kottke.org posts about video
Vimeo user Subterminally appears to have had the worst 13 seconds of his life last week when he hit the cliff off of which he was base jumping. Subterminallyill received a “Compression Fracture of the T12 Vertebra, 5 stitches to the eye, 6 stitches to the chin, severely sprained Back, wrist and hand. multiple bruised areas,” which is not too bad considering he FELL OFF A FUCKING CLIFF.
Alternate copy for this post, “No. No, no no no no no no. No. No. No. No, no, no, no, no. No.”
(via just about everyone)
Using a large piece of spandex (representing spacetime) and some balls and marbles (representing masses), a high school science teacher explains how gravity works.
The bits about how the planets all orbit in the same direction and the demo of the Earth/Moon orbit are really neat. And you can stop watching around the 7-minute mark…the demos end around then.
Update: Here’s another video of a similar system with some slightly different demos.
In a clip from Eye of the Leopard narrated by Jeremy Irons, we see a female leopard kill a baboon. And then the leopard notices the baboon has just given birth to a tiny baby. Her reaction is unexpected:
In a masterfully edited video, David Ehrlich presents his 25 favorite films of 2013.
Fantastic. This video makes me want to stop what I’m doing and watch movies for a week. It’s a good year for it apparently…both Tyler Cowen and Bruce Handy argue that 2013 is an exceptional year for movies. I’m still fond of 1999… (via @brillhart)
From a 1968 film shot by director Jean-Luc Godard, here’s the Rolling Stones in the recording studio, working on refining Sympathy for the Devil.
(via openculture)
In a video analogue of Alvin Lucier’s I Am Sitting in a Room, this YouTube video is uploaded and then downloaded 1000 consecutive times until the image becomes all artifacts.
(via digg)
Using an iPad app called Procreate, artist Kyle Lambert made this painting of Morgan Freeman. It took him 200 hours. The video of him doing it is mesmerizing:
(via gizmodo)
From the cotton in the fields to the manufacturing machines to the container ships, NPR’s Planet Money looks at the often complex world behind the making of a simple t-shirt.
We flew drones over Mississippi. We got mugged in Chittagong, Bangladesh. We met people whom we’ll never forget — the actual people who make our clothing. At every location we had radio reporters and videographers.
You’ve likely seen the various dialect maps of the US…the Coke/soda/pop maps. The Atlantic Video team did a wonderful thing with them…they called native speakers around the country and asked them to pronounce some of the words featured on these maps.
It’s one thing to read the difference between the pronounciations of “route”, it’s another thing entirely to hear them. I haven’t lived in the Midwest since 2000 and I have since transitioned from “pop” to “soda”, “waiting in line” to “waiting on line”, and am working on switching to “sneakers” from “tennis shoes” (or even “tennies”). But I was surprised to learn that I still pronounce “bag” differently than everyone else!
When Nirvana appeared on Top of the Pops in 1991, they were asked to only sing the lead vocal over an instrumental track. The result was perhaps the most unusual performance of Smells Like Teen Spirit ever, with the band barely playing their instruments in sync with the music and Cobain doing his best Ian Curtis/Morrisey impression.
Pharrell has made a 24-hour music video of people dancing and lip-syncing that’s a cross between Christian Marclay’s The Clock and Girl Walk // All Day.
Girls. Trailer. Third season. HBO. January 12. Lena Dunham. Watch:
I am so excited for this show to return. I don’t think I can hide it. It’s like I’m about to lose control. Maybe I like that feeling?
I linked to a stabilized version of the Zapruder film of JFK’s assassination a few years ago but Antony Davison has made a version that presents the whole film in panoramic HD, resulting in an amazingly clear representation of the event.
James Murphy (LCD Soundsystem) remixed David Bowie’s Love is Lost in the style of minimal music composer Steve Reich. Here’s the video for it by Barnaby Roper:
The video is NSFW, although most of the NS-ness is of the watching scrambled Cinemax on your uncle’s cable in 1985 variety (aka datamoshing).
Errol Morris and Tink Thompson share an obsession about the nature of photographic evidence. In a short film for the NY Times, Morris talks to Thompson about the photographic and filmic evidence of the JFK assassination, which Thompson has been investigating on and off since 1963.
Interesting that 1) there exists much more photographic evidence of the assassination than is commonly shown/known, and 2) Thompson very much has a theory of what the evidence shows but Morris doesn’t spill those particular beans:
Is there a lesson to be learned? Yes, to never give up trying to uncover the truth. Despite all the difficulties, what happened in Dallas happened in one way rather than another. It may have been hopelessly obscured, but it was not obliterated. Tink still believes in answers, and in this instance, an answer. He is completing a sequel to “Six Seconds” called “Last Second in Dallas.” Like its predecessor, this book is clearly reasoned and convincing. Of course, there will be people who will be unmoved by his or any other account.
See also Morris’ previous short film featuring Thompson & the assassination, The Umbrella Man.
R. Kelly is some sort of random love song generating genius apparently. On a recent visit to the Rolling Stone offices, R. Ess asked R. Kelly to sing to them about dolphins, ice hockey, newspapers, and Italian heroes. The results R. Hilarious.
(via @leecrutchley who has a new book out.)
The Moken are a nomadic people who live on the coasts and islands of Thailand and Burma. They live off the bounty of the sea and have learned to control the size of the pupils in order to see better underwater.
Pupil constriction is triggered by incoming light levels — the less light (as at depth) the bigger the pupil — but the Moken have learned to override that implulse and keep their pupils small at low light levels, therefore making their eyesight sharper. (via the kid should see this)
From Freestyle: The Art of the Rhyme, a short clip of a 17-year-old Christopher Wallace (aka Biggie Smalls, aka The Notorious B.I.G.) freestyle rapping on a street corner in Bed Stuy, Brooklyn in 1989.
It’s all there…the talent, the confidence, the skills. Compare with a 17-year-old LL Cool J rapping in a Maine gymnasium in 1985. (via ★interesting)
Update: Biggie was rapping on Bedford Ave between Quincy St and Lexington Ave in Bed-Stuy. Check it out on Google Maps. (thx, debbie)
A short time before his death, Benoît B. Mandelbrot filmed an interview with Errol Morris. Morris charmingly starts off my asking Mandelbrot where “the fractal stuff” came from.
Note: as always, the “B.” in “Benoît B. Mandelbrot” stands for “Benoît B. Mandelbrot”. (via @sampotts)
Kevin Kelley is the head football coach at Pulaski Academy in Little Rock, Arkansas. In games, he instructs his team to never punt, to never receive punts, and almost always onside kick.
The numbers Kelley cites are that eye-popping. And he isn’t cooking the books: Cal professor David Romer concluded that teams should not punt when facing fourth-and-4 or less; NFL stats analyst Brian Burke has detailed the need to rethink fourth-down decision-making; Football Outsiders has conflated punts with turnovers. You’ve even read about it on this site. Most fans and analysts who are willing to accept that change is a fundamental part of life have embraced the idea that automatically punting on fourth down doesn’t make sense.
Since Kelley took over, Pulaski is 124-22 and has won three state titles.
Wes Anderson did a short film for Prada. The film contains race cars, Jason Schwartzman, Italy, and tweeness.
(via digg)
This video visualization of 15 different sorting algorithms is mesmerizing. (Don’t forget the sound.)
An explanation of the process. You can play with several different kinds of sorts here.
Hans Bethe was a giant in the field of nuclear physics. He rubbed shoulders with Einstein, Bohr, and Pauli, was head of the Theoretical Division of the US atomic bomb project, and was awarded a Nobel Prize. In 1999, at the age of 93, Bethe gave a series of three lectures to the residents of his retirement community near Cornell University, where he had taught since 1935. Video of the lectures is available on the Cornell website.
In the first lecture, Bethe covers the development of the “old quantum theory”, covering the work of Max Planck and Niels Bohr. In the second and third lectures, he relates how modern quantum mechanics was developed, with a healthy amount of personal recollection along the way:
Professor Bethe offers personal anecdotes about many of the famous names commonly associated with quantum physics, including Bohr, Heisenberg, Born, Pauli, de Broglie, Schrödinger, and Dirac.
Without a doubt, this is the most high-power presentation ever made at a retirement home. (via @stevenstrogatz)
One of my favorite books on technology, Tom Standage’s The Victorian Internet, was adapted into a TV documentary. It is now available on YouTube:
The Victorian Internet tells the colorful story of the telegraph’s creation and remarkable impact, and of the visionaries, oddballs, and eccentrics who pioneered it, from the eighteenth-century French scientist Jean-Antoine Nollet to Samuel F. B. Morse and Thomas Edison. The electric telegraph nullified distance and shrank the world quicker and further than ever before or since, and its story mirrors and predicts that of the Internet in numerous ways.
I posted a video earlier today of a Super Cub airplane landing on the side of a mountain. Super Cubs are ideal for that undertaking because of their low stall speed and short take-off and landing distances. But I had no idea you could land and take off in one in the space of 20 feet.
Never seen a plane do that before…well, aside from tiny model planes. What an incredible power-to-weight ratio that plane must have. You can seriously land these things anywhere, almost like a helicopter. Wanna go fly fishing? Just set it down on the banks of a stream:
Or on a gravel bar in a river:
These planes are referred to as STOL (short takeoff and landing) aircraft; here’s some detail on how they work. (via @alper)
Update: Is this the shortest takeoff in history?
Six feet. Six. (via @mikebee)
When you read the title of this video, “Super Cub landing on windy mt. top”, you’re thinking, ok, there’s a runway on the side of this mountain and it’s gonna be a little dicey but not a big deal. But then the video starts and there’s just a steep snowy mountain and no runway and it’s uphill and you’re like, WHAT JUST HAPPENED?
I looked up info on the plane and if you’re going to land on the side of a mountain, the Super Cub is the plane for you. It can take off in as little as 200 feet, land in 300-400 feet, and has a stall speed of only 43 mph. The guy lands uphill and takes off downhill in this video and looks like he needed less than 100 feet in each case. (via ★mouser)
Archer Lars Andersen can shoot 10 arrows in less than 5 seconds, without sacrificing power or accuracy. Andersen learned his technique by studying ancient archery practices…the key is holding the extra arrows in the hand and instinctive shooting.
Update: Anderson is back with a new video and new skills, like incoming shooting arrows with arrows of his own.
(via @psillin & @gavinpurcell)
A video from Microsoft Research showcases a system that uses the Kinect motion sensing input device to translate between American Sign Language and other sign and spoken languages.
You can read more about the system at Microsoft Research.
For the sufficiently skilled front-end loader driver, doing a front wheelie with a 20-ton machine is a piece of cake.
Got this from Modern Farmer’s selection of “Jaw-Dropping Russian Tractor Videos”; the other one I liked from the list is this guy who souped up his tractor with a car engine and then does donuts in his field.
A mouse finds a cracker about his own size and thinks, “this is great, I’ll be able to eat for a week!” But he can’t quite get the cracker up and over the short ledge that leads back to his hole. But he doesn’t give up that easily:
(via ★interesting)
Newer posts
Older posts
Socials & More