kottke.org posts about video
The challenge facing children of the last half generation of how to connect their LEGO pieces to their Lincoln Logs to their K’Nex has been solved by The Free Universal Construction Kit and access to a 3D printer. (Did they choose the name for the acronym?) Apparently Construx have fallen so out of favor the Kit does not wish to connect them with pieces of other species. They should have made the list on the strength of this theme song alone.
Old man says: We never had this problem when playing with wooden blocks. (via @djacobs)
Perhaps inspired by 500 Years of Female Portraits in Art or this hat throbber, art.com made a video in support of their new iPad app.
This video shows a fourth grader trying a bigger ski jump for the first time. If you’re a parent, I defy you to not tear up at least once while viewing. Oh, and the audio is essential.
Here’s what jumping rope looks like from the rope’s perspective:
(via ★interesting)
Eating a flower gives you the power to spit fireballs. Bullets have faces. Stars make you invincible. In addtion to being video game, maybe Super Mario Bros is a surrealist masterpiece.
You’ve likely seen other videos taken from cameras attached to the Space Shuttle and its boosters, but this is one is exceptional in two regards: it’s in HD and the sound has been remastered by Skywalker Sound.
Watch, and more importantly, listen to the whole thing…at the very end, you can see the second booster land a few hundred yards away from the first one. Who knew that being in space sounds like being trapped with a whale underwater in a tin pail? (via ★mouser)
Driverless cars is the type of innovation that may have unanticipated consequences. Sure, you can read Twitter while you’re being spirited around by your robotic car, but driverless cars may also end private car ownership. And what will intersections look like when used exclusively by driverless cars? Perhaps a little like this:
“There would be an intersection manager,” Stone says, “an autonomous agent directing traffic at a much finer-grain scale than just a red light for one direction and a green light for another direction.”
Because of this, we won’t need traffic lights at all (or stop signs, for that matter). Traffic will constantly flow, and at a rate that would probably unnerve the average human driver.
I wonder how people will abuse or have fun with driverless cars. Driver- and passenger-less car joyrides? Will they be hackable and if so, dangerous?
A dance crew performs while wearing Tron-like outfits in total darkness. It’s like a wearable laser light show.
(thx, tuomas)
The first episode of the second season of Put This On is out (as funded on Kickstarter). The episode takes place in NYC and features a segment on Lo Heads, a subculture of Polo Ralph Lauren enthusiasts.
With roots in 1980s street gangs, these Polo Ralph Lauren enthusiasts have made “aspirational apparel” a lifestyle. They once had to boost their Polo from stores and fight to keep it on the streets. Today, their culture is worldwide, promulgated by hip-hop. Their hero is Ralph Lauren — a working class New Yorker who understood that the fantastical power of style can be transformative. Dallas Penn from The Internets Celebrities, a dedicated Lo Head (and former member of the Decepts crew) with a collection of over 1000 pieces of Polo apparel takes us on a tour of this remarkable fashion subculture.
Watch as legendary animator Chuck Jones draws Bugs Bunny, one of the many characters he helped create during his long career.
It’s amazing how the drawing looks nothing like a rabbit and then with a few quick strokes, he draws those cheeks and, boom, there’s Bugs. You can also watch Jones draw Wile E. Coyote and the Roadrunner, Pepe le Pew, and Daffy Duck. These are fascinating. (via ★interesting)
Ten Stone Baby is a British Pathe newsreel from 1935 that shows three-year-old Leslie Downes, a child so heavy that he is unable to walk. The video quickly turns surreal with the chipper atta-boy tone of the announcer playing while the boy scrambles for a chocolate bar that someone is dangling over his head.
Not sure what, but this is a metaphor for something.
Casey Neistat tries to steal his own bike in several locations around NYC and finds it’s pretty easy…even if you’re doing so right in front of a police station.
I recently spent a couple of days conducting a bike theft experiment, which I first tried with my brother Van in 2005. I locked my own bike up and then proceeded to steal it, using brazen means — like a giant crowbar — in audacious locations, including directly in front of a police station. I wanted to find out whether onlookers or the cops would intervene. What you see here in my film are the results.
This is a video of the earlier attempt he mentions. (via ★ironicsans)
The people who shot this video claim the iceberg exploded but it looks more like the collapsing ice caused the air and water to shoot out of that hole suddenly. Still cool though.
(via @polarben)
François Vautier installed an ant colony in his scanner and scanned it each week for five years. This is the resulting time lapse video.
Five years ago, I installed an ant colony inside my old scanner that allowed me to scan in high definition this ever evolving microcosm (animal, vegetable and mineral). The resulting clip is a close-up examination of how these tiny beings live in this unique ant farm. I observed how decay and corrosion slowly but surely invaded the internal organs of the scanner. Nature gradually takes hold of this completely synthetic environment.
(via ★colossal)
Flesh and blood cheetahs are the fastest land animals, capable of traveling at more than 70 mph for shorts periods of time. This robotic cheetah can only do 18 mph but could probably go forever and ever until everything on the Earth has been caught and consumed by its steely jaws.
For reference, Usain Bolt’s average speed over 100 meters is ~23 mph, so at least he’s safe…for a little while. (via ★interesting)
Update: Another team working at MIT has built a robotic cheetah that can leap over obstacles on the run.
No word on how the team working on the robotic cheetah that can rip bloody human flesh from the bone is coming along.
I swear this is totally not made up: Ultimate Tak Ball is an indoor sport wherein you try to deposit a large soccer ball into a goal while the other team tries to stop you with stun guns. As in, you’re running along and then the defender tasers you:
Even Lionel Messi might go down if confronted with a taser-wielding Pepe. (via ★kyleridolfo)
Short video profile of Sam Zygmuntowicz, a Brooklyn violin maker.
I like the robotic violin player that appears around 2:15, presumably used to test a violin’s sound characteristics. (via ★interesting)
Ever since the World Cup in 2010, I’ve been watching a fair amount of soccer. Mostly La Liga, Premier League, and Champions League but a smattering of other games here and there. As my affection for the game has grown, I’ve mostly made my peace with diving. Diving in soccer is the practice of immediately falling to the ground when a foul has been committed against you (or even if one hasn’t) in order to get the referee’s attention. To Americans who have grown up watching American football and basketball, it is also one of the most ridiculous sights in sports…these manly professional athletes rolling around on the ground with fake injuries and then limping around the pitch for a few seconds before resuming their runs at 100% capacity. I still dislike the players who go down too often, lay it on too thick, or dive from phantom fouls, but much of the time there’s only one referee and two assistants for that huge field and you’re gonna get held and tackled badly so how else are you going to get that call? You dive.
Except for Lionel Messi. It’s not that he never dives (he does) but he stays on his feet more often than not while facing perhaps the most intense pressure in the game. Here’s a compilation video of Messi not going down:
In recent years, efforts have been made on various fronts to apply the lessons of Moneyball to soccer. I don’t think diving is one of the statistics measured because if it were, it might happen a lot less. Poor tackles and holding usually occur when the player/team with the ball has the advantage. By diving instead of staying on your feet, you usually give away that advantage (unless you’re in the box, have Ronaldo on your team taking free kicks, or can somehow hoodwink the ref into giving the other guy a yellow) and that doesn’t make any sense to me. If you look at Messi in that video, his desire to stay upright allows him to keep the pressure on the defense in many of those situations, creating scoring opportunities and even points that would otherwise end up as free kicks. It seems to me that Messi’s reluctance to dive is not some lofty character trait of his; it’s one of the things that makes him such a great player: he never gives up the advantage when he has it.
Very interesting talk by Bret Victor on the power and effectiveness of organizing your work around a guiding principle. Victor’s principle is “creators need an immediate connection to what they create” and he shows some really cool ways he’s exploring that idea.
(via waxy)
This is the oldest surviving clip of an American football game, in which we see Princeton and Yale battle in 1903.
The game footage starts at around 2:00. It resembles the current game of football in name only…before the forward pass, yards and points were difficult to come by and the game seems more like rugby or 11-on-11 wrestling. (via sly oyster)
This footage from the British Pathe archive shows the Hindenburg flying peacefully around and then cuts to the mighty airship in flames as it hits the ground.
(via devour)
I needed a little beauty this morning and this certainly fit the bill…a snowboarder covered in LED lights shreds in the dark. (thx, finn)
A Canadian man has been digging out his basement with scale-model RC construction equipment since 1997.
Yes, you read that right — he’s been digging out his basement for 15 years — with nothing but little R/C tractors, diggers and even a miniature rock crusher! Amazing.
At an average rate of eight or nine cubic feet of earth moved each year, the process has been absolutely glacial. But what do you expect when every morning he drives his little excavator on its transport truck down to the basement, unloads it, and then uses it to dig out the basement walls.
Then Joe uses the excavators to load R/C trucks and they work their way up a spiral ramp to the basement window where the soil gets dumped outside.
Then, once it’s outside, he uses bulldozers to consolidate the pile of excavated dirt.
This is so perfectly in the kottke.org wheelhouse that I can’t even tell if it’s any good or not: a mashup of Jay-Z and Kanye’s N***as in Paris and Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris.
(via ★davidfg)
Peter Sellers did four different spoken word versions of The Beatles’ She Loves You: as Dr. Strangelove, with a Cockney accent, with an Irish accent, and with an upper crust English accent (my fave):
Yeah, Sellers is pretty good with accents. (via ★bump)
Turn up the sound for this one, a short video shot in Odessa, Ukraine of ice creaking and squeaking really really loudly.
It sounds like a pod of dolphins trying to mate with Skrillex. (via ★acoleman)
The NY Times has a short documentary film by Errol Morris on El Wingador, a five-time winner of the Wing Bowl. My favorite line from the film, uttered by an off-camera Morris:
Wait a second. That’s cannibalism!
Though his several wins came early on in the competition’s history, El Wingador is still competing in the Wing Bowl. In the 2012 competition, held today, El Wingador came in third while Takeru Kobayashi completely demolished the competition in his first attempt, eating 337 wings in the process.
From the This Must Be the Place series, a lovely short film about the Prime Burger Restaurant in midtown Manhattan. The restaurant opened in 1938 and one of the servers, Artie, has been there since 1952.
For many of the guys that work here, the restaurant is like a second home — some of them have been slinging burgers, making shakes, and waiting on customers at this location for decades. Opened in 1938, the place hasn’t been altered since the early ’60s, and it looks all the better for it. Here the waiters and workers of Prime Burger discuss their views on their chosen profession, and the unique nature of the place itself.
(via @daveg)
Update: Over at Serious Eats, Ed Levine gives some advice on how to order properly at Prime Burger.
So why the need to order right? Because to keep up with the fast food chains, the DiMicelis started par-broiling their burgers. Par-broiling produces a less juicy burger. So when you order at Prime Burger specify you want your burger ($5.25 for a hamburger, $5.95 for a cheeseburger) made from scratch, and that you’re willing to wait the extra few minutes.
This is a 1930 short film from avant-garde filmmaker Ralph Steiner that shows dozens of gears and other machinery at work.
(thx, matthew)
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