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Frans Hofmeester filmed his daughter Lotte once a week for the past twelve years and produced this time lapse film. We’ve seen this kind of thing before (Kalina, etc.) but the use of short snippets of video instead of still photos adds something.
Hofmeester has also filmed his son in the same manner for the past nine years. (thx, david)
Update: Lotte recently turned 16.
(via @Raaphorst)
This is an episode of Mad Men, incompletely downloaded from BitTorrent.
The video captures an episode of the popular TV show in the act of being shared by thousands of users on bittorent. The video simultaneously acts as a visualisation of bittorrent traffic and the practice of filesharing and is an aesthetically beautiful by product of the bittorrent process as the pieces of the original file are rearranged and reconfigured into a new transitory in-between state.
(via waxy)
This is great…BBC America made this promo of kids narrating the Planet Earth nature documentary in place of David Attenborough.
(via boing boing)
Shot with a Phantom Flex at 2500 frames per second, this video shows stupid things happening in super slow motion, including Coke bottle & chainsaw and flour and candle. And lots of fireworks.
I was completely unprepared for what happened with the microwave and the bottle of red wine. (via devour)
This video is a visualization of the how ships moved goods and people around the world from the mid-18th century to the mid-19th century.
Here’s more on how it was done.
This shows mostly Spanish, Dutch, and English routes — they are surprisingly constant over the period (although some empires drop in and out of the record), but the individual voyages are fun. And there are some macro patterns — the move of British trade towards India, the effect of the American Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, and so on.
There are times in the video when a single nation dominates all of the shipping traffic…the British in the early 1800s and the Dutch from the mid 1830s on.
Primer is one of my favorite films of the past ten years and is available on YouTube in its entirety.
The first episode of Girls, an eagerly awaited HBO series by executive producer Judd Apatow and writer/director Lena Dunham, is available for free on YouTube (HBO disabled embedding for some dumb reason). HBO plans to do this with Veep next week as well.
Reporting for Marketplace, Rob Schmitz shows how iPads are made by Foxconn workers in Shenzhen.
(via daring fireball)
I don’t think this has anything to do with the actual invention of the football helmet, so consider this a more hilarious alternate history. Watch as the inventor of a new type of safer helmet gets kicked in the head, repeatedly bonked in the noggin with a baseball bat, and runs himself into a wall, over and over again.
(via ★dunstan)
In this video, Erlend Lavik compares the relatively spare visual style of The Wire with that of other TV programs.
(via @uxprinciples)
Caine is nine years old, lives in LA, and built his own arcade out of cardboard boxes in the back of his father’s auto parts store.
You’ve go to watch until at least 3:10 when he explains how to check the validity of the “Fun Pass” using the calculators located on the front of each game. So so so good!
Alive Inside is a documentary that follows social worker Dan Cohen as he discovers that music can “awaken” people suffering from degenerative memory loss (Alzheimer’s, etc.). Here’s a clip in which a man goes from a near-coma state to talking about his favorite songs after listening to music for awhile on headphones.
(via ★swissmiss)
I did not know how much I had missed A Show with Ze Frank until I just watched the first episode of the new series:
I just caught myself waving my hands in the air. Sing it, Brother Ze.
A collection of scenes featuring movie stars before they were stars…like Nicolas Cage in Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Renee Zellweger in Dazed and Confused.
They missed one of my favorites…James Earl Jones as Lieutenant Zogg in Dr. Strangelove. (via devour)
Since Google released the video for their augmented reality glasses the other day, people have been busy making videos that show a more realistic (or cynical) portrayal of how the glasses might work. Here are a couple of the better ones. First a version of the glasses with Google ads:
And this one gives new meaning to the phrase “banner blindness”:
While not specifically about Google Glasses, this concept video by Keiichi Matsuda is also worth a look:
I will also direct your attention to the second episode of Black Mirror, a UK drama series by Charlie Brooker.
A satire on entertainment shows and our insatiable thirst for distraction set in a sarcastic version of a future reality. In this world, everyone must cycle on exercise bikes, arranged in cells, in order to power their surroundings and generate currency for themselves called Merits. Everyone is dressed in a grey tracksuit and has a “doppel”, a virtual avatar inspired by Miis and Xbox 360 Avatars that people can customise with clothes, for a fee of merits. Everyday activities are constantly interrupted by advertisements that cannot be skipped or ignored without financial penalty.
(via jake & stellar)
Jim Henson made this pitch video to sell The Muppet Show to CBS. It starts a bit slow but stick with it.
There’s also a scene with Kermit right at the end which unfortunately didn’t make it into the clip.
After Leo’s powerful speech, Kermit appears from off-screen against a CBS logo and shrugs, “What the hell was that all about?”
And just because, here’s the opening theme song of The Muppet Show. (via @gavinpurcell)
Google has shared a bit about their augmented reality glasses project (more at the NY Times).
A video released by Google on Wednesday, which can be seen below, showed potential uses for Project Glass. A man wanders around the streets of New York City, communicating with friends, seeing maps and information, and snapping pictures. It concludes with him video-chatting with a girlfriend as the sun sets over the city. All of this is seen through the augmented-reality glasses.
The glasses look a little strange, like Geordi La Forge’s visor…they might go over a little better if they looked more Warby Parkerish.
The Intimacy 2.0 fashion garments become see-through when the wearer’s heart rate increases.
I think my pants are broken. They should be fully transparent at the moment… (via ★warrenellis)
Now available in its entirety on YouTube, a 95-minute documentary on physicist Richard Feynman called No Ordinary Genius.
The excellent film on Andrew Wiles’ search for the solution to Fermat’s Last Theorem is available as well (watch the first two minutes and you’ll be hooked).
This is expertly done…a panoramic time lapse view out the rear window in Rear Window, stitched together from scenes in the film.
More information on how it was made. (via ★interesting)
Kinect Star Wars has a Galactic Dance Off mode where you can “dance to modern songs remixed with Star Wars lyrics”. After watching 30 seconds of this, you may not be able to get “I’m Han Solo” out of your head. It features dance moves like “The Speeder”, “Chewie Hug”, and “Trash Compactor”.
Kind of amazing, but not surprising, that the Star Wars universe has come to this. As one YouTube commenter noted:
I just felt the death of Star Wars. It was as if millions of voices suddenly cried out in terror, and were suddenly silenced.
Here are some of the lyrics:
I’m feeling like a star,
you can’t stop my shine
I’m loving Cloud City,
my head’s in the skyI’m solo, I’m Han Solo,
I’m Han Solo.
I’m Han Solo. Solo.Yeah, I’m feeling good tonight,
Finally feeling free and it feels so right, oh.
Time to do the things I like,
Gonna see a Princess, everything’s all right, oh.No Jabba to answer to,
Ain’t a fixture in the palace zoo, no.
And since that carbonite’s off me
I’m livin’ life now that I’m free, yeah.Told me to get myself together
Now I got myself together, yeah.
Now I made it through the weather,
Better days are gonna get better.I’m so happy the carbonite is gone.
I’m movin’ on.
I’m so happy that it’s over now.
The pain is gone.I’m putting on my shades
to cover up my eyes
I’m jumpin’ in my ride,
I’m heading out tonightI’m solo, I’m Han Solo,
I’m Han Solo.
I’m Han Solo. Solo.I’m picking up my blaster,
put it on my side.
I’m jumpin’ in my Falcon
Wookie at my side.I’m solo, I’m Han Solo,
I’m Han Solo.
I’m Han Solo. Solo.
It’s at this point that Lando comes on and gets jiggy. Amazing. (via ★ironicsans)
If I hadn’t seen it on the official Emmentaler web site, I would have thought this video about cheese producers using geckos to produce better cheese was fake.
Pesky flies buzzing around our cows cause them stress. And this affects the quality of the milk. Which is why we quite simply put a gecko on our cows which gets rid of all these pesky flies — by eating them. The result is milk that is smoother, and cheese that is smoother too.
(thx, urs)
Update: sigh This is likely an early April Fools joke or whatever. INTERNET, I THOUGHT WE HAD AGREED THAT APRIL FOOLS IS STUPID AND FOR STUPID PEOPLE AND EVEN IF THAT IS NOT THE CASE TO CONFINE THE STUPIDITY TO ONE DAY, APRIL FIRST, AND NOT DO ANYTHING BEFOREHAND. God, I hate April Fools Day. Fuck you.
If you’ve never seen the early seasons of The Simpsons, a good way to catch up might be to watch this:
Just a quick hack to experiment what happens if you watch a lot of The Simpsons episodes at the same time. It just took 10 lines of code and a few hours of processing.
About the video:
-Top to bottom: each row shows a season (from season 1 to season 10)
-Left to right: each column shows an episode (from episode 1 to episode 13)A total of 130 episodes is displayed, framerate is 25fps, thumbnails have been captured at 80x60px
I also enjoyed this minimalist representation of the Simpson family in Lego:
(via @TrevorBaum)
I followed a link to this video from Twitter. “Oh, a small jumping robot,” I thought, “I bet it hops over a chair or something.” Not even close. Check this out:
Boston Dynamics is at it again…they did the Big Dog and cheetah robots as well. What are the odds that they change their name to Cyberdyne Systems in the next few years? (via @jcn)
Update: I did a quick calculation…if a 6-ft-tall human could jump as high as this robot relative to its height, they could jump 315 feet into the air, high enough to land on the roof of a 30-story building. (If you ignore the scaling issues, that is.)
A pair of recent info visualizations look as though they were painted by Vincent van Gogh. Wind Map shows the realtime flow of wind over the United States.
Perpetual Ocean is a NASA animation of ocean currents around the world.
Would be cool to see both of these rendered through Stamen’s watercolor filter.
Amazon announced recently that they bought a company named Kiva for $775 million. In cash. Kiva makes robots for fulfillment warehouses, of which Amazon has many. When I heard this news, I was all, robots are cool, but $775 million? But this short video on how the Kiva robots work made me a believer:
Also, pro-tip, it’s pronounced ro-butt. (via ★interesting)
A recent 45-minute documentary on Lionel Messi, which starts with his discovery in Argentina and runs through the end of last season.
It’s funny seeing Messi playing as a kid…the style is essentially the same, but in an even smaller package. (via @dens)
Allan Benton makes ham, some of the most delicious ham you’ll ever taste. In a pair of documentaries, Benton talks about his approach to life, business, and ham. The first is short, just a couple of minutes, and offers a taste of Benton’s daily schedule:
And this one is a more straightforward documentary look at Benton and his philosophy of ham.
Benton was interviewed by Esquire in 2009:
It’s not the dollar that motivates me so much as the compliment.
and profiled by Gourmet in 2006, in which Benton takes a trip to some of the NYC restaurants using his products:
David Chang of Momofuku, the iconoclastic ramen and small plates bar, is a stalwart. He has been using Allan’s bacon and ham since January 2005. When Allan and Sharon arrive, Chang beams. He genuflects. He stands tall by the stove and dishes a soup of cockles in a ham broth. He whisks a ham-skin-scented dashi into a pan of yellow grits, then tops them with a poached egg, crescents of ruby shrimp, and a thatch of crisp chopped bacon. And as Allan and Sharon fold their napkins, Chang exits the galley kitchen and joins them at the counter.
Allan, who has the countenance and intellect of a presidentialera Jimmy Carter, ducks his head and grins. He snags an afterthought of bacon with his chopsticks and drags it through a puddle of yolk. “I had no idea what you were doing with my bacon and ham,” he says, his face twisting upward, the corners of his mouth gone vertical. “This is amazing, just amazing, especially for a purebred Tennessee hillbilly.”
I get the Benton’s ham every time I go to Ssam Bar. You can order hams and bacon from Benton’s web site, which, with its odd URL (bentonscountryhams2.com) and default page title (“Network Solutions E-Commerce Web Site - Home”), is just as delightfully old timey as the rotary telephone in Benton’s office.
Lionel Messi has scored 234 goals in his short career (he’s only 24), making him the top goal scorer in all competitions for FC Barcelona. Here are all of them.
What strikes me about this video, aside from the crappy quality, is that the type of goals Messi scores are not generally what you see from other top scorers. Think of the booming balls of Ronaldo for instance, which may break the sound barrier on their way into the back of the net. Many of Messi’s goals often don’t look like much. They’re chips and slow rollers and even the fast ones aren’t that fast. But what’s apparent in watching goal after goal of his is that what Messi lacks in pace, he more than makes up with quickness, placement, and timing. It’s a bit mesmerising…I can only imagine how it feels as an opposing keeper to watch the same thing happening right in front of you. (via devour)
ps. I also enjoyed reading this piece by Simon Kuper on Barcelona’s Secret to Soccer Success.
Barcelona start pressing (hunting for the ball) the instant they lose possession. That is the perfect time to press because the opposing player who has just won the ball is vulnerable. He has had to take his eyes off the game to make his tackle or interception, and he has expended energy. That means he is unsighted, and probably tired. He usually needs two or three seconds to regain his vision of the field. So Barcelona try to dispossess him before he can give the ball to a better-placed teammate.
Bless me Father Sloan, for I have committed a radical act on the Internet. I have watched this slow motion video of ballet dancers four times and loved, yes, loved the display of precise power and grace contained therein.
And playing a remix of Radiohead’s Everything in Its Right Place over the video? I think they made this just for me.
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