kottke.org posts about video
From the AIGA, a lovely short film on type designers Jonathan Hoefler and Tobias Frere-Jones. I love the bit about starting a typeface design with the O, H, and D. Elsewhere, Hoefler recommended other potential starting points:
Work out the B, the ampersand, and the bullet before you get too far: you’ll have to confront decisions about thinning strokes, intersections, and shapes without any counters, which might inform what you do on the other letters.
(via daring fireball)
Why go to medical school when you can just read this Medical School tumblr blog? Includes posts on open heart surgery, sickle cell anemia, and a simple suturing demonstration:
You’ve heard of Weird Twitter but now there’s Weird Ocean. This square mile of water in the Lembeh Strait has some of the strangest and most unique marine life on the planet. Includes an appearance by the always delightful cuttlefish. (via @colossal)
In the 1980s, crack babies were all over the news. They were supposed to have severe mental and physical problems, overwhelm our schools and health care institutions, and cost us billions of dollars. None of this happened because the media latched onto some limited preliminary research and blew it all out of proportion.
Retro Report has gone back to look at the story of these children from the perspective of those in the eye of the storm — tracing the trajectory from the small 1985 study by Dr. Ira Chasnoff that first raised the alarm, through the drumbeat of media coverage that kept the story alive, to the present where a cocaine-exposed research subject tells her own surprising life story. Looking back, Crack Babies: A Tale from the Drug Wars shows the danger of prediction and the unexpected outcomes that result when closely-held convictions turn out to be wrong.
This video was produced by a new news organization called Retro Report, which revisits old news stories with a sober eye…”a smart, engaging and forward-looking review of these high-profile events”. In addition to the crack babies story, they’ve also explored the New York garbage barge and the Tailhook scandal.
Back in April, the Landsat Data Continuity Mission (aka a NASA satellite with a bitchin’ camera) took photos of the Earth along a swath of land 120 miles wide by 6,000 miles long, from Russia to South Africa. Then they stitched it into a mesmerising 15-minute video:
Feel free to put on some Sigur Ros while you watch. (via the atlantic)
Daft Punk + goats who yell like people = not the funniest thing you’ve seen in your life but it hits a certain spot, that’s for sure.
(via @thebakerruns)
From XKCD, a chart of the memes that various star systems are just hearing from the Earth’s light-speed communications.
This is the meme version of Contact’s opening credits scene, which is one of my favorites:
Claude Friese-Greene shot these scenes in color around London in 1927.
(thx, rob)
Update: This footage was taken from the British Film Institute’s YouTube channel and it turns out there’s tons of color footage Friese-Greene shot around Britain in the 1920s. Like farm laborers in Devon in 1924, a busking family in Scotland in 1926, the docks in Cardiff in 1926, and much more. (via @magnakai)
Perfect for a slow Friday afternoon. Have a good weekend everyone.
A nice short analysis by filmmaker Steven Benedict of the themes expressed and techniques used by Steven Spielberg in his films.
Marine scientist Cassandra Brooks narrates a time lapse video of her two-month journey on an Antarctic icebreaker. High points: the ice ramming at 2:35 and the fishing penguins at the end.
Brooks blogged her journey for National Geographic. If you want to fall down the rabbit hole of how icebreakers are designed and how they differ from usual ships, Wikipedia is a good place to start.
For a ship to be considered an icebreaker, it requires three traits most normal ships lack: a strengthened hull, an ice-clearing shape, and the power to push through sea ice.
Damn! Watch this railroad tanker car instantly implode:
I couldn’t find too much information on the source of this clip, but it appears to be part of a safety training video on the perils of improperly steam cleaning tanker cars. In the clip, the tanker car is filled with steam and the safety valves are disabled. The steam cools, then condenses, the pressure inside drops, and the pressure difference is big enough to crumple that huge railcar like a napkin.
Update: See also “sun kink”, when railroad tracks buckle in intense heat:
An explanation of the effect can be found here. (thx, will)
The Peregrine Falcon is the world’s fastest animal;1 it can reach speeds of more than 240 mph during dives. It uses that speed to kill other birds in mid-air. Here’s a video of a Peregrine diving and killing a duck, shot with a camera mounted on the falcon’s back.
It’s cool watching her fly around, but the exciting part starts right around 2:45. The acceleration is incredible. The same bird does a longer and faster dive in this video (at ~0:55):
Here’s what the Peregrine’s dive looks like from an observer’s point-of-view:
Our family had a lively discussion about Peregrine Falcons around the dinner table a couple of weeks ago…I can’t wait to show the kids these videos when I get home tonight. (via @DavidGrann)
Many Russian cars are outfitted with dashboard cameras to protect drivers against insurance fraud. These cameras have caught all sorts of crazy happenings — car accidents, low-flying jets, insurance scam attempts, meteors, and plane crashes
— leading many to believe that Russia is a place where crazy shit pretty much happens constantly.
But Russia’s dash cams have also captured many more tender moments — people hopping out of their cars to help old ladies across the street, looking after little kids who wandered into the street, pushing cars out of snowbanks, etc.
I love the hell out of this video. Russia, you’re alright. (via devour)
In Lambert’s Cafe in Sikeston, MO, they just throw your bread to you from across the restaurant.
You’ve heard of oobleck, yeah? It’s a non-Newtonian fluid made of corn starch and water that doesn’t act like a normal fluid. Like, for instance, you can run on top of it:
Cooking Issues ran across a video of a cook preparing noodles made from a non-Newtonian batter. Watch as the batter solidifies when he slaps more batter into the sieve and then drains out of the bottom.
Love the technique here. See also the noodle-making robot, power of noodles, Korean honey candy, and, my favorite, flatbread tossing:
(via @Ianmurren)
Yesterday morning, a 747 cargo plane taking off from Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan crashed soon after taking off. A dash cam caught the entire thing on video:
It is amazing how quickly a powerful and fast jet airplane turns into a leaden hunk of metal. (via @VictorGodinez)
Steven Spielberg is doing a sequel to Lincoln called Obama and he got Daniel Day-Lewis to play the lead. I knew Day-Lewis was good, but this is bonkers.
In complete defiance of its parents, NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory has stared directly at the Sun for the past three years. Here’s a video of those three years made from still images taken by the SDO.
During the course of the video, the sun subtly increases and decreases in apparent size. This is because the distance between the SDO spacecraft and the sun varies over time. The image is, however, remarkably consistent and stable despite the fact that SDO orbits the Earth at 6,876 miles per hour and the Earth orbits the sun at 67,062 miles per hour.
The video notes say the animation uses two images per day…it would be nice to see the same animation with a higher frame rate. (via ★interesting)
Cars were moving too fast through an intersection in the town of Poynton in England, so they took out the stoplights & walk signals and replaced the intersection with an unusual double roundel design. The result is a mixed-use space with slower moving car traffic and safer pedestrian traffic.
(via digg)
Burn this guy at the stake because he’s a witch! You can’t separate out the water from Coca-Cola with a simple water filter. Coke is elemental, inviolable. It’s The Real Thing. Coke Is It. A Coke is a Coke.
(via digg)
What happens when you wring a washcloth out in zero gravity? Something cool.
Commander Hadfield is the best. I love when he casually lets go of the wireless mic and it just floats there right in front of his face. (thx, dusty)
Dove employed Gil Zamora, a FBI-trained forensic sketch artist, to help with an interesting experiment about self-perception. Zamora first sketched a series of women as they described themselves (they were hidden from his view) and then he sketched portraits of the same women based on descriptions by people who had met them. The difference between the two drawings, self-described vs. peer-described, were striking.
More on the experiment here. And a counterpoint from Jazz.
Major League Combat is a sport that combines juggling, rugby, Capture the Flag, and maybe Quidditch? I can’t make out how you score, but keeping your juggle from end-to-end seems important.
Weird sport or the weirdest sport? It’s definitely up there with chessboxing. (thx, benjamin)
Watch as wingsuit pilot Alexander Polli flies through a hole in a mountain. And it’s not that big of a hole either.
Watching this, I kept seeing an image of Wile E. Coyote wearing an Acme-brand wingsuit smacking into the side of the mountain. (via stellar)
Starting with cubes of four simple materials (bone, tissue, 2 types of muscles) and one simple rule (faster bots have more offspring) results in a surprising amount of complexity among walking robots.
(via buzzfeed)
Filmed at 780 fps with a Phantom Flex from the back of a moving SUV, James Nares’ Street depicts people walking New York streets in super slow motion.
The film runs 60 minutes (depicting about three minutes of real time footage), Sonic Youth’s Thurston Moore did the soundtrack, and it’s on display at The Met until the end of May.
Update: Here’s another short clip of the full film from the National Gallery of Art.
If you’re compiling a list of the least cool brands, Kmart deserves serious consideration. But you’ve got to give them props for this daring ad touting free home shipping of out-of-stock merchandise.
I almost shipped my pants laughing at this. (via ★interesting)
The term of art for time lapse videos in which the camera moves is hyperlapse. In playing around with the hyperlapse technique, Teehan+Lax developed a system to make hyperlapse videos using Google Street View. Like this one:
Make your own here.
This video would be a lot better without the first 15 seconds (sippy cups? talking? who cares?) but the rest of it is pants-wettingly amazing.
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