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From The Royal Observatory, Greenwich, a short video explanation of how scientists measure the size of the Universe.
This is science for the layperson done right…PBS or the Discovery Channel would have inflated this into a 30-minute show. (via ★interesting)
I was trying to find out exactly what is happening in this video when I stumbled on the below video, and then it was off to the races. 30 minutes later, if they ever want to make a Shame-like movie about heavy tool machine porn, I’m available and sufficiently prepped. My brain about melted when I realized the drill wasn’t spinning.
The other video is 6 minutes of a blade cutting through steel with a soundtrack by the London Philharmonic, and it’s quite meditative to watch. (via @chrissandoval)
Here’s another slow motion drill with sparkles. Cripes. It might be better.
If you spend a lot of time in bars, you’ve probably seen some of these bets before, but if you haven’t…
The tomato in a glass bit is pretty clever. My favorite bet of this type is seeing who can empty a 2-liter bottle faster. The trick is to swirl the water to create a vortex in the bottle. That way, the air can quickly enter the bottle through the middle of the vortex while the water shoots out around the edge…no slow glug glug glug. (via ★interesting)
Robert Hodgin gave a talk at the recent Eyeo Festival for which he “created 12 new projects”. The thing is, any single one of these projects would stand out on a coding artist’s portfolio and Hodgin created all twelve for a conference talk. My favorite of the bunch is this demonstration of how he created the stars for the Planetary app.
You’re not going to believe me, but this mushroom processing machine is pretty fascinating. There’s lots of deceptively simple engineering to mechanically manipulate the mushrooms…the auto-alignment and size-sorting bits are especially interesting.
Plus there’s a trance soundtrack. See also how crayons are made, the robotic pancake sorter, and the salami sorting robot. (via @kdern)
PBS teamed up with Symphony of Science’s John Boswell for this remix, “the first in a series of PBS icons remixed.” I’ve listened to this 5 times.
You can grow ideas in the garden of your mind. (via sly oyster)
Venus passed in front of the Sun yesterday for the last time until 2117. The transit took almost seven hours but this NASA video shows it in under a minute.
Lovely video of skateboarding tricks in super slow motion. It was filmed at 1000fps.
Uncommon skateboarding tricks in super slow motion. Filmed at 1,000 frames per second with a Redlake N3 high speed camera. Since skateboarding trick names are defined by common usage and these tricks are not very common, some of them don’t have well-established names. So here are my best guesses as to what they should be called:
Kyle McPherson — nollie dolphin flip (AKA nollie forward flip)
Cameron Carmichael — backside 180 casper flip (?) (or bs 180 hospital flip)
Jerrod Skorupski — nollie heelflip bs body varial
David Case - nollie 360 shuv underflip (AKA nerd flip)
David Case - frontside shuv underflip (AKA kiwi flip)
Dustin Blauvelt - hardflip pretzel
Dustin Blauvelt - Merlin twist (switch front foot impossible fs 180)
Dustin Blauvelt - nollie heelflip indy grab
Shane Anderson - early grab frontside 180 fingerflip (?)
Jovan Pierson - pressure hardflip (?)
Jovan Pierson - ?? I don’t know what this is, I just call it a Jovan flip
Erick Schaefer - backside pop shuv underflip
Tim Hamp - Nollie pressure hardflip (?)
(thx, jay)
The Tacoma Narrows Bridge was open for about four months in 1940 before a steady wind set it twisting and ultimately tore the bridge apart.
Damn Interesting has a detailed account of the bridge’s short history and demise.
After opening, the new bridge shortly came to be known as “Galloping Gertie,” so named by white-knuckled motorists who braved the writhing bridge on windy days. Even in a light breeze, Gertie’s undulations were known to produce waves up to ten feet tall. Sometimes these occurrences were brief, and other times they lasted for hours at a time. Numerous travelers shunned the route altogether to avoid becoming seasick, whereas many thrill-seeking souls paid the 75-cent toll to traverse Gertie during her more spirited episodes.
The 99% Invisible podcast devoted a show to the collapse of the bridge.
(via sarah pavis)
File this one under what fast looks like: motorcycle racers reach speeds in excess of 200 mph as they navigate the tiny curved roads of the Isle of Man during the Isle of Man TT race. The crash at 1:30, which is insane by the way, involves a stone wall, sheep, and was filmed cinematically from a helicopter.
(thx, @garymross)
Many of you liked the slinky on the treadmill video. This slow-motion video of Alan Rickman drinking tea isn’t quite as compelling, but it’s not bad either. Wait for the drop around 1:22 before judging.
The original video without the dramatic sound is here. (More info.)
There’s a driving technique called heel-and-toe where the driver uses all three pedals (brake, clutch, throttle) at once to make deceleration smoother, especially in the turns.
Heel-toe or heel-and-toe double-declutching is used before entry into a turn while a vehicle is under braking, preparing the transmission to be in the optimal range of rpm to accelerate out of the turn. One benefit of downshifting before entering a turn is to eliminate the jolt to the drivetrain, or any other unwanted dynamics. The jolt will not upset the vehicle as badly when going in a straight line, but the same jolt while turning may upset the vehicle enough to cause loss of control if it occurs after the turn has begun. Another benefit is that “heel-and-toeing” allows the driver to downshift at the last moment before entering the turn, after starting braking and the car has slowed, so the engine speed will not be high enough when the lower gear is engaged.
Here is a video of Formula One great Ayrton Senna demonstrating the techique in a Honda NSX. You’ll note he’s wearing a button-down shirt, dress pants, Italian loafers, and no helmet while burying the speedometer on his way around the track.
It’s a bit difficult to understand from the video what Senna is actually doing…this step-by-step video shows the heel-and-toe technique more clearly. (thx, micah)
With the LA Kings, LA Lakers, and LA Clippers all in the playoffs this year, the Staples Center has been pretty busy. Between May 17th and May 20th, there were 6 games. The crew at the Staples Center has to break the arena down between every game, what with all the different teams and sports. Watching the set up is pretty neat, and since no one would watch a four-day-long video, they’ve been kind enough to share a time lapse. Watch the arena go from Kings to Lakers to Clippers to Lakers to Kings to Clippers. My favorite parts are the pre-game introductions and that they lower the jumbotron every night.
(via Quickish)
I had no idea a Slinky’s adventures on a treadmill could be so dramatic or affecting. The stumble at ~1:43 is the most harrowing scene in film so far in 2012.
(via stellar)
Dirk van der Kooij is a designer who uses a low-resoution 3D printer of sorts to print out plastic furniture with plastic recovered from recycled refrigerators.
Images of the finished product are available on his web site as are the chairs themselves, for €840. (via @curiousoctopus)
If you’re attempting to enjoy beer and are without your bottle opener but you have your chainsaw, this will come in handy:
Didn’t spill a drop! See also opening a beer bottle with a piece of paper, opening a beer bottle with a cigarette lighter, and opening a beer bottle with an iPad power brick.
In the spirit of conservation, Joe Smith shows us how to use a paper towel properly.
(via df)
A bunch of cute kids review Bangarang by Skrillex.
What is dupstep?
I’ve never heard of that.
Daddy loves dubstep.
A couple of the kids were asked what “the drop” meant:
I think the drop is when you drop being sensible.
When it gets really quiet and then it gets really really really loud. BANG!
(via ★interesting)
The person who made Wes Anderson From Above and Tarantino From Below has put together a supercut of distinct sounds from Darren Aronofsky’s films.
(via ★interesting)
In this short film by Sarah Klein and Tom Mason, Ken Burns shares his thoughtful perspective on what makes a good story.
Abraham Lincoln wins the Civil War and then he decides he’s got enough time to go to the theatre. That’s a good story. When Thomas Jefferson said “we hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal”, he owned a hundred human beings and never saw the hypocrisy, never saw the contradiction, and more importantly never saw fit in his lifetime to free any one of them. That’s a good story.
Over at the Atlantic, Kasia Cieplak-Mayr von Baldegg has an interview with the filmmakers.
This time lapse covers more than 1000 years and shows the shifting national borders of Europe.
There’s also a slowed-down version that shows the year and some annotation of events. (via ★interesting)
Update: The originals got taken down but the company responsible for the historical mapping software put up similar versions that I’ve embedded/linked above. But the new versions are worse and not quite so fantastic. Why is that always the case? (thx, andrew)
As a tribute to Adam Yauch of the Beastie Boys, James Winters and his family made this parody of the video Sabotage with kids playing all the roles.
Charming, although I might have gone with squirt guns instead of the more realistic item.
(via @moth)
Taken from the Studio Stories series included on the Blu-ray versions of Toy Story 1 & 2, here’s a short story about how Toy Story 2 was almost erased before the film could be rendered for theaters.
Woody’s hat disappeared. And then his boots disappeared. And then as we kept checking, he disappeared entirely. Woody’s gone.
(via tested)
Update: Over at Quora, Oren Jacob (the guy in the video) explains in more detail what happened.
First, it wasn’t multiple terabytes of information. Neither all the rendered frames, nor all the data necessary to render those frames in animation, model, shaders, set, and lighting data files was that size back then.
A week prior to driving across the bridge in a last ditch attempt to recover the show (depicted pretty accurately in the video above) we had restored the film from backups within 48 hours of the /bin/rm -r -f *, run some validation tests, rendered frames, somehow got good pictures back and no errors, and invited the crew back to start working. It took another several days of the entire crew working on that initial restoral to really understand that the restoral was, in fact, incomplete and corrupt. Ack. At that point, we sent everyone home again and had the come-to-Jesus meeting where we all collectively realized that our backup software wasn’t dishing up errors properly (a full disk situation was masking them, if my memory serves), our validation software also wasn’t dishing up errors properly (that was written very hastily, and without a clean state to start from, was missing several important error conditions), and several other factors were compounding our lack of concrete, verifiable information.
The only prospect then was to roll back about 2 months to the last full backup that we thought might work. In that meeting, Galyn mentioned she might have a copy at her house. So we went home to get that machine, and you can watch the video for how that went…
From British Council film, a short film from 1945 that shows how a bicycle is designed and manufactured.
(via stellar)
Lorena Galliot came to NYC from France and didn’t know what a hipster was. So she took to the streets of Williamsburg to find out.
(thx, phillip)
“TapTronic is a progressive fusion of Irish dance and electronic music.” Dancing starts at 40 seconds.
(via The Daily What)
86-year-old Brendon Grimshaw has lived alone on a tiny island in the Seychelles since 1962. He bought it for £8000 and has spent those years introducing trees and 120 giant tortoises back to the island.
(via ★interesting-links)
From PBS Off Book, a quick look at the thinking behind the opening titles for TV shows and movies, including Zombieland, Mad Men, and Se7en.
See also Art of the Title and A Brief History of Title Design. (via devour)
This might be the coolest thing a sitting President has ever done. Aside from, maybe, freeing the slaves or The New Deal or winning WWII.
Update: And an amazingly depressing excerpt from a speech Obama gave earlier in the day:
But we only finished paying off our student loans — check this out, all right, I’m the President of the United States — we only finished paying off our student loans about eight years ago.
If you mix calcium carbide and water, it produces acetylene. Acetylene is extremely flammable and can launch 55-gallon drums into the air when ignited.
(via ★aaroncohen)
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