kottke.org posts about video
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:
Physicist Sean Carroll leads off this video with this line:
I like to say that Einstein is, if anything, underrated as a physicist, which is hard to imagine given how highly he is rated.
And then leads us through a history of modern physics and quantum mechanics that, Einstein and Newton aside, is much more collaborative than you often hear about.
This idea that there are many people contributing and many different parts of the pieces need to put together is actually much more characteristic of how physics is usually done than the single person inventing everything all by themselves.
What’s fun about school closing for the wicked blizzard in the Northeast today is last week was February break for Massachusetts schools, which means many kids are home for the the 6th school day in a row, and many will be home for closures tomorrow and beyond. All this to say, it reminded me a lot of the first couple weeks of school closures in March 2020, when I edutained my kids with Youtube videos about BMX, how to make biscuits, early 90s live punk hardcore shows, and skateboarding clips. And THAT reminded me it’s been a minute since I posted a skateboarding video here.
Here’s a 20 minute clip with something for everyone. There’s kick flips, front flips, backflips, flips off bikes, multiple visually impaired skaters and skaters without legs. There’s also lots of kids, stairs, pools, ramps, massive air, ballet, rollerskating on broken skateboards, incredible creativity, and no falls.
For a show on Hulu called Tell Me Lies, synth-pop band Chvrches covered Such Great Heights by The Postal Service. Lovely.
Just dropped this morning: the trailer for the final season of For All Mankind. When season four’s teaser trailer came out, I caught some flack for suggesting that “if you tilt your head and squint…you see For All Mankind as a prequel/origin story for The Expanse”. It looks like we’re heading even more in that direction in season five, which begins airing March 27.
During her time aboard the International Space Station, NASA astronaut Loral O’Hara took a series of photos of the Earth from directly overhead. Seán Doran has stitched those images together into a gorgeous 4K video of a journey across North America, from San Diego to cloud-covered Quebec.
The footage is a simulation, converting an image sequence into video footage using image processing and animation. In reality this journey from California to Quebec took 11 minutes to traverse. In order to better appreciate the view this film slows that speed by a factor of 4.
Along the way, we’re treated to views of Joshua Tree National Park, the Grand Canyon, and the Rocky Mountains. Even the clouds are mesmerizing.
In this lovely short film, the traditional Tibetan drink butter tea (bho jha) becomes a bridge between generations, outreach across cultures, and a reminder of the value of mindfulness.
From Clarissa Wei at Eater, more about butter tea and its place in Tibetan culture:
I stayed with Goulongzhu and her family in Tibet for four days in June, and every morning, without pause, she’d serve me a creamy bowl of yak butter tea for breakfast. In the early hours, she’d make a batch of crude black pu’erh tea — a fermented dark tea from China — brewed along with a great deal of salt. Then, a fat serving of yak butter would go into a bowl along with toasted barley powder and milk curds, and she’d pour the tea in until the liquid nearly reached the rim. I’d mix it all together with my chopsticks and sip. It was creamy and substantial — overflowing with healthy fats. The highland barley gave it a nutty finish, and in those four days, yak butter tea was something I looked forward to immensely in the mornings.
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