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From the clueless British announcer who brought you this bad baseball commentary (“No! Caught by the chap in the pajamas with the glove that makes everything easier. And they all scuttle off for a nap.”) comes some hilariously misinformed NFL game commentary.
Alabama’s fullback has a handkerchief in his back pocket. He must have a cold but he’s pressing on regardless. That’s stoicism for you.
What do you think you get if you add 1+2+3+4+5+… all the way on up to infinity? Probably a massively huge number, right? Nope. You get a small negative number:
This is, by a wide margin, the most noodle-bending counterintuitive thing I have ever seen. Mathematician Leonard Euler actually proved this result in 1735, but the result was only made rigorous later and now physicists have been seeing this result actually show up in nature. Amazing. (thx, chris)
Update: Of course (of course!) the actual truth seems more complicated, hinging on what “sum” means mathematically, etc. (via @cenedella)
Update: As usual, Phil Plait sorts things out on this complicated situation. (via @theory)
Well lookie here, a restored full-length version of Stanley Kubrick’s very first film, 1953’s Fear and Desire, has popped up on YouTube:
Kubrick famously disliked his first film. From a 1994 episode of All Things Considered:
D’Arcy: But Stanley Kubrick hates the film and to keep it off the screen he threatened Film Forum with copyright violations, even though Fear and Desire is in the public domain. Through a Warner Brothers’ publicist, Kubrick called his first feature ‘a bumbling amateur film exercise’.
Goldstein: Kubrick had Warner Brothers send a letter out to all the press in town saying that the picture was boring and pretentious and of course, that only drew more attention to it. So it now, now it really is a must see, because now it’s the picture Kubrick wants to suppress. So that makes it even sexier as a box office attraction. So I think he’s increased our attendance four-fold.
(via @SebastianNebel)
Hoop Dreams is a tremendous documentary that will be re-screened at Sundance this year, two decades after its initial release. Here’s an oral history of the making of the film.
Basketball fanatics Steve James, Frederick Marx, and Peter Gilbert originally set out to make Hoop Dreams as a half-hour doc for PBS that would focus on the culture surrounding streetball. But as quickly as they got on the blacktop, they left it. The dreams of their subjects, Arthur Agee and William Gates, were too grand for just the playground, and instantly, the filmmakers were immersed in the young men’s lives, showcasing both the good and bad.
Twenty years after the film premiered at Sundance and was awarded the festival’s Audience Award, it’s grown into an iconic work. Its snub in the Best Documentary category at the 67th Academy Awards in 1995 led to changes in the voting process. NBA players treat the movie as their own life story. It’s been added to the Library Of Congress’ National Film Registry. And when looking back on the film’s 15th anniversary, Roger Ebert declared it “the great American documentary.”
As the government has cracked down on the large drug labs located in jungles, the Colombian drug cartels have begun to decentralize their operations, operating small labs in city apartments and cooking batches in microwaves. Here’s a look at one of those apartment labs, which includes an interview with a dealer and a look at the smuggling technique du jour.
It turns out that the latest trend in Colombia’s cocaine trade is moving processing out of the huge plants in the jungle to small, mobile and disposable urban labs. In this new, decentralized world of cocaine production, two men with some buckets, a handful of microwave ovens and only the most basic knowledge of chemistry can take naturally growing coca leaves and turn them into 100 percent pure cocaine powder. And here’s the craziest part…they show us how they do it.
(via digg)
From a presentation at SIGGRAPH Asia 2013, a demonstration of a program that learns how to walk by evolving the orientation of its muscles.
Love these kinds of things. I remember another video like this that went around a few months ago…but instead of bipeds, it was a a shambling collection of cubes that learned how to move around. Anyone have a link?
Update: Ah, here’s that other video; I posted it back in April. (thx, @_DavidSmith)
Korean artist group Shinseungback Kimyonghun made a video of every time they clicked their mouse. It’s mesmerizing.
Ride along with Anders Jacobsen as he takes flight off the end of a ski jump in Lillehammer, Norway.
Very nice, but this fourth grader’s first time on a bigger ramp is by far my favorite ski jump video of all time.
David Munson, CEO of Saddleback Leather, gives some advice to those who want to rip off his high quality leather bags…basically how to save money by cutting corners, using cheaper leather, etc.
Like Twitter, HBO’s Game of Thrones started out with 140 characters but now most of them are dead so I have no idea what this season is going to be about. But dragons!
This is wonderful: an hour-long PBS documentary from 1981 on the making of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Lots of behind the scenes footage, interviews with Spielberg, Lucas, Ford, etc.
I love how delighted Spielberg is after the idol exchange scene.
No one uses slow motion more consistently than Wes Anderson; all his films except Fantastic Mr. Fox use the technique. Here are all the slow-mo scenes from his films strung together:
(via devour)
First of all, how cute are these foxes jumping up and diving down into the snow after mice?
So. Cute. Here’s Robert Krulwich on what they’re up to:
Think about this … an ordinary fox can stalk a mole, mouse, vole or shrew from a distance of 25 feet, which means its food is making a barely audible rustling sound, hiding almost two car lengths away. And yet our fox hurls itself into the air — in an arc determined by the fox, the speed and trajectory of the scurrying mouse, any breezes, the thickness of the ground cover, the depth of the snow — and somehow (how? how?), it can land straight on top of the mouse, pinning it with its forepaws or grabbing the mouse’s head with its teeth.
Look at those ears and how the fox moves his head around to zero in on the mouse’s location…reminds me of the pre-radar acoustic location devices (sometimes called war tubas) used in the early 20th century to detect approaching aircraft:
Let slip the tubas of war! Aaaaanyway, as the acoustic location device gave way to the more effective radar, so too is the fox more successful at hunting when he is pointed northeast — a kind of magnetic radar, if you will. Fascinating.
In 1963, Studs Terkel interviewed a 21-year-old Bob Dylan, before he was famous.
In the spring of 1963 Studs Terkel introduced Chicago radio listeners to an up-and-coming musician, not yet 22 years old, “a young folk poet who you might say looks like Huckleberry Finn, if he lived in the 20th century. His name is Bob Dylan.”
Dylan had just finished recording the songs for his second album, “The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan”, when he traveled from New York to Chicago to play a gig at a little place partly owned by his manager, Albert Grossman, called “The Bear Club”. The next day he went to the WFMT studios for the hour-long appearance on “The Studs Terkel Program”.
Dangerous Minds has more detail about the interview.
Bob Dylan is a notoriously tough person to interview and that’s definitely the case here, even this early in his life as a public persona. On the other hand, Terkel is a veteran interviewer, one of the best ever, and he seems genuinely impressed with the young man who was just 21 at the time and had but one record of mainly covers under his belt. Terkel does a good job of keeping things on track as he expertly gets out of the way and listens while gleaning what he can from his subject. It’s an interesting match-up.
Dylan seems at least fairly straightforward about his musical influences. He talks about seeing Woody Guthrie with his uncle when he was ten years old (Is this just mythology? Who knows?), and he mentions Big Joe Williams and Pete Seeger a few times.
Much of the rest is a little trickier. Terkel has to almost beg Dylan to play what turns out to be an earnest, driving version of “A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall.” Dylan tells Terkel that he’d rather the interviewer “take it off the disc,” but relents and does the tune anyways.
(via @mkonnikova)
Dear God, watch this moustache explode into — well, you’ll see — and you’ll never have to watch it again. You’ll see it every time you close your eyes.
Trailer for It’s a Wonderful Life, recut in the style of the trailer for Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street. Music is Black Skinhead by Kanye West.
Artist Cy Kuckenbaker digitally reorganized the traffic in this video by color.
(via http://stellar.io/interesting)
As if wingsuit flying wasn’t insane enough, here’s a guy in a wingsuit flying down a trench in Chamonix, like he’s Luke trying to blow up the Death Star.
I don’t even. (via devour)
Ethen Godfrey Roberts pulled off a trick called a Superman double backflip the other day and it is a thing to behold:
Sploid says the trick “seems to murder the laws of physics” but if you can close your mouth long enough to stop drooling (this took me several views, BTW), the law of conservation of angular momentum is responsible for the optical illusion that makes the trick look so cool. The trick begins with a tight backwards flip, which happens quickly because all of the weight (human + bike) is distributed close to the center of gravity. By opening his body up in the middle part of the flip, Roberts slows down the rotation, just like a figure skater, diver, or ballerina would by throwing out their arms or legs. And then he gathers himself back onto the bike, which spins quickly again because the weight is all back close to the center. Boom, physics.
Backed up against a fence with no room to swing in a recent tournament, Matt Wheatcroft hit a shot straight out of Happy Gilmore, more miniature golf than golf.
(via devour)
So, there’s the famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial for the Macintosh. There was the Think Different campaign. And the Mac vs. PC ads. But I think Apple’s newest effort, Misunderstood, is perhaps their best ad ever:
Or maybe I’m the biggest sap in the world…either way, I’m totally crying at work.
ps. But of course, that can’t be the best Apple advertisement ever because that title will always and forever be taken by a drunk Jeff Goldblum extolling the virtues of the iMac’s internet capabilities:
Great, now I’m crying from laughing at work.
12 O’Clock Boys is a documentary about an Baltimore dirt-bike gang.
Pug, a wisecracking 13 year old living on a dangerous Westside block, has one goal in mind: to join The Twelve O’Clock Boys; the notorious urban dirt-bike gang of Baltimore. Converging from all parts of the inner city, they invade the streets and clash with police, who are forbidden to chase the bikes for fear of endangering the public. When Pug’s older brother dies suddenly, he looks to the pack for mentorship, spurred by their dangerous lifestyle.
(via @aaroncoleman0)
Milos Rajkovic, aka Sholim, creates Terry Gilliam-esque cutout animations of people’s heads.
The animated GIF versions are available on Tumblr.
The Leap Motion is a motion controller for the Mac or PC which lets you control on-screen action through hand movements and gestures. Freeform is an app that unleashes your inner Michelangelo, allowing you to sculpt 3D objects on the screen much like you would if a hunk of clay were sitting in front of you.
(via prosthetic knowledge)
Working for CBS and later on his own in the 40s and 50s, sound engineer Charley Douglass perfected the laugh track technique, which was then called sweetening. His secret weapon was the laff box, a machine that you could use like a typewriter to produce the type and sequence of laughter you needed for a particular situation. Here’s how the machine worked:
The one-of-a-kind device — affectionately known in the industry as the “laff box” — was tightly secured with padlocks, stood more than two feet tall, and operated like an organ. Only immediate members of the family knew what the inside actually looked like (at one time, the “laff box” was called “the most sought after but well-concealed box in the world”). Since more than one member of the Douglass family was involved in the editing process, it was natural for one member to react differently to a joke than another. Charley himself was the most conservative of all, so producers would put in bids for other editors who were more liberal in their choice of laughter. Douglass used a keyboard to select the style, gender and age of the laugh as well as a foot pedal to time the length of the reaction. Inside the machine was a wide array of recorded chuckles, yocks, and belly laughs; exactly 320 laughs on 32 tape loops, 10 to a loop. Each loop contained 10 individual audience laughs spliced end-to-end, whirling around simultaneously waiting to be cued up. Since the tapes were looped, laughs were played in the same order repeatedly. Sound engineers would watch sitcoms and knew exactly which recurrent guffaws were next, even if they were viewing an episode for the first time. Frequently, Douglass would combine different laughs, either long or short in length. Attentive viewers could spot when he decided to mix chuckles together to give the effect of a more diverse audience.
I found out about the laff box from Kevin Slavin & Kenyatta Cheese’s talk about how, with the Internet, the audience now has an audience.
Eric Hollenbeck is a master woodworker who owns and operates the Blue Ox Millworks in Eureka, CA. The Ox is a lovely short film about Hollenbeck directed by Ben Proudfoot, who previously made the equally lovely ink&paper.
Watch as a trio of trials riders zoom across rusty old bridges, up rocky mountains, and down dry water slides on skinny-tired road bikes. An eye-popping collection of tricks.
There’s a bit of a backstory to this video. It’s a sequel to a similar video performed solo by Martyn Ashton. In the middle of filming this sequel, Ashton broke his back during a demonstration and is currently paralyzed from the waist down. Friends and fellow trials riders Chris Akrigg and Danny MacAskill stepped in to help Ashton complete the video. (via digg)
Ok, bear with me here…this is a video of a helicopter harvesting Christmas trees in Oregon. But the pace at which the pilot is moving those trees into the trucks is almost literally unbelievable.
(via @jchristopher & @cdevroe)
Update: And here’s the helicopter cockpit view from a similar harvest:
(via @iEddyG)
The teeterboard is an acrobatic apparatus that looks like a seesaw. This is a pair of acrobats training on a Korean-style teeterboard, where instead of getting catapulted off the board, the participants land back on the board after each jump:
Using a black & white workprint of The Dark Crystal that Jim Henson and Frank Oz wanted to release, YouTube user scoodidabop made a full-length director’s cut of the film. It’s a bit rough in spots, but the original vision is all there.
Production was supposed to have begun on a Dark Crystal sequel, but according to the Muppet Wiki, the project has been shelved.
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