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This robot with a chainsaw for an arm makes a few cuts into a log and, voila, chairs.
More info here. What’s so terrifying about furniture making? Now imagine this robot with tiny chainsaws on its arms leading a army of BigDog-mounted noodle-slicing robots and sleep well tonight, suckers! (via @curiousoctopus)
The People are Awesome videos usually come out in October (2010, 2011), but I’ll accept it a couple months late. Four and a half minutes of people doing awesome things.
(via ★acoleman)
One of Sean Wilson’s chicken laid a huge egg and when he cracked it open, it contained another egg.
Not even a hoax! As the curator of the egg collection at London’s Natural History Museum explains, the double egg is rare but real and results from a fully formed egg being pushed back into the ovary, where another egg forms around it. Here’s another double egg and a report of a Texan double egg. (via colossal)
Now that the giant squid has been observed alive in its natural habitat (the video footage is rather underwhelming IMO):
it’s the perfect time to re-read David Grann’s 2004 piece about giant squid hunters.
O’Shea is one of the few people in the world who have succeeded in keeping not only coastal but also deep-sea squid alive in captivity. Unlike an octopus, which, as he put it, “you can’t kill, no matter how hard you try,” a squid is highly sensitive to its environment. Accustomed to living in a borderless realm, a squid reacts poorly when placed in a tank, and will often plunge, kamikaze-style, into the walls, or cannibalize other squid.
In 2001, during a monthlong expedition at sea, O’Shea caught a cluster of paralarval giant squid in his nets, but by the time he reached the docks all of them had died. He was so distraught that he climbed into the tank, in tears, and retrieved the corpses himself. “I had spent every day, every hour, trying to find the paralarvae, and then they died in my grasp,” he told me. For two years, he was so stricken by his failure that he refused to mount another expedition. “I knew if I failed again I would be finished,” he recalled. “Not just scientifically but physically and emotionally.”
He couldn’t stop wondering, though, about what had happened in the tank. His wife, Shoba, a computer scientist who was born in India, told me that sometimes in the middle of an unrelated conversation he would suddenly say, “What did I do wrong?” O’Shea became determined to correct what he called “my fatal mistake,” and began a series of painstaking experiments on other species of juvenile deep-sea squid. He would subtly alter the conditions of captivity: tank size, intensity of light, oxygen levels, salinity. He discovered that the tank in which he had stored his paralarvae during the expedition had two lethal flaws: it had a rectangular shape, which, for some reason, caused the squid to sink to the bottom and die; and its walls were made of polyethylene, a plastic compound that, it turns out, is toxic to deep-sea squid. “Knowing what I know now, I feel like a fool,” he said. “It was like walking them to their execution.”
I enjoyed every minute of this behind-the-scenes piece by Stephen Rodrick on the making of Paul Schrader’s The Canyons.
Lindsay Lohan moves through the Chateau Marmont as if she owns the place, but in a debtor-prison kind of way. She’ll soon owe the hotel $46,000. Heads turn subtly as she slinks toward a table to meet a young producer and an old director. The actress’s mother, Dina Lohan, sits at the next table. Mom sweeps blond hair behind her ear and tries to eavesdrop. A few tables away, a distinguished-looking middle-aged man patiently waits for the actress. He has a stack of presents for her.
Here’s a scene from the movie:
By now, you’ve seen a billion instances of people taking daily pictures of themselves and editing them into time lapse movies set to music. Well, this one is a bit different. It features an unhappy young man who, over the course of three years, transitions into a more confident and happy young woman.
This video makes me happy. And there are dozens of other examples and tutorials on YouTube of people switching sexes. What a boon for those who struggle with their sex/gender to be able to see other people who are going through and have gone through similar situations.
Take footage of NFL players, coaches, and officials talking, dub it poorly with alternate dialogue, and you get a bit of genius.
Let’s not beat around the bush: this is the best thing ever. (via @gavinpurcell)
Some YouTube commenters claim to have found the cameraman in the TV footage, looking out the window at around 13:03. This video is posted with healthy skepticism, but also an unbridled joy in amazing timing. (via digg)
Update: Andy Baio synched the two videos up and it seems legit.
The owner of this cockatiel taught it how to sing dubstep.
Nice try, bird, but this is still the best dubstep video of all time. (via stellar)
Keith Ratliff posted dozens of videos showcasing high-powered guns on his popular YouTube channel, FPSRussia. Last week, he was found dead with a single shot to the head, surrounded by several guns…but not the gun that killed him.
The news, coming amid a national debate about gun control, rippled across the blogs and social networking sites where his videos were popular. Tributes on Facebook and Twitter came from fans stunned that such a well-armed expert had not been able to defend himself.
“For him not to pull out that gun and try to defend himself, he had to feel comfortable around somebody,” his wife, Amanda, told a television channel in Lexington, Ky., where he used to live. “Either that or he was ambushed.”
Here’s a FPSRussia video showing off a fully automatic shotgun that can shoot 300 rounds per minute even after being submerged in water:
And this drone with a machine gun on it is terrifying:
(via the atlantic)
Update: Just to clarify because I’m getting a bunch of mail about it, Ratliff was a gun nut and the owner of that YouTube channel, but he was not the person in all those videos…he was more like the producer/camera operator.
Also, that quadricopter machine gun thing is CGI and a commercial for a video game. Soon enough though.
This f*cking guy shows you the f*cking pool, the f*cking ice cream bar, the f*cking ocean, and every other f*cking thing on the ship.
(via @nickkokonas)
This is a clever use of a GoPro camera…attached to the slide of a trombone and pointed back at the player.
And thus the motion is timed perfectly to the music…reminds me of Michel Gondry’s video for Star Guitar in that way. (via @dens)
If you read the piece on pickpockets in the New Yorker last week (and if not, I encourage you to), you’ve got to check out this video they made of Apollo Robbins taking all sorts of stuff from Adam Green, who plays the bewildered NYer writer part perfectly. Way better than the YT video I embedded last week.
Every evening at 10pm, students living in the Flogsta neighborhood of Uppsala, Sweden stick their heads out the window and scream. No one knows how it started, but most accounts say it began in the 1970s and has been going on every night since.
(thx, alex / reddit)
Tommy Edison shows how he uses Instagram on the iPhone.
So we’ll just take a picture of the crew. Why I’m holding the thing up to my face like I can look through the thing is beyond me, but here we go.
His Instagram feed is available here. (via ★precipice)
This is a silent film from 1926 that shows a call coming in to a Manhattan fire station, a first-person POV shot from the chief’s car as he responds to a call, and then some firemen fighting a blaze consuming a storage warehouse.
The driving through the crowded streets of Manhattan starts at about 2:10 with the BAD TRAFFIC JAMS FORCE USE OF SIDEWALKS title card coming soon after at 2:51. The film is sped up but still, the chief dodges all manner of roadsters, horse-drawn wagons, trolleys, buses, automobiles, and other assorted conveyances.
See also a trip down San Francisco’s Market Street in 1906. (via @djacobs)
NASA astronaut Sunita Williams, who has spent almost a year in space, gives us a 25-minute tour of the International Space Station. AKA the nerdiest episode of MTV Cribs.
(via @durietz)
In the latest issue of the New Yorker, Adam Green profiles Apollo Robbins, by most accounts the world’s best pickpocket. How he goes about engaging his prey is fascinating:
One day, over lunch at a Vietnamese restaurant in a Las Vegas strip mall, Robbins demonstrated his method on me. “When I shake someone’s hand, I apply the lightest pressure on their wrist with my index and middle fingers and lead them across my body to my left,” he said, showing me. “The cross-body lead is actually a move from salsa dancing. I’m finding out what kind of a partner they’re going to be, and I know that if they follow my lead I can do whatever I want with them.”
Robbins needs to get close to his victims without setting off alarm bells. “If I come at you head-on, like this,” he said, stepping forward, “I’m going to run into that bubble of your personal space very quickly, and that’s going to make you uncomfortable.” He took a step back. “So, what I do is I give you a point of focus, say a coin. Then I break eye contact by looking down, and I pivot around the point of focus, stepping forward in an arc, or a semicircle, till I’m in your space.” He demonstrated, winding up shoulder to shoulder with me, looking up at me sideways, his head cocked, all innocence. “See how I was able to close the gap?” he said. “I flew in under your radar and I have access to all your pockets.”
Hard to choose just one passage from this story, so I will also include this bit about attention:
But physical technique, Robbins pointed out, is merely a tool. “It’s all about the choreography of people’s attention,” he said. “Attention is like water. It flows. It’s liquid. You create channels to divert it, and you hope that it flows the right way.”
Robbins uses various metaphors to describe how he works with attention, talking about “surfing attention,” “carving up the attentional pie,” and “framing.” “I use framing the way a movie director or a cinematographer would,” he said. “If I lean my face close in to someone’s, like this” — he demonstrated — “it’s like a closeup. All their attention is on my face, and their pockets, especially the ones on their lower body, are out of the frame. Or if I want to move their attention off their jacket pocket, I can say, ‘You had a wallet in your back pocket — is it still there?’ Now their focus is on their back pocket, or their brain just short-circuits for a second, and I’m free to steal from their jacket.”
This routine is a pretty good demonstration of how Robbins diverts attention for the purpose of theft.
It’s 2013 and I’m hopelessly in love. With this blooper reel from season two of Star Trek: The Next Generation.
As we’ve previously discussed, many Russian vehicles are equipped with dashboard video cameras. The other day, one such dashcam caught a plane crash on video:
See also driving in Russia.
In a clip from an old stand-up routine, Chris Rock advocates for bullet control.
I think all bullets should cost $5,000.
(via @joffley)
President Obama pledged to use “whatever power this office holds to engage my fellow citizens, from law enforcement, to mental health professionals, to parents and educators, in an effort aimed at preventing more tragedies like this” in his speech last night at a prayer vigil in Newtown, CT.
A full transcript of the speech is available.
And then there were the scenes of the schoolchildren helping one another, holding each other, dutifully following instructions in the way that young children sometimes do, one child even trying to encourage a grownup by saying, “I know karate, so it’s OK; I’ll lead the way out.”
As a community, you’ve inspired us, Newtown. In the face of indescribable violence, in the face of unconscionable evil, you’ve looked out for each other. You’ve cared for one another. And you’ve loved one another. This is how Newtown will be remembered, and with time and God’s grace, that love will see you through.
But we as a nation, we are left with some hard questions. You know, someone once described the joy and anxiety of parenthood as the equivalent of having your heart outside of your body all the time, walking around.
With their very first cry, this most precious, vital part of ourselves, our child, is suddenly exposed to the world, to possible mishap or malice, and every parent knows there’s nothing we will not do to shield our children from harm. And yet we also know that with that child’s very first step and each step after that, they are separating from us, that we won’t — that we can’t always be there for them.
They will suffer sickness and setbacks and broken hearts and disappointments, and we learn that our most important job is to give them what they need to become self-reliant and capable and resilient, ready to face the world without fear. And we know we can’t do this by ourselves.
It comes as a shock at a certain point where you realize no matter how much you love these kids, you can’t do it by yourself, that this job of keeping our children safe and teaching them well is something we can only do together, with the help of friends and neighbors, the help of a community and the help of a nation.
And in that way we come to realize that we bear responsibility for every child, because we’re counting on everybody else to help look after ours, that we’re all parents, that they are all our children.
This is our first task, caring for our children. It’s our first job. If we don’t get that right, we don’t get anything right. That’s how, as a society, we will be judged.
And by that measure, can we truly say, as a nation, that we’re meeting our obligations?
Can we honestly say that we’re doing enough to keep our children, all of them, safe from harm?
Can we claim, as a nation, that we’re all together there, letting them know they are loved and teaching them to love in return?
Can we say that we’re truly doing enough to give all the children of this country the chance they deserve to live out their lives in happiness and with purpose?
I’ve been reflecting on this the last few days, and if we’re honest with ourselves, the answer’s no. We’re not doing enough. And we will have to change. Since I’ve been president, this is the fourth time we have come together to comfort a grieving community torn apart by mass shootings, fourth time we’ve hugged survivors, the fourth time we’ve consoled the families of victims.
Mr Rogers’ advice on how to talk to children about tragic news events is worth a read for parents and, well, everyone really.
When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, “Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.” To this day, especially in times of “disaster,” I remember my mother’s words and I am always comforted by realizing that there are still so many helpers — so many caring people in this world.
Here’s Rogers talking about his mother’s advice:
I have a lot more respect for painters now. Who knew it was such an intense sensory workout?
This is taken from a longer video piece with less screaming that will be on display at the Walker Art Center in 2013.
Inspired by Bob Ross-style instructional television programs, the Seoul-based artist says “the theme of this video is the existential nature of contemporary art (and culture) as well as of artists.” Characteristic of Beom’s deadpan humor, the narrator’s demonstration shows how to apply paint while engaged in “a long scream that sounds like when you’re hurt”; “a scream induced by psychological pain”; and “a more pained, wronged, and regretful scream.”
(via ★spavis)
In this video, Bo Jackson’s historic quarter-long run against the Patriots is recreated on Tecmo Super Bowl almost exactly. I tried to figure out how many yards he actually ran, but I can’t count that high or fast. Apparently a Tecmo quarter lasts about 1:54 when the clock is allowed to run.
See also, You Don’t Know Bo, the just aired ESPN 30 for 30 documentary. (via @sportsguy33)
So this is the new trailer for the new Superman movie (Man of Steel), which should not be confused with the old trailer for the new Superman movie or with a trailer from the old new Superman movie or with a trailer from the old Superman movie.
What I am confused about is whether this trailer is any good. On one hand, it seems really really good but also really crappy at the same time. Tell me what to feel, Superman!
As we saw yesterday in this compilation, a lot of vehicular bad behavior is caught on camera. Marina Galperina explored why Russians get into so many traffic accidents and where all the video footage comes from.
Dash-cam footage is the only real way to substantiate your claims in the court of law. Forget witnesses. Hit and runs are very common and insurance companies notoriously specialize in denying claims. Two-way insurance coverage is very expensive and almost completely unavailable for vehicles over ten years old-the drivers can only get basic liability. Get into a minor or major accident and expect the other party to lie to the police or better yet, flee after rear-ending you. Since your insurance won’t pay unless the offender is found and sued, you’ll see dash-cam videos of post hit and run pursuits for plate numbers.
And sometimes drivers back up or bump their pre-dented car into yours. It used to be a mob thing, with the accident-staging specialists working in groups. After the “accident,” the offending driver — often an elderly lady — is confronted by a crowd of “witnesses,” psychologically pressured and intimidated to pay up cash on the spot. Since the Age of the Dash-cam, hustle has withered from a flourishing enterprise to a dying trade, mainly thriving in the provinces where dash-cams are less prevalent.
Here’s a video compilation of scam attempts foiled by cameras. (thx, andrew & sam)
This video is 13 minutes of traffic accidents in Russia and totally amazing.
Question #1: Why did I end up watching all 13 minutes of this video? A: Because it’s one literally unbelievable thing after another.
Question #2: Was that a jet? A: Yes! And a helicopter.
Question #3: Why does everyone in Russia record their drives? A: Because this sort of thing happens all the time?
Question #4: I didn’t know a powerline could flip a car over. A: Not a question, but yeah, WTF!?
Question #5: Have you ever seen so many tires fall off of cars before? A: No. No I haven’t.
Revisiting a classic today: a cover of Snoop Dogg’s Gin and Juice by The Gourds.
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