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It’s not up on their web site or YouTube yet, but I’m pretty sure this is a prototype of a new dancing robot built by Boston Dynamics, makers of the Big Dog, Cheetah, and Petman robots.
Looks similar to Atlas or Petman, but way more advanced…how did they pack all of the circuitry and power supplies into such a small yet realistic-looking housing? (via devour)
Real Kitchen, a small Chicago eatery that mostly does take-out food, dressed up as Michelin 3-star Alinea for Halloween. Some genuine LOLs here, especially the table-side dessert to-go.
Greg Packer gets quoted in the news a lot, an area man among mere area boys. Andrew David Watson added fuel to his fire by producing a short film about Packer for the New Yorker.
Filed under even if it’s fake it’s real. (via ★interesting)
In this 7-minute interview, Alfred Hitchcock explains his editing/cutting technique.
The full interview from which this is taken, which is “part interview, part master class in the craft of telling stories on film”, is available on YouTube: part 1 and part 2.
Speaking of Wes Anderson, Matt Zoller Seitz has finished his video essay series on Anderson’s movies. You can find the entire collection of videos on Vimeo and transcripts and notes are on Seitz’s blog. Here are the final two to get you going:
And if that’s not enough for you, here’s the book that the videos are based on.
A blooper reel from the original Star Wars…looks like this hasn’t ever been seen before.
This video dicusses three simple ways to travel through time (all of which you can do right now at home) and three not-so-simple time travel methods.
For more on time-travel, here are some works by physicist and time-lord Sean Carroll:
Rules for time-travellers - http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cos…
Learn more about time and time-machines in his book From Eternity to Here - http://preposterousuniverse.com/etern…
Visualizations of the spinning universe - http://iopscience.iop.org/1367-2630/1…
An engaging talk on the Paradoxes of Time Travel - https://vimeo.com/11917849
(via digg)
NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory is getting some really amazing shots of the Sun, including this 200,000 mile-long solar eruption that left a huge canyon on the surface of the Sun:
Different wavelengths help capture different aspect of events in the corona. The red images shown in the movie help highlight plasma at temperatures of 90,000° F and are good for observing filaments as they form and erupt. The yellow images, showing temperatures at 1,000,000° F, are useful for observing material coursing along the sun’s magnetic field lines, seen in the movie as an arcade of loops across the area of the eruption. The browner images at the beginning of the movie show material at temperatures of 1,800,000° F, and it is here where the canyon of fire imagery is most obvious.
The level of detail shown is incredible. (via @DavidGrann)
This video of Atlanta cheerleader Mikayla Clark breaking the world backflip record is mesmerizing. I did not know there was a world backflip record, but here is someone breaking it last year, too.
Yes, it is gymnastics day on kottke.org, what of it?
I wasn’t expecting a whole lot from this video of a robotic gymnast doing a routine on the high bar, but holy cow! I audibly gasped at the 33-second mark and again at 57 seconds.
Looks like a home-built, just some guy in his garage. The robot has learned some new tricks since that video was made. Here’s a quintuple backflip landing:
A double twist that it didn’t quite land:
And it does floor exercises as well…here’s a double back handspring:
(via @moth)
Even by Apple standards, the video showing how the new Mac Pro is made is a great little piece of cinema. Product designer Greg Koenig does some forensic analysis on the video and opens the curtain a bit on what manufacturing techniques Apple is using.
What makes Apple fascinating is not that they are using some wiz-bang alien technologies to make things — even here in Portland, Oregon, all the technologies Apple shows in this video are in-practice across numerous local factories. What makes Apple unique is that they perform their manufacturing with remarkable precision and on a scale that is simply astonishing, using techniques typically reserved for the aerospace or medical device industries.
(via ★interesting-links)
Glen Weisgerber is a wizard at the art of hand-lettering. Make sure you watch all the way through for the big flourish-y finish.
(via colossal)
With $10 and a little elbow grease, you can turn your iPhone into a really nice digital microscope capable of 175x magnification, allowing you to take photos of plant cells:
Here’s how you do it:
(via ★interesting)
Nestled in the midst of Matt Zoller Seitz’s video essay on Wes Anderson’s The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou is this bombshell: the movie contains a Star Wars reference no one seems to have noticed. Seitz synced the scenes for us:
There have to be others, right? Many of Anderson’s films end with all of the characters gathered together like at the medals ceremony in Episode IV…someone even synced up the end of the movie with the closing credits music from Zissou and it works really well:
And of course, there’s Conan O’Brien’s take on what a Star Wars movie directed by Anderson might look like.
In New York Magazine this week, Mike Tyson writes about growing up in Brooklyn and his discovery of boxing as a way out and up.
Having to wear glasses in the first grade was a real turning point in my life. My mother had me tested, and it turned out I was nearsighted, so she made me get glasses. They were so bad. One day I was leaving school at lunchtime to go home and I had some meatballs from the cafeteria wrapped up in aluminum to keep them hot. This guy came up to me and said, “Hey, you got any money?” I said, “No.” He started picking my pockets and searching me, and he tried to take my fucking meatballs. I was resisting, going, “No, no, no!” I would let the bullies take my money, but I never let them take my food. I was hunched over like a human shield, protecting my meatballs. So he started hitting me in the head and then took my glasses and put them down the gas tank of a truck. I ran home, but he didn’t get my meatballs. I still feel like a coward to this day because of that bullying. That’s a wild feeling, being that helpless. You never ever forget that feeling. That was the last day I went to school. I was 7 years old, and I just never went back to class.
The piece is adapted from Tyson’s upcoming memoir, Undisputed Truth. Tyson wrote the book with Larry Sloman, author of Reefer Madness who has also ghostwritten for Howard Stern, Anthony Kiedis, and KISS’s Peter Criss.
Update: Spike Lee directed a documentary version of Undisputed Truth; it’ll air on HBO on November 16. Here’s the trailer:
Vsevolod Pudovkin was a Soviet film director who developed influential theories of film editing. In this 12-minute video, Evan Richards uses clips from films like 2001, Lawrence of Arabia, and The Godfather to illustrate Pudovkin’s editing techniques.
Pudovkin’s book, Film Technique and Film Acting, which is available to read for free online. Stanley Kubrick was a fan:
The most instructive book on film aesthetics I came across was Pudovkin’s Film Technique, which simply explained that editing was the aspect of film art form which was completely unique, and which separated it from all other art forms. The ability to show a simple action like a man cutting wheat from a number of angles in a brief moment, to be able to see it in a special way not possible except through film — that this is what it was all about. This is obvious, of course, but it’s so important it cannot be too strongly stressed. Pudovkin gives many clear examples of how good film editing enhances a scene, and I would recommend his book to anyone seriously interested in film technique.
Matt Zoller Seitz is doing a video essay series based on his new book, The Wes Anderson Collection. The first two installments, on Bottle Rocket and Rushmore, are already up:
I love what he says about Rushmore:
There are few perfect movies. This is one of them.
The book and video essays came about because Anderson saw Seitz’s earlier video essay series, The Substance of Style, an examination of Anderson’s stylistic influences. Great resource for fans of Anderson and film.
630 yards. Par 3. Tee is accessible only by helicopter. $1,000,000 for a hole-in-one. Meet the world’s most difficult hole of golf:
(via quora)
Professor Xavier downsizes Wolverine for being the most useless member of the X-Men.
Reason for dismissal: “Made of metal, the substance the guy we fight the most can manipulate with his mind.” (via http://stellar.io/interesting)
Google’s got themselves a quantum computer (they’re sharing it with NASA) and they made a little video about it:
I’m sure that Hartmut is a smart guy and all, but he’s got a promising career as an Arnold Schwarzenegger impersonator hanging out there if the whole Google thing doesn’t work out.
I’m not sure that the bad lip reading of NFL players will ever be topped, but this dubbing of Game of Thrones with alternative dialogue is pretty great too.
(via devour)
(Just so I don’t bury the lede too much here: THIS IS INSANE.) Wingsuit flyers keep upping the ante. For awhile, it was enough to glide at 100 mph a foot or two off the ground. Then they started flying through gaps between skyscrapers. And then through holes in mountains. Last year, Gary Connery landed safely in a pile of cardboard boxes without the use of a parachute. And now, watch as Raphael Dumont, straps on his wingsuit, climbs an Italian mountain, and LANDS SAFELY ON A LAKE WITHOUT A PARACHUTE.
Raphael Dumont, human seaplane. That shit cray.
Update: Rumblings on Twitter are indicating that this is fake. I WANT TO BELIEVE. (But that footage of the landing is shot on the world’s shakiest camera for no reason so…)
Pop culture is rife with references to “four o’clock in the morning”. The Museum of Four in the Morning is collecting them. Here’s a supercut of some of the findings:
See also Christian Marclay’s The Clock?
A year ago yesterday, Felix Baumgartner rode in a balloon up to a height of almost 128,000 feet and jumped out. Red Bull, who sponsored the jump, has finally released the full-length footage of the jump from Baumgartner’s point-of-view.
A feature-length documentary about the jump is available on Rdio. Is it weird that this makes me want to go see Gravity again? (via devour)
Black MIDI music composers make “seemingly impossible” music consisting of millions of notes.
Blackers take these MIDI files and run them through software such as Synesthesia, which is kind of an educational version of Guitar Hero for the piano, and bills itself as “piano for everyone.” It’s kind of brilliant to imagine a novice piano player looking for some online tutorials and stumbling across, say, this video of the song Bad Apple, which reportedly includes 8.49 million separate notes.
Here’s a tune with 10 million notes:
And another with 110 million notes that sounds like a random TV channel played at 5000x normal speed. I really thought dubstep was going to be the “those kids and their crazy unlistenable music” transition for me, but that’s nothing compared to this. If this is what the youngs are going to be listening to in three years, count me out.
The NHL season is only a few days old, but Sharks rookie Tomas Hertl may have already scored the goal of the year. This is crazy:
Also, that was his fourth goal of the game. (via grantland)
Terminus is a 1961 documentary depicting a day in the life of London’s Waterloo Station.
The film was directed by John Schlesinger (Midnight Cowboy) and won several awards when it was released. (thx, nick)
Watch as several kayakers rocket down a drainage ditch in BC at speeds approaching 35 mph.
That looks like a lot of fun. See also what fast looks like. (via devour)
A promising debut by Sarah Pavis of a science program called Square 1, an attempt at a Connections-like show for the modern day. In the first episode, she explores how phone touchscreens work.
In addition to being an occasional guest editor around these parts, Sarah is a mechanical engineer, so she knows her science.
Steven Hawking came up with a simple and clever way of seeing if time travel is possible. On June 28, 2009, he threw a party for time travellers from the future…but didn’t advertise it until after the party was already over.
In an effort to improve the chances of the party invite being noticed by future generations, Peter Dean, working with approval from Hawking, has made this gorgeous hand-printed poster of the party invitation:
There’s also a smaller less-expensive version of the poster in grey and a fetching yellow/orange.
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