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I remember tearing baseballs apart as a kid and seeing the rubber core, but I guess I had forgotten that a baseball is mostly a leather-covered yarn ball. See also how footballs are made and homemade soccer balls. (via @marklamster)
NPR’s Planet Money talked to Ed Herr of Herr Foods about how potato chip manufacturing has changed since 1946, when the company was housed in a barn on his family’s land.
Herr estimates that if they currently made chips the way they did back in the 1940s, they’d cost about $25 a bag.
Someone built a robotic goalkeeper and then someone else had the bright idea to pit reigning best player in the world Lionel Messi against it:
Iker Casillas, your job is in jeopardy. But maybe not quite yet…by the final attempt, Messi seems to have figured out how to send the goalie the wrong way, at least for an instant. (via digg)
The other day I posted a video about how differential gears work to help cars go smoothly around curves. Trains don’t have differential gears, so how do they manage to go around curves without slipping or skidding? Richard Feynman explains:
Ha, it looks like I’ve posted this one before as well. Can never get enough Feynman. (thx, kerry)
I’ve posted this before, but it’s so good, here it is again: a super-simple explanation of why differential gears are necessary in cars and how they work.
(via @stevenstrogatz)
Leigh Singer gathered more than 50 clips from movies that break the fourth wall (where the characters acknowledge they’re in a movie).
Sadly my favorite broken fourth wall moment didn’t make the list: Billy Ray Valentine in Trading Places getting a commodities lesson from the Dukes. (via zupped)
Update: Ah, and all is right with the universe again as Trading Places makes it into Singer’s second compilation of fourth wall breaks.
If you need a little pick-me-up, try this video of two nonagenarians racing each other in the 100-meter dash. Seems like there’s gonna be a clear winner from the start but…
Both men were born in 1918; if the video were filmed this year, that would make them 95. (via @gavinpurcell)
Dustin Cohen made a lovely little film about shoemaker Frank Catalfumo, who has been making and repairing shoes in Brooklyn since before World War II.
Frank Catalfumo is a 91 year old shoemaker and repairer in Bensonhurst, Brooklyn. He first opened the doors to F&C Shoes in 1945 and continues to work five days a week alongside his son Michael. If you’re ever in the area, make sure to stop by the shop and listen to one of Frank’s amazing stories about life in Brooklyn back in the day.
This is an episode of Computer Chronicles from 1995 showing what you could do on the internet.
(via mental floss)
Vice made a 24-minute documentary film about Cody Wilson, who is designing a semi-automatic weapon that can be printed out on a 3-D printer. You just download the plans, print it out, and there you go.
“Gun control is a fantasy” indeed.
Well, this is interesting. Graphene is a substance discovered relatively recently that has a number of unusual properties. In 2004, physicists at the University of Manchester and the Institute for Microelectronics Technology in Russia used ordinary scotch tape to isolate single-layer sheets of graphene. Once isolated, the sheets could be tested for the unusual properties I mentioned. The 2010 Nobel Prize in Physics was awarded for this work.
In 2012, a group of researchers at UCLA discovered they could make single-layer sheets of graphene by coating a DVD with graphite oxide and then “playing” the disc in a plain old DVD drive. And then in a happy accident, they found that graphene has unusually high supercapacitance properties, which could mean that graphene could be used, for example, as a mobile phone battery that lasts all day, charges in a few seconds, and can be thrown into a compost bin after use.
(via io9)
It does what it says on the tin.
My favorite part is how it shoots the airplane out at the end. “Be gone, good sir, I am quite done with you!” (thx, Alex)
There’s prior art, but this image toaster is still pretty cool.
Toastagram? Toastr? I foresee BERG putting out a smaller version of this, perhaps printing out the day’s news on a small-crumb cocktail bread; they’ll call it Little Toaster. (via sly oyster)
If it’s got wheels, extreme sports enthusiasts will do tricks on it. The push scooter your five-year-old rides at the playground is no exception:
If they ever to a Back to the Future reboot, they know who to call for the downtown Hill Valley chase scene. (via @DavidSimkins1)
A Danish TV show called Dumt & Farligt (which translates as Stupid & Dangerous) films all sorts of crazy things at 2500 frames/sec with a super HD camera. You may have seen the first video from last April…here’s a follow-up that just came out:
The highlights for me were the bottle of red wine in the microwave and the rocket-powered drying rack from the first video and the bottle of Diet Coke shot with a bullet and gas leak in a camper. The Diet Coke scene is almost cinematic, the way the bottle’s clothes are blown off and “arms” flap around as the bottle spins, wobbles, and finally falls to the ground. (via digg)
Watch as Ludovic Woerth & Jokke Sommer fly through a hole in a building in central Rio de Janeiro that looks not much more than 15 feet wide. Jesus.
And speaking of Jesus, another pair of wingsuiters flew under the arms of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio a few years ago. (via @rands)
A nascent trend on YouTube is to take contemporary dramas and imagine what their 1995-style opening credits sequences might look like. The first one appears to be this Walking Dead one, followed by Breaking Bad, which is the best of the bunch:
The Game of Thrones one is pretty great as well:
These seem to be a variation on the recut trailers meme, e.g. The Shining as a romantic comedy or Toy Story as a horror film. (via @aaroncoleman0)
New York Day is a film by Samuel Orr that crams a whole NYC day into about three and a half minutes.
Orr is using Kickstarter to raise funds to make a longer version (~20 min.) of the film. (via @dhmeyer)
This is a clip from Samsara, a 2011 film directed by Ron Fricke, who was the director of photography for Koyaanisqatsi. The chicken picker machine hoovering up chickens and depositing them into drawers is one of the most dystopian things I’ve ever seen.
The whole film doesn’t look this depressing, but this short clip really gives full visual meaning to the mass production of food. (via @colossal)
While ice climbing in Wales, Mark Roberts gets hit by some ice and falls more than 100 feet…and his helmet cam caught the whole thing.
He was not seriously injured but that fall went on for way longer than I expected. (via @DavidGrann)
9 minutes and thirty nine seconds of Ron Swanson dancing to Daft Punk. Years from now this video could be the basis of a religion.
Broadcasters are starting to experiment with using footage taken from cameras worn by in-game referees. Here’s footage from a rugby ref’s vantage point:
And from a hockey ref:
PRIDE Fighting Championships has been using ref cams since at least 2004. Also: roller derby, girls high school basketball, and paintball. (thx, david)
Poignant video profile of Ralph Baer, the inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console gaming system. He’s still inventing at age 90.
Your endurance challenge for today: see how much of this video of the final round of the 2012 O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship you can watch before flinging your computing device across the room.
For bonus points, see if you can get through some of the comments…they are PUNishing. (Gah, I’ve been infected.)
This is a clip from the BBC series Edwardian Farm that shows how rope was made in the olden days.
The entire series is available to watch online.
Here’s a video that shows how scientists believe the human face has changed over the past 7 million years:
I don’t want to stand in the way of all science, but I am completely on board with the banning of all research into the creation of a dancing dog robot that throws cinder blocks with ease. Oops, I am too late. And now this is happening.
This place isn’t too far from me in Boston, so if anyone wants to meet up for a little Terminator 2 style future saving, let me know.
Since the Sun moves relative to the other stars around it at about 45,000 miles/hr, if you change the frame of reference from the Sun to the surrounding stellar system, you get planetary motion that looks something like this:
I would take this video with a grain of salt though, especially when it says things like “the Sun is like a comet, dragging the planets in its wake”…the planets don’t lag behind the Sun. Better to think of the thing as a conceptual schematic: resembling reality but not really accurate. (via @pieratt)
Update: There’s a new version of the video that addresses some of the concerns raised about the first video:
(thx, john)
Update: Phil Plait from Bad Astronomy has posted a pretty thorough takedown of this video.
However, there’s a problem with it: It’s wrong. And not just superficially; it’s deeply wrong, based on a very wrong premise. While there are some useful visualizations in it, I caution people to take it with a galaxy-sized grain of salt.
And the TED Prize (“awarded to an extraordinary individual with a creative and bold vision to spark global change”) this year goes to this guy, who invented a machine for separating Oreos:
Congratulations! (thx, brad)
Tony McCabe demonstrates how to jump on eggs without breaking them.
If this is what Britain was like in the 70s, it’s possible that Monty Python’s Flying Circus was a documentary. (via @scottlamb)
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