advice for Charles Foster Kane, sir?” You know, let’s get down to the psychiatric intervention. How can we help this poor man? He’s obviously troubled. How can we help him? Donald, help me out here!
And Donald says, “My advice to Charles Foster Kane is find another woman!” And you know, I thought, is that really the message that Welles was trying to convey? That Kane had made poor sexual choices, poor marriage choices?
America is no longer a majority white, Christian country.
At 45 percent of the population, white Christians are a shrinking demographic — and the backlash from many members of the group against the increasing diversification of America has been swift and bitter.
The narrator of the video, Robert P. Jones, wrote a book about this new reality called The End of White Christian America.
For most of our nation’s history, White Christian America (WCA) — the cultural and political edifice built primarily by white Protestant Christians — set the tone for our national policy and shaped American ideals. But especially since the 1990s, WCA has steadily lost influence, following declines within both its mainline and evangelical branches. Today, America is no longer demographically or culturally a majority white Christian nation.
After World War II, the helmets of German soldiers were refashioned into colanders, pots, and other kitchen utensils. This video from the British Pathé archive shows how the repurposing happened.
A beautifully shot HD video of machines manufacturing springs and other wire gizmos. I love how all the tools take turns and work together to make the widgets. Imagine the chatter amongst the tools:
“Ok, thanks, my turn.”
“Here, hold this while I turn it. Alright, we’re out.”
“Lemme just bend that a little for you.”
“Outta the way, I just gotta twist this for a sec.”
(via @pieratt, who says to substitute Steve Reich for the provided music)
I watched the new Ghostbusters last week and:
1. It was good…better than the trailers indicated it would be.
2. LOL to all the whiny man-babies who boycotted and trashed it because of the all-female main cast. If there was anything wrong with the film, it had nothing to do with the leads.
3. Kate McKinnon was flat-out amazing, a revelation. I could watch 20 more minutes of her outtakes.
4. “Not just Higgs!”
Kurzgesagt shares a speculative bit of physics called vacuum decay that could very efficiently erase the entire Universe.
To understand vacuum decay, you need to consider the Higgs field that permeates our Universe. Like an electric field, the Higgs field varies in strength, based on its potential. Think of the potential as a track on which a ball is rolling. The higher it is on the track, the more energy the ball has.
The Higgs potential determines whether the Universe is in one of two states: a true vacuum, or a false vacuum. A true vacuum is the stable, lowest-energy state, like sitting still on a valley floor. A false vacuum is like being nestled in a divot in the valley wall — a little push could easily send you tumbling. A universe in a false vacuum state is called “metastable”, because it’s not actively decaying (rolling), but it’s not exactly stable either.
There are two problems with living in a metastable universe. One is that if you create a high enough energy event, you can, in theory, push a tiny region of the universe from the false vacuum into the true vacuum, creating a bubble of true vacuum that will then expand in all directions at the speed of light. Such a bubble would be lethal.
Such a process could already be underway, but don’t worry:
But even if one or multiple spheres of death have already started expanding, the Universe is so big they might not reach us for billions of years.
From Genius, a short review of Beyonce Knowles’ life and career, from an appearance on Star Search — I wonder what Skeleton Crew is up to these days? — to Lemonade, one of 2016’s few genuine bright spots. The greatest entertainer of the century so far? A friend recently went to see Beyonce and Kanye concerts about two weeks apart. I asked her who was better and she just rolled her eyes.
This SNL Black Jeopardy skit with Tom Hanks is as good as everyone says it is. And it’s not just funny either…it’s the rare SNL skit that works brilliantly as cultural commentary. Kudos to the writers on this one.
Update: Writing for Slate, Jamelle Bouie details why the Black Jeopardy sketch was so good; the title of the piece asks, “The Most Astute Analysis of American Politics in 2016?”
When Thompson reads a second clue for that category — “They out here saying that every vote counts” — Doug answers again, and again correctly: “What is, come on, they already decided who wins even ‘fore it happens.’” With each correct answer, Doug gets cheers and applause from Thompson, the black contestants, and the black audience. They all seem to understand the world in similar ways. “I really appreciate you saying that,” says Thompson after Doug praises Tyler Perry’s Madea movies, leading to an awkward moment where Hanks’ character recoils in fear as Thompson tries to shake his hand, but then relaxes and accepts the gesture.
By this point, the message is clear. On this episode of “Black Jeopardy!”, the questions are rooted in feelings of disempowerment, suspicion of authority, and working-class identity-experiences that cut across racial lines. Thompson and the guests are black, but they can appreciate the things they share with Doug, and in turn, Doug grows more and more comfortable in their presence, such that he gets a “pass” from the group after he refers to them as “you people.”
A quick short film about how different people in LA approach breakfast, from the woman who nibbles to the professional bodybuilder who eats 30 egg whites and a cup of grits on his off day.
Me? I almost never eat breakfast and have been unwittingly following an intermittent fasting regimen for many years.
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