The Backyard Astronomer
With the homemade telescope in his backyard observatory, amateur astronomer Gary Hug has discovered over 300 asteroids.
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kottke.org posts about video
Mythbusters for the Impatient
I’ve pretty much stopped watching science and engineering TV shows because their information density is often so low. Mythbusters is no exception, but this clever YouTube channel helpfully edits the 44-minute episodes down to a svelte and info-packed 2-5 minutes. (via digg)
Professional bridge has a cheating problem
Players in the top ranks of the world’s professional bridge organizations have been caught cheating and the evidence is on YouTube.
On deals in which Fisher and Schwartz ended up as declarer and dummy, they cleared away the tray and the board in the usual manner. But when they were defending-meaning that one of them would make the opening lead-they were wildly inconsistent. Sometimes Fisher would remove the tray, and sometimes Schwartz would, and sometimes they would leave it on the table. Furthermore, they placed the duplicate board in a number of different positions — each of which, it turns out, conveyed a particular meaning. “If Lotan wanted a spade lead, he put the board in the middle and pushed it all the way to the other side,” Weinstein said. If he wanted a heart, he put it to the right. Diamond, over here. Club, here. No preference, here.”
Here’s a video showing what Fisher and Schwartz were doing:
Once you see it, it’s obvious they’re cheating.
What an odd seeming game when played at the professional level, BTW. Players seated so they can’t see their teammates. Information is passed through bidding, but only through signals that everyone is aware of. And some available information you can use and some you can’t:
Expert poker players often take advantage of a skill they call table feel: an ability to read the facial expressions and other unconscious “tells” exhibited by their opponents. Bridge players rely on table feel, too, but in bridge not all tells can be exploited legally by all players. If one of my opponents hesitates during the bidding or the play, I’m allowed to draw conclusions from the hesitation — but if my partner hesitates I’m not. What’s more, if I seem to have taken advantage of information that I wasn’t authorized to know, my opponents can summon the tournament director and seek an adjusted result for the hand we just played. Principled players do their best to ignore their partner and play at a consistent tempo, in order to avoid exchanging unauthorized information — and, if they do end up noticing something they shouldn’t have noticed, they go out of their way not to exploit it.
As the story goes on to say, there are technological fixes that would curtail the cheating, but would get rid of the actual cards in a card game. Why not get rid of the humans as well and just run games as computer simulations? Again, odd game. (via @pomeranian99)
The sad state of US gun violence, explained in 7 minutes
One of the video’s main points:
It’s not that America has much more crime. It’s that crime in the US is much more lethal.
Similar to a sentiment I tweeted out a few months ago:
Easy access to guns turns bad moods, bad politics, bad religion, bad brain chemistry, and bad ideas into murder.
(via @atul_gawande)
First trailer for Finding Dory
Hmm. I… Hmm. Up until Wall-E, Finding Nemo was my favorite Pixar film. And…I’m not sure about this. (via trailer town)
Aging 70 years in 4 minutes
This fantastic short video from Anthony Cerniello shows a person imperceptibly aging from youth to old age.
The idea was that something is happening but you can’t see it but you can feel it, like aging itself.
I would love to know how this was done. Benjamin Button-esque FX, I would imagine.
Update: Oh hey, luckily for me, this blogger named Jason Kottke posted this video more than two years ago and noted how the video was made.
Anthony Cerniello took photos of similar-looking family members at a reunion, from the youngest to the oldest, and edited them together in a video to create a nearly seamless portrait of a person aging in only a few minutes.
I think I’ll have to subscribe to this fella’s site. (via @jniemasik)
Why the War on Drugs Is a Huge Failure
In their latest video, Kurzgesagt tackles the War on Drugs. The Stop the Harm website, which they mention at the end of the video, says this about the failed efforts to curb drug use:
The global drug policy system is well and truly broken. Despite aiming to ‘protect’ people from drugs, its punitive approach has instead increased the harms of these substances, punishing and demonizing the people and communities most impacted by them. This punishment has disproportionately impacted people and communities of color, indigenous peoples, and the economically marginalized, while stoking public health crises by restricting access to essential medicines and exacerbating the spread of HIV, hepatitis C, and other blood borne viruses.
The Mindblowing Special Effects Used on Carol
Mad Max, Star Wars, and Ex Machina have gotten all the VX press this year, but the special effects in Carol are off the chain, yo! I had no idea Andy Serkis played Rooney Mara’s character in certain heavy VX scenes.
Side-by-side comparisons of movies and their remakes
A quick three-minute look at how the same scenes were filmed in movies and their remakes. Includes scenes from Oldboy, Psycho, The Ring, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, Cape Fear, Planet of the Apes, Carrie, and Solaris.
Loving Vincent
Loving Vincent is an upcoming feature-length film about Vincent van Gogh that is animated in an unusual way: using 12 oil paintings per second. They’ve trained dozens of painters — and are looking for more if you’re interested — in the style of van Gogh to illustrate every instant of the film. Here are some of the painters working on the movie:
Update: A full trailer is out:
(via colossal)
Bad Doors Are Everywhere
If you’ve ever pulled a door that you should have pushed, you’re not alone. Vox and 99% Invisible collaborated on this video about bad door design. I read Don Norman’s The Design of Everyday Things just as I was starting my design career and it probably had more influence than anything in how I approached designing for the web. (via @ophelea23)
Chris Rock’s opening monologue from the Oscars
Chris Rock opened his monologue at the Oscars last night with “I’m here at the Academy Awards, otherwise known as the White People’s Choice Awards” and for the next ten minutes, talked about racism in Hollywood.
Update: As much as I enjoyed Rock’s monologue, I also agree with Stacia Brown’s piece, Chris Rock, Justice for Flint and why we still have ‘real things to protest’.
We still have real things to protest. If water contamination in a U.S. city due to alleged negligence doesn’t call for “real” protest, what does? Disinvestment in the Oscars — especially for DuVernay and Coogler — isn’t a frivolous undertaking. And black performers don’t want equal opportunity just to be considered for awards. In this country, celebrity has always afforded people the platform and the capital to push forward the issues that are important to them. There couldn’t have been a Justice for Flint fundraiser on the scale that they were able to mount without star power. Black celebrity — its acknowledgement and its compensation — is significant.
(via @anildash)
John Oliver’s 22 minutes of pain for Donald Drumpf
On Last Week Tonight last night, John Oliver took on the #brand running for President known as Donald Trump. Or, as he would have been known had one of his ancestors not changed his last name, Donald Drumpf. If you’d like to play along at home, you can install the Drumpfinator Chrome extension, which will replace any mentions of “Trump” on the web with “Drumpf”.
Just what is Crispin Glover all about anyway?
For his series on character actors called No Small Parts, Brandon Hardesty profiles the incomparable Crispin Glover. (via waxy)
The Secret Life and Art of Henry Darger
Henry Darger is perhaps the most famous outsider artist in the world. This is a short documentary about his life (not much is known) and art (which now fetches tens of thousands of dollars).
A story of last words
From Candice Drouet, a short film called Last Word, a story told with the last words from 129 movies.
The missing Seinfeld episode, made from Curb Your Enthusiasm clips
In 2009, Curb Your Enthusiasm centered on Larry David doing another season of Seinfeld. The four main Seinfeld stars (plus Newman) were all on the show, in character. From the various clips and bits shown, Topher Grace edited together a nine-minute “missing” Seinfeld episode. It’s actually pretty good. I didn’t know how much I’d missed the show until I watched this. (thx, greg)
The Coen Brothers: Shot, Reverse Shot
In this installment of Every Frame a Painting, Tony Zhou and Taylor Ramos examine how the Coen brothers shoot characters in their films close up with wide lenses to created empathy and comedy.
Honey badgers are magical escape artists
Watch as a honey badger uses everything at his disposal (rocks, mud, trees, tunnels) to escape a supposedly unescapable enclosure. I was aware honey badgers don’t give a shit, but I didn’t know they were so clever.
The chemistry of matches (in super slow motion)
With amazing super slow-motion footage of a match head starting to burn as a backdrop, this video explains the chemical reactions involved in lighting a match.
When the match is struck, a small amount of the red phosphorus on the striking surface is converted into white phosphorus, which then ignites. The heat from this ignites the potassium chlorate, and the match head bursts into flame. During manufacture, the match stick itself is soaked in ammonium phosphate, which prevents ‘afterglow’ once the flame has gone out, and paraffin, which ensures that it burns easily.
(via gizmodo)
More creative freeskiing hijinks from Candide Thovex
Skier Candide Thovex goes on another one of his crazy creative ski runs. In this one, he jumps over a helicopter (among other things). I still like his previous video a bit more, although the kids are partial to his Audi commercial, especially the abrupt ending.
Giant new robot excels at taking human abuse
Boston Dynamics, creator of the Big Dog prancing robot, has upgraded their Atlas robot, which can walk on two legs, open doors, stack boxes, walk on slippery terrain, recover from being shoved, etc. And everyone’s all HA HA HA TERMINATOR but soon enough the HA HAs will become less hearty and more nervous. It took human ancestors hundreds of thousands of years to evolve from quadrupeds to bipeds and Boston Dynamics has done the same in just a few years.
Mark my words: no good will come of playing box keep-away with robots and treating them like, well, machines. It’s already started…did you notice Atlas didn’t even look behind itself to see if it needed to hold the door for anyone? And you think manspreading on the subway is a problem…wait until we have to deal with robotspreading by robots whose ancestors we shoved with hockey sticks.
Update: The hockey stick is back, accompanied by some “robust” tail pulling:
When the entire corpus of YouTube casually becomes a training ground for “young” AI programs, the bots are going to watch this and be all like, “WTF!?” and it’s gonna be on.
The Dowager Countess’ sickest burns
As an unapologetic fan of Downton Abbey and Maggie Smith, I quite enjoyed this video compilation of the Dowager Countess’ best burns from all six seasons of Downton Abbey. If you’re having DA withdrawals now that the show is over,1 I encourage you to check out Gosford Park. Robert Altman directed it, Downton creator Julian Fellowes wrote it, and it features Maggie Smith as a snooty Countess — not to mention Clive Owen as a dishy valet. Scrumptious!
Well, almost over in the US..it’s been done in Britain and on the torrents since the start of the year.↩
How to lose weight in four easy steps
Aaron Bleyaert lost 80 pounds, got in shape, and wrote about how he did it in four easy steps on his Tumblr.
3.) HAVE YOUR HEART BROKEN
And not just broken; shattered. Into itsy bitsy tiny little pieces, by a girl who never loved you and never will.
Now he’s turned that experience into a short film that showed at Sundance. Watch for the Conan O’Brien cameo.
Michael Jackson’s prototype of Thriller
When the song that became Thriller was first considered for the album that also became Thriller, it was called Starlight and had totally different lyrics.
We need some starlight starlight sun
There ain’t no second chance we got to make it while we can
You need the starlight some starlight sun
I need you by my side you give me starlight starlight tonight yeah
Songwriter Rod Temperton explains:
Originally, when I did my Thriller demo, I called it Starlight. Quincy said to me, ‘You managed to come up with a title for the last album, see what you can do for this album.’ I said, ‘Oh great,’ so I went back to the hotel, wrote two or three hundred titles, and came up with the title ‘Midnight Man’. The next morning, I woke up, and I just said this word… Something in my head just said, this is the title. You could visualise it on the top of the Billboard charts. You could see the merchandising for this one word, how it jumped off the page as ‘Thriller’.
That story reminds me of the scene in the hot tub in Boogie Nights where Eddie Adams chooses his stage name:
I just want a name, I want it so it can cut glass, you know, like razor sharp. When I close my eyes, I see this thing, a sign. I see this name in bright blue neon lights with a purple outline. And this name is so bright and so sharp that the sign — it just blows up because the name is so powerful … It says “Dirk Diggler.”
Thriller and Dirk Diggler. Both great names. (via @aaroncoleman0)
John Oliver takes on crazy US abortion laws
On the most recent episode of Last Week Tonight, John Oliver argues against many US states’ anti-abortion laws. This was super funny and also made me really angry.
Primitive Technology
My new favorite YouTube channel is called Primitive Technology. It features mostly silent videos of an Australian man making and building things using only Stone Age technology. He built a hut out of mud, sticks, and leaves:
He made his own charcoal:
To make the charcoal the wood was broken up and stacked in to a mound with the largest pieces in the center and smaller sticks and leaves on the out side. The mound was coated in mud and a hole was left in the top while 8 smaller air holes were made around the base of the mound. A fire was kindled in the top of the mound using hot coals from the fire and the burning process began.
He’s also made an axe, a sling, baskets, and a cord drill for starting fires…all completely from scratch. Here’s the accompanying blog. (via @craigmod & sarah)
How to win an election
From the NY Times and Redglass Pictures, a video in which political advisor Mark McKinnon details how to win an election. His short answer: “successful campaigns tell a good story”. My “favorite” part is after discussing his irresponsible fear-mongering campaign for Bush in 2004, McKinnon talks about bowing out of the McCain campaign because he believed Obama was a good man and good for the country and he didn’t want to smear him. Wish he could have moved procuring a conscience up a few years. NSFW if you, like me, see George W. Bush and involuntarily start loudly swearing like a sailor.
The rich meaning in The Lord of the Rings orchestral score
Howard Shore, composer of the orchestral score for The Lord of the Rings, uses leitmotif to help tell the story, in the form of recurring thematic musical phrases that accompany certain actions, places, or characters. For instance, there’s a Shire theme that plays when the hobbits are central to the action but which becomes less important as their physical distance from the Shire increases. Wagner famously used leitmotif in his Ring cycle and so did John Williams in Star Wars…Vader’s theme is a good example.1
This has me wondering: has anyone done a close “reading” of the music in The Force Awakens? I bet the placement of some of the musical themes give clues as to the Force sensitivity, parentage, and origin of some of the characters that we’re wondering about.↩
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