Super Mario Bros for the Atari 2600
This seems like a Soviet version of Mario:
Get the game here. (via bb)
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kottke.org posts about video
Using a plastic bottle to separate eggs
This video of a woman using a plastic bottle to separate eggs is hypnotic when she transfers the yolk back and forth.
(via @carveslayer)
Typewriter accessory for the iPad
I love the mechanical nature of this typewriter accessory for the iPad.
(via df)
This Door Sounds Like Miles Davis
This door in a Chicago parking garage does a pretty good impression of Miles Davis.
(via ★whileseated)
The Little Games We Play
There are all these simple little games that people play using their surroundings: don’t step on the cracks, balance beam railroad tracks (or curbs), bicycle slalom, etc.
My game in the car was to use my hand to jump over driveways & telephone poles and swoop down into ditches…just a small flick of the wrist in the wind is all it took. Haven’t done that in years. I still occasionally play don’t step on the cracks and fight the daily urge to jump and touch. (via ★interesting)
Extreme slow motion photography at 1 trillion frames per second
At one trillion frames per second, you can see light move:
Crazy dancing
Excuse the dubstep if you must, but Marquese Scott is amazing. Previously.
(via the high definite)
Downton Abbey season three trailer
This is apparently taped off of someone’s television so the picture is blurry and the sound is not so good, but you get the gist.
Season three of Downton is set to start airing in the UK in September and in the US in January (for those who don’t know what BitTorrent is).
The Life and Death of Sports Fans
Team Spirit is a wonderful short film for ESPN by Errol Morris about the funerals of die-hard sports fans.
I love the Steelers fan laid out in a recliner under a Steelers blanket in front of a television with a Steelers game on as if “he just fell asleep watching the game”.
Watch a plane crash from inside the cockpit
This is a view of a small plane crashing into some trees from inside the cockpit (two of the passengers were filming with GoPro cameras). Although everyone survived, the pilot got pretty banged and bloodied so viewer beware.
After flying up into the mountains for a morning hike in the Frank Church River of No Return Wilderness we were planning on flying to a small mountain town for dinner. Due to warming temperatures there was an increase in density altitude and we had a hard time getting adequate lift. After taking off we hit an air pocket that made us rapidly loose altitude, pushing us down into the trees.
The plane just takes an amazingly long time to get off the ground…shouldn’t that have been a clue to the pilot that something wasn’t right? But the most fascinating part of the video is after the crash and they find the camera again and start filming themselves and each other…it’s just surreal, especially the part where one of them checks the pilot. (via ★mouser)
Magical heart rate monitor iPhone app
Using just the camera on your iPhone, the Cardiio app can accurately measure your heart rate. Here’s how it works:
Every time your heart beats, more blood is pumped into your face. This slight increase in blood volume causes more light to be absorbed, and hence less light is reflected from your face. Using sophisticated software, your iPhone’s front camera can track these tiny changes in reflected light that are not visible to the human eye and calculate your heart beat!
This video shows this process in action (with a short explanatory intro of the mathematical technique):
That is flat-out amazing. (via @delfuego)
Torpedo outfitted with HD camera swims with dolphins
Sometimes you’re out fishing for tuna and messing around with a torpedo with a GoPro camera on the end of it and a pod of dolphins comes along and you get swimming-with-dolphin shots that you haven’t even seen even from Planet Earth.
Takes a bit to get going…the good stuff starts around 1:40. (via @Colossal)
Evolution of the uneven bars in women’s gymnastics
The uneven parallel bars event has changed a lot over the years. For one thing, the bars used to be a lot closer together. And obviously the routines have gotten a lot harder.
Some of those moves in the 60s and 70s were sweet though. More grace and less raw power. (thx, doug)
The physics of cats always landing on their feet
In this slow-motion video, you can see how cats rotate themselves in the air while conserving angular momentum.
This is an interesting companion to yesterday’s owl rotation video. (via @stevenstrogatz)
This Owl Will Not Move His Head
If you move an owl’s body around in any direction, its head will remain remarkably still.
See also the eerie stillness of chicken heads. (via stellar)
Lights controlled by eye blinks
Neat project from Michal Kohút: glasses that turn the lights off whenever the person wearing them blinks.
The lights in the room are temporarily turned off whenever the person wearing the glasses blinks. It all happens so fast that the person wearing the glasses does not even notice the change.
(via @essl)
Only surviving film footage of Mark Twain
It was shot by Thomas Edison in 1909 about a year before Twain’s death.
(via the atlantic)
Homemade Olympic highlights
The WSJ is producing some homemade highlight videos of important Olympic events, sort of like what one of the Tenenbaum children might conjure up.
(via @davidfg)
Double trainbow! What does it mean?
Listen to this guy absolutely lose his shit while taking video of these two vintage trains. I’ve never heard someone so excited about anything before.
Fun fact: US train enthusiasts are sometime called “foamers”. (via @LTBelcher, who also came up with the genius “double trainbow” phrase)
Men throwing rocks with the other hand
There’s something about this video of men throwing rocks with their opposite hand. Maybe it’s the French music?
(via ★dunstan)
The View From Earth of Different Planets Replacing the Moon
What if Mars orbited the Earth at the same distance as the Moon…what would that look like? How about Neptune? Or Jupiter? Like this:
See also what the Earth would look like with Saturn’s rings. (via @stevenstrogatz)
Landing on Mars next week: the Curiosity rover
The rest of you can have your Olympics, but the early August event I’m most looking forward to is the arrival on Mars of the Curiosity rover. But NASA has had some problems in the past delivering payloads to Mars, so this is going to be somewhat of a nail-biter. If you haven’t seen it, Curiosity’s Seven Minutes of Terror is well worth watching to see the logistical challenge of getting the rover down to the surface.
Curiosity will hopefully land on the surface on Aug 6 at about 1:30 am ET.
The inspiration for Heath Ledger’s Joker
In 1979, singer Tom Waits appeared on The Don Lane Show in Australia. As you will soon be able to see (the action starts at 1:30), his appearance was likely the basis for Heath Ledger’s performance as The Joker in The Dark Knight.
Holy, uh, Batman, Batman!
How to rescue baby bears trapped in a dumpster
Some bear cubs climbed into a trash dumpster but were unable to get back out. Until, that is, the bravest person I have ever seen arrives on the scene.
(via @beep)
Fargo documentary
Minnesota Nice is a 25-minute documentary about the Coen brothers’ Fargo.
(via ★interesting)
Bob Ross remixed and autotuned
The second in a series of remixed PBS icons is out with a super positive Bob Ross track, again by Symphony of Science’s John Boswell. You may recall the brilliant Mr. Rogers remix from June. “Relax. Let it flow.” and “Believe you can do it because you can do it.”
And here are a couple profiles of Ross: Orlando Sentinel, 1990, and NY Times, 2001. Additionally, this NY Times, 1991 profile talks about how he didn’t sell his paintings despite how prolific he was.
Mr. Ross, who said he has produced nearly 30,000 paintings (the prolific Picasso did not match that record), does not sell his paintings or show his work in galleries; he has only had one retrospective — at the Minnetrista Cultural Center in Muncie, a town that boasts of the artist as an honorary native son. Mr. Ross said he had no desire for a major exhibit. “There are thousands of very, very talented artists who will never be known, even after they are dead,” he said. “Most painters want recognition, especially by their peers. I achieved that a long time ago with TV. I don’t need any more.”
The best of Ralph Wiggum
A selection of good Ralph Wiggum moments from The Simpsons.
Pretty good, except that they missed “I’m Idaho”, “This tastes like burning”, and “Oh boy, sleep! That’s where I’m a viking!” (via @erikmal)
What cricket looks like to Americans
You may remember a small chunk of this video from its brief appearance in Get Him to the Greek…happy to find the whole thing.
Live TV coverage of Apollo 11 landing and moon walk
The Apollo 11 Lunar Module landed on the surface of the Moon 43 years ago today. For the 40th anniversary of the landing in 2009, I put together a page where you can watch the original CBS News coverage of Walter Cronkite reporting on the Moon landing and the first Moon walk, synced to the present-day time. I’ve updated the page to work again this year: just open this page in your browser and the coverage will start playing at the proper time. Here’s the schedule:
Moon landing broacast start: 4:10:30 pm EDT on July 20
Moon landing shown: 4:17:40 pm EDT
Moon landing broadcast end: 4:20:15 pm EDT
{break}
Moon walk broadcast start: 10:51:27 pm EDT
First step on Moon: 10:56:15 pm EDT
Nixon speaks to the Eagle crew: approx 11:51:30 pm EDT
Moon walk broadcast end: 12:00:30 pm EDT on July 21
Here’s a post I wrote when I launched the project.
If you’ve never seen this coverage, I urge you to watch at least the landing segment (~10 min.) and the first 10-20 minutes of the Moon walk. I hope that with the old time TV display and poor YouTube quality, you get a small sense of how someone 40 years ago might have experienced it. I’ve watched the whole thing a couple of times while putting this together and I’m struck by two things: 1) how it’s almost more amazing that hundreds of millions of people watched the first Moon walk *live* on TV than it is that they got to the Moon in the first place, and 2) that pretty much the sole purpose of the Apollo 11 Moon walk was to photograph it and broadcast it live back to Earth.
Thanks to Dave Schumaker for the reminder.
Mr. Wizard is a dick
I laughed pretty hard at this video of Mr. Wizard being kinda jerky to the kids on his show.
(via ★interesting)
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