A love letter to plywood
I have a new appreciation of plywood after watching this:
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kottke.org posts about video
Finding Love After a Heart Transplant
Kellan Roberts died suddenly at 22. He had decided to be an organ donor and his heart went to a high school student from Minnesota, Connor Rabinowitz. After receiving the heart, Connor visited Kellan’s family in Seattle and met Kellan’s sister Erin. After a few years, Erin and Connor, well, just watch…this is a wonderful story well told.
The science of anti-vaccination
Host Hank Green of the SciShow looks at the anti-vaccination movement from a scientific perspective: why are US parents growing less likely to vaccinate their children?
In psychology, the search for these explanations is called “Explanatory Attribution” and different people have different “explanatory styles”. Some people are more prone to blame themselves, while others search for an external event to blame. But one thing is clear: we are very bad at not blaming anything. It’s not surprising that parents of children with autism, especially parents who notice a sudden loss of previous development, will search for a possible cause. And when the most significant recent event in the health of the child was a vaccination, as can be said for many moments in the life of a young American, we might identify that as a potential cause and deem that link worthy of further examination.
Now this, is completely logical. The problem is that over a dozen peer-reviewed papers have found no correlation between autism and the MMR vaccine, or any other vaccine for that matter. And yet, when you Google vaccines and autism, a fair number of the results claim that there is a link between the two, and that that link is being covered up either by the government or by big corporations. A parent, already experiencing frustration with the medical community’s inability to tell them why this thing has happened to their child, will, on the internet, find a vibrant community of similarly frustrated people who share their values and experiences. These communities are full of anecdotes that draw connections between vaccines and autism. And so, unsurprisingly, some people become convinced that they have found the reason for their child’s disability.
Once their mind has been made up, confirmation bias sets in. Confirmation bias is simply our tendency to more readily, and with less scrutiny, accept information, anecdotes, and world views that confirm our existing beliefs. And, again, it is a completely normal thing that every person does. Indeed, trying to convince someone that a previously held belief is incorrect has been proven to actually increase their affinity for that idea. And so a community is born, and the safety of vaccines is called into question. And once the procedure for getting a vaccine goes from the doctor telling you that it is now time for a vaccine — and 99% of parents agreeing because that person went through medical school — to it being a question to ponder, vaccination rates will go down.
Hunter S. Thompson calls customer service
This is allegedly a recording of a voicemail that Hunter S. Thompson left for the AV company that wrongly installed his home theater system.
If your setup is still here tomorrow night, I’m gonna destroy it and write about it. Yeah, I write a column, several, I write about a lot of things, you might of heard of the rest of my name somewhere, I write books, I write things that get out and people read! I’ll ruin your fucking name! You goddamn idiots, you fuck up my system!!
We’ve all been there, haven’t we? Perhaps with fewer illicit substances in our systems, but still. (via @davidgrann)
Update: Here’s an interview with someone who worked at the AV company at the time of the call.
The Design Audio/Video team got back to Thompson and fixed the problem which, it turned out, they hadn’t actually caused. The items had actually been sold to the author by another local dealer, which McCorkle knows but would not name.
“It turns out, we didn’t sell him the stuff, but we ended up fixing it for him,” McCorkle said. “In true Hunter style, he never apologized for it, but he was grateful.”
(via @StephenSilver)
The Infinite Hotel Paradox
In a lecture given in 1924, German mathematician David Hilbert introduced the idea of the paradox of the Grand Hotel, which might help you wrap your head around the concept of infinity. (Spoiler alert: it probably won’t help…that’s the paradox.) In his book One Two Three… Infinity, George Gamow describes Hilbert’s paradox:
Let us imagine a hotel with a finite number of rooms, and assume that all the rooms are occupied. A new guest arrives and asks for a room. “Sorry,” says the proprietor, “but all the rooms are occupied.” Now let us imagine a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, and all the rooms are occupied. To this hotel, too, comes a new guest and asks for a room.
“But of course!” exclaims the proprietor, and he moves the person previously occupying room N1 into room N2, the person from room N2 into room N3, the person from room N3 into room N4, and so on…. And the new customer receives room N1, which became free as the result of these transpositions.
Let us imagine now a hotel with an infinite number of rooms, all taken up, and an infinite number of new guests who come in and ask for rooms.
“Certainly, gentlemen,” says the proprietor, “just wait a minute.”
He moves the occupant of N1 into N2, the occupant of N2 into N4, and occupant of N3 into N6, and so on, and so on…
Now all odd-numbered rooms became free and the infinite of new guests can easily be accommodated in them.
This TED video created by Jeff Dekofsky explains that there are similar strategies for finding space in such a hotel for infinite numbers of infinite groups of people and even infinite amounts of infinite numbers of infinite groups of people (and so on, and so on…) and is very much worth watching:
(via brain pickings)
Stock Oscars
From Dissolve, a video that recreates scenes from some Oscar winning movies using only stock footage.
The recreated movies include Gladiator, The Social Network, Jurassic Park, and 2001. See also their first effort at this sort of thing.
The sounds of Tarantino
A montage of hundreds of sounds from Quentin Tarantino’s movies, from Zed drumming his fingers on top of the gimp’s head in Pulp Fiction to the schiiiiing of The Bride’s Hattori Hanzo sword in Kill Bill.
What are the Coen brothers trying to say?
From Steven Benedict, a short video essay featuring the characters from different Coen brothers’ films talking to each other. According to Benedict, the dialogue reveals three main themes of their movies.
While other essays have assembled several recurring visual tropes: elevators, dogs, dream sequences, bathrooms etc., this essay has the characters talk to one another across the films so we can more clearly hear the Coens’ dominant concerns: identity, miscommunication and morality. Taken as a trinity, these elements indicate that the Coens’ true subject is the search for value in a random and amoral universe.
(via @khoi)
The Katering Show
About a minute into The Katering Show, I already knew it was going to be my favorite cooking show of all time. In this episode, the toothsome twosome with the Beatlesesque names of McCartney and McLennan make risotto hot wet rice using a Thermomix.
So “what is a Thermomix?” I hear anyone under the age of 33 ask. It’s a blender, a microwave, an ice bucket, and a set of kitchen scales. It’s a gangbang of kitchen appliances that’s created a futuristic robot saucepan. It’s the kind of appliance that your rich mother-in-law gives you as a wedding gift because she doesn’t think you can cook. Or something that you buy yourself because you’ve always wanted to join a cult, but you don’t have the energy for the group sex.
(via digg)
Seagull contrails
Using a tiny bit of post-processing, the flight paths of seagulls become visible in this video:
See also the bird contrail videos by Dennis Hlynsky.
Wooper
Wooper is a Robot Chicken parody of Looper, in which cartoon characters like Elmer Fudd are sent back in time to be killed because they can’t show guns in children’s cartoons anymore.
(via @gruber)
The problem with action movies today
In this persuasive video, Chris Stuckmann argues that today’s action movies are mostly bad and provides six reasons why.
His fifth point, the camerawork, drives him a little crazy.
Shakycam. Fucking shakycam. At some point, someone somewhere told Hollywood that people like incoherent incompetent camera work, blinding the audience with multiple cuts and assaulting us with nothing but a barrage of sound effects that are supposed to subconsciously tell us that something is happening on screen.
See also how to do action comedy from Every Frame a Painting and Chaos Cinema from Mattias Stork. (via devour)
LOTR’s One Ring explainer
Here’s a good explanation of what the One Ring from Lord of the Rings actually is and what it can do:
I transcribed a short passage from the video:
First, the ring tempts everyone (well, almost everyone) with promises that yes, this little ring can be a mighty weapon or a tool to reshape the world and gosh don’t you just look like the best guy to use it. Let’s go vanquish the powerful demigod who lives over there to get started, shall we? This is why the hobbits made great ring bearers, because they’re pretty happy with the way things are and don’t aspire to greatness. Of course, there’s Gollum, who started out as a hobbit, but all things considered, he held out pretty well for a couple hundred years. Set the ring on the desk of most men and they wouldn’t be able to finish their coffee before heading to Mordor to rule the world and do it right this time.
What’s interesting about hearing of The Ring in this focused way is how it becomes a part of Tolkien’s criticism of technology. The Ring does what every mighty bit of tech can do to its owner/user: makes them feel powerful and righteous. Look what we can do with this thing! So much! So much good! We are good therefore whatever we do with this will be good!
The contemporary idea of the tech startup is arguably the most seductive and powerful technology of the present moment, the One Ring of our times. It’s not difficult to modify a few words in the passage above to make it more current:
First, the startup tempts everyone (well, almost everyone) with promises that yes, this little company can be a mighty weapon or a tool to reshape the world and gosh don’t you just look like the best guy to use it. Let’s go disrupt the powerful middleman who lives over there to get started, shall we? This is why the nerds made great ring bearers, because they’re pretty happy with the way things are and don’t aspire to greatness. Of course, there’s Sergey and Larry, who started out as nerds, but all things considered, they held out pretty well for a decade. Set the ring on the desk of most men and they wouldn’t be able to finish their mail-order espresso before heading to Silicon Valley to rule the world and do it right this time.
Ok, haha, LOL, and all that, but it’s curious that nerds (and everyone else) shelled out billions of dollars to watch Peter Jackson’s LOTR movies in the early 2000s in the aftermath of the dot com bust. Those were dark times…the power of the startup had just been lost after Kozmo’s CEO Dave Isildur was slain by economists while delivering a single pint of Ben & Jerry’s Chubby Hubby to far reaches of the Outer Sunset and had not yet been rediscovered by Schachter, Butterfield, and Zuckerberg.
And these nerds, whose spines all tingled when Aragorn charged into the hordes of Mordor — for Frodo! — and whose eyes filled with tears when Frodo parted with Sam at the Grey Havens, came away from that movie experience siding with Boromir, Saruman, and Denethor, determined to seize that startup magic for themselves to disrupt all of the things, defeat the evil corporate middlemen, and reshape the world to be a better and more efficient place. And gosh don’t you just look like the best guy to use it?
Machine With Concrete
Arthur Ganson is a kinetic sculptor who builds “Rube Goldberg machines with existential themes”. One of his works is called Machine with Concrete, which demonstrates the magic of gear ratios
According to a piece in Make, the input shaft spins at 200 rpm, which is reduced by gearing down to 1 revolution every 2 trillion years by the time you reach the gear on the end…which is so slow that even embedding the final gear in concrete doesn’t make any difference to the machine’s operation. (via interconnected)
Taylor Swift’s Nine Inch Nails
If you take the vocals from The Perfect Drug by Nine Inch Nails and match them to the beats from Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off, you get this little bit of magic:
Update: I totally forgot I’d previously featured this awesomeness: NIN’s Head Like a Hole vs. Carly Rae Jepsen’s Call Me Maybe. Also of note: Mark Romanek directed the videos for Shake It Off and The Perfect Drug. (via ★interesting, @sarahmakespics, and mark)
Ocean Gravity
Free diver Guillaume Néry looks like an astronaut floating around in space in this underwater video.
See also this surrealist free diving video and Néry’s underwater base jump. (via ★interesting)
Magic Mike XXL trailer
I liked Magic Mike and I hope this one is going to be as good, although no McConaughey hey hey girl, so I dunno.
And also, Soderbergh is not returning as director, although he is responsible for the movie’s cinematography, editing, and even some camera operating.
The kingdom of Westeros in Minecraft
In the time it’s taken George RR Martin to complete zero books in the A Song of Ice and Fire series, a group of dedicated fans has created much of the kingdom of Westeros in Minecraft. Here’s a quick video tour:
The Wall is the most visually impressive element:
According to the FAQ, the in-game map is currently the size of Los Angeles, about 500 square miles. (via devour)
The Unbearable Slowness of Light
Nothing is faster than the speed of light. But compared to the unimaginable size of the Universe, light is actually extremely slow. This video is 45 minutes long and during that time, a photon emitted from the Sun1 will only travel through a portion of our solar system.
In our terrestrial view of things, the speed of light seems incredibly fast. But as soon as you view it against the vast distances of the universe, it’s unfortunately very slow. This animation illustrates, in realtime, the journey of a photon of light emitted from the sun and traveling across a portion of the solar system.
It takes light more than 43 minutes to travel to Jupiter and even to travel the diameter of the Sun takes 4.6 seconds. (thx, andy)
To even fight its way out of the Sun is an incredible journey for a photon. The Sun is so dense that a photon generated at the core is absorbed and re-emitted trillions of times by hydrogen nuclei on its way out. By some estimates, it may take up to 40,000 years for a photon to escape the Sun’s surface and head on out to the cold reaches of space.↩
Earth Primer
Earth Primer is an upcoming iOS app that bills itself as “A Science Book for Playful People”. It looks amazing:
Earth Primer is a science book for playful people. Discover how Earth works through play-on your iPad. Join a guided tour of how Earth works, with the forces of nature at your fingertips. Visit volcanoes, glaciers, sand dunes. Play with them, look inside, and see how they work.
Earth Primer defies existing genres, combining aspects of science books, toys, simulations, and games. It is a new kind of interactive experience which joins the guided quality of a book with open ended simulation play.
Here’s a quick preview of the app. Can’t wait to explore this, with and without the kids.
Update: The Earth Primer app is now available on the App Store.
Serenading the cattle
Watch as farmer Derek Klingenberg calls his cattle in by playing Lorde’s Royals on his trombone.
I can’t tell if this is the perfect Monday video or the perfect Friday video. Maybe I’ll post it again on Friday and we’ll compare. (via the esteemed surgeon and writer @atul_gawande)
NYC in 1981, a most violent year
The producers of A Most Violent Year, one of the year’s most acclaimed movies, are doing something interesting to promote their film. They’re running a blog that posts all sorts of media and information about NYC in 1981, the year the film is set. Today, they released a short documentary that features interviews with some people who were scraping together lives in NYC circa 1981. It’s worth watching:
Featuring Guardian Angels founder Curtis Sliwa, performance artist and former Warhol Factory fixture Penny Arcade, actress Johnnie Mae, Harlem street-style legend Dapper Dan, auto body shop owner Nick Rosello, and trucking union rep Wayne Walsh.
The trailer for A Most Violent Year is here…I’ve heard good things about this one and hope to catch it soon.
Supply, demand, and equilibrium
From Marginal Revolution University, three short videos on the economic concepts of supply, demand, and equilibrium using oil as an example good.
Infrared Planet Earth
This is an ultra-HD time lapse of planet Earth in infrared. Infrared light is absorbed by clouds and water vapor, so the result is a sphere of roiling storms and trade winds.
Here’s a video with both hemispheres at once and another offering a closer view. If you’ve got a 4K display, this will look pretty incredible on it. James Tyrwhitt-Drake has done a bunch of other HD videos of the Earth and Sun, including Planet Earth in 4K and the Sun in 4K.
The HD Aquarium
In the tradition of the 80-minute video of the South China Sea shot from the bow of a container ship, here’s six high-definition hours of 8000 fish and other aquatic animals swimming in the massive Ocean Voyager tank at the Georgia Aquarium.
Are you relaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaxed? (via @riondotnu)
A Murmuration of Starlings
A flock of starlings is called a murmuration, an apt word because the flocks move like a rumor pulsing through a crowded room. This is a particularly beautiful murmuration observed in Utrecht, The Netherlands.
Handwriting robots
Clive Thompson writes about the newest innovation in junk mail marketing: handwriting robots. That’s right, robots can write letters in longhand with real ballpoint pens and you can’t really tell unless you know what to look for. Here’s a demonstration:
But it turns out that marketers are working diligently to develop forms of mass-generated mail that appear to have been patiently and lovingly hand-written by actual humans. They’re using handwriting robots that wield real pens on paper. These machines cost up to five figures, but produce letters that seem far more “human”. (You can see one of the robots in action in the video adjacent.) This type of robot is likely what penned the address on the junk-mail envelope that fooled me. I saw ink on paper, subconsciously intuited that it had come from a human (because hey, no laser-printing!) and opened it.
Handwriting, it seems, is the next Turing Test.
There is also a company that provided handwritten letters for sale professionals and I don’t know if that or the robot letters are more unusual.
Unreal Paris
Unreal Engine 4 is the latest edition of Epic Games’ acclaimed gaming engine for creating realistic gaming worlds. UE4 and its predecessors power all sorts of games, from Gears of War to BioShock Infinite to iOS games. But level designer Dereau Benoit recently used UE4 to model a contemporary Parisian apartment and damn if it doesn’t look 100% real. Take a look at this walkthrough:
This + Oculus Rift = pretty much the future. (via hn)
Mapping Greenland’s ice layers in 3D
Using ice-penetrating radar and ice cores, NASA has been able to map the layers in the Greenland ice sheet.
This new map allows scientists to determine the age of large swaths of Greenland’s ice, extending ice core data for a better picture of the ice sheet’s history. “This new, huge data volume records how the ice sheet evolved and how it’s flowing today,” said Joe MacGregor, a glaciologist at The University of Texas at Austin’s Institute for Geophysics and the study’s lead author.
Greenland’s ice sheet is the second largest mass of ice on Earth, containing enough water to raise ocean levels by about 20 feet. The ice sheet has been losing mass over the past two decades and warming temperatures will mean more losses for Greenland. Scientists are studying ice from different climate periods in the past to better understand how the ice sheet might respond in the future.
One way of studying this distant past is with ice cores. These cylinders of ice drilled from the ice sheet hold evidence of past snow accumulation and temperature and contain impurities like dust and volcanic ash that were carried by snow that accumulated and compacted over hundreds of thousands of years. These layers are visible in ice cores and can be detected with ice-penetrating radar.
Ice-penetrating radar works by sending radar signals into the ice and recording the strength and return time of reflected signals. From those signals, scientists can detect the ice surface, sub-ice bedrock and layers within the ice.
New techniques used in this study allowed scientists to efficiently pick out these layers in radar data. Prior studies had mapped internal layers, but not at the scale made possible by these newer, faster methods. Another major factor in this study was the amount of Greenland IceBridge has measured.
It’s amazing that the detectors and data analysis are sensitive enough to pick out different layers in the ice just from radar. (via @ptak)
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