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You’ve seen one washing machine self-destruction video, you’ve seen them all, right? Maybe not. Back in August, I posted this short video of a washer destroying itself (with some help from a brick) but this longer video is mesmerizing and almost poignant at times.
At times, it seems as though the washer is attempting to turn into the Picasso version of itself, a Cubist sculpture manifesting itself over time. (via @aaroncoleman0)
Designer Adam Ladd asked his five-year-old daughter for her impressions of several well-known logos. This is great:
(via stellar)
The Eames’ Powers of Ten and Eva Szasz’s Cosmic Zoom both came out in 1968 and were based on Kees Boeke’s 1957 essay called Cosmic View. This seems like an incredible coincidence. I couldn’t find anything online about which film came first or if there was any influence one way or the other, so I thought I’d ask if anyone knows anything about which came out first. Hit me at [email protected].
The Pronunciation Book channel on YouTube shows you how to say various words in American English in a straightforward fashion. Here’s how to say Zegna, the men’s clothing brand:
This is not to be confused with the Pronunciation Manual channel, which does the same thing in the same format but much funnier and more incorrect.
I could have embedded a dozen more…I have no idea why I think these are so funny but I just cannot stop laughing at them. Ok, one more:
And this one! Make it stop!!
Update: My kids and I still use these mispronunciations around the house all the time. I cannot help looking at even the fanciest bottle of Châteauneuf-du-Pape without thinking choody-noofy-doopy-poopy.
The Bay of Fundy in Eastern Canada has some of the world’s greatest tides…at times, high tide is 50+ feet higher than low tide. Here’s a time lapse video of those tides in action.
Maybe I’m just way over-cautious but this guy does almost kill himself while bungee jumping off a bridge using a jury-rigged climbing rope and harness, right? This is just totally batshit crazy:
Skip ahead to about 1:30…everything before that is just filler. (via ★bryce)
Clip after clip of formerly intact objects (boats, planes, buildings) being destroyed in a matter of seconds.
(via @unlikelywords)
According to this YouTube video, Japanese do multiplication by drawing lines like this:
(via ★vuokko)
Adele’s Rolling in the Deep has been covered thousands of times on YouTube…here’s 70 of those performances cut together into one seamless song.
(via ★davidfg)
A collection of things that New Yorkers say. Like “where’s the train?”, “you have to go to Brooklyn, it’s the law”, and “tourists!”
Watch as John Scalzi’s 13-year-old daughter sees an LP record for the first time.
This is… This is… What? What?! This is huge! This is like ten CDs in one. How many songs does it have on it?
I believe the record in question is from Jonathan Coulton. (via ★mathowie)
I don’t know if the nudie playing cards are absolutely essential, but this trick is pretty neat.
(via @itscolossal)
The Fournitures Generales Pour Le Piano is a shop in Paris that sells parts for piano repair. The owner runs the shop himself, sells fewer and fewer parts each year, and dreams of building a one-string instrument which sounds like a piano, lute, and harp all at the same time.
See also the decline in piano quality over the last 100 years. (thx, judy)
This is mesmerizing: using Google Image Search and starting with a transparent image, this video cycles through each subsequent related image, over 2900 in all.
(via ★mattb)
Micro-Macro is a Powers of Ten-style video in which the various scales are depicted with food.
(via ★glass)
The sound and picture are poor, but the entirety of Errol Morris’ A Brief History of Time is available on YouTube.
Featuring music from Philip Glass, the film is a documentary about Stephen Hawking and his ideas about the universe. Morris recently stated on Twitter:
Yes. I plan to re-release [A Brief History of Time]. (It was never properly color corrected and is one of my best films.)
The film is difficult, if not impossible, to find on DVD and isn’t available on Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, or iTunes. And as far as I can tell, the soundtrack was never released either.
I have rarely in my life seen something as physically impressive as this performance of Swan Lake:
It’s not just what she does, it’s how rock-still she is while doing it. Just, wow. (via ★interesting)
Fotoshop is a new beauty product from Adobé (say aah-DOE-bay) that slims, gets rid of wrinkles, and can even lighten your skin color.
(via stellar)
Thirty Japanese giant hornets take on an entire hive of European honey bees and slaughter 30,000 bees in three hours.
Not having evolved alongside the giant hornet, European honey bees don’t have a natural defense against them. But the Japanese honey bee does:
The Japanese honey bee, on the other hand, has a defense against attacks of this manner. When a hornet approaches the hive to release pheromones, the bee workers emerge from their hive in an angry cloud-formation with some 500 individuals. As they form a tight ball around the hornet, the ball increases in heat to 47 °C (117 °F) from their vibrating wings, forming a convection oven as the heat released by the bees’ bodies is spread over the hornets. Because bees can survive higher temperatures (48 to 50 °C (118 to 122 °F)) than the hornet (44 to 46 °C (111 to 115 °F)), the latter dies.
(via ★aaroncohen)
This video, which takes its audio from a 2007 interview, takes a crack at defining it.
So, a dubstep or grime is kinda like this ultra slow, ultra dirty spawn of hip hop, but it’s almost at a breakbeat speed, but it’s at a halftime breakbeat speed. So it feels, like, abnormally slow, and just gives this really heavy feel.
Since the evolution of music has slowed since, say, the early 1980s, I thought it would be a long time before a popular genre of music came along that seemed, to my old ears, to be noisy garbage…but then dubstep came along. Industrial, happy hardcore, metal, punk, glitch, and even drum & bass I can appreciate, but dubstep makes me want to yell at children to get off lawns. And I actually like that door stopper noise!
This is kind of amazing: if you put a contact microphone on a hard surface and then process the sound in realtime, you can turn that surface into a touch screen…or a programmable musical instrument.
(via ★johnpavlus)
The quantum levitation videos I showed you a couple months ago are pretty cool, but scientists scienticiens at the Japan Institute of Science and Technology have upped the game by using QL CGI to build a real-world Wipeout track.
Say it with me: science!! Also, do Rainbow Road next! (via ★interesting)
Update: Say it with me: advertising! Or some other such nonsense. Several people have alerted me that this video is a fake…you can see vapor trails passing through walls, etc. Boo. Boo-urns. (thx, all)
A short time lapse of Comet Lovejoy appearing in the pre-dawn sky over the Andes. Wait for the last sequence…it’s the best one.
Lovejoy was only discovered in Nov 2011 by an amateur astronomer. (via ★interesting)
A lovely short film by Ben Proudfoot about a letterpress company and a paper company who are scraping by next door to each other in Los Angeles.
Three guys ride on tiny paths next to steep rock faces and over narrow wooden bridges. I could only manage watching a minute of this…I almost threw up in fear.
(via ★interesting)
One of my favorite things on the internet is footage of old styles of dancing set to contemporary music. Like this:
See also Daft Punk Charleston and Russian dancing (w/ Run DMC). (via ★dunstan)
Get it while you can: an hour-long BBC documentary about Steve Jobs with on-camera interviews with Woz, Stephen Fry, Tim Berners-Lee, John Sculley and many others.
(thx, jteve)
An increasingly frustrated lizard plays a game called Ant Crusher on an Android phone. He’s pretty good, but is no less hungry than before he started.
(via stellar)
At the beginning of this video, Ramesh Raskar, associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, announces calmly:
We have built a virtual slow-motion camera where we can see photons, or light particles, moving through space.
Yeah, no biggie.
When this came on right before the season finale of Boardwalk Empire, I shushed my talking wife so hard I nearly threw out my back.
April! April is coming!
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