Stephen Colbert breaks character
I nearly wet my pants at work watching this:
(via stellar)
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kottke.org posts about video
Robot more human than human?
You remember the BigDog robotic prototype constructed by Boston Dynamics? Now they have a human robot that can run, do push-ups, and just generally acts pretty human.
Take this robot, some super-realistic human masks, and a Siri-powered iPhone 4S, and we’re in Terminator territory. (via ★interesting)
Robot rides bicycle
Watch until at least 45 seconds in.
I wanna see three of these riding a team sprint in a tiny velodrome.
Watch complete games of the Dream Team from the 1992 Olympics
Here’s a little weekend viewing for you…Ballislife has put several complete 1992 Dream Team games up on YouTube. Here’s their game versus Croatia to get you going:
(via @fchimero)
The history of the typewriter recited by Michael Winslow
Ok you guys, apparently Michael Winslow is some sort of national treasure and we didn’t know it. First there’s the Led Zeppelin thing. And now I’ve run across this 2009 film of Winslow imitating several different typewriters in chronological order of their year of release…on each typewriter, he “types out” the words “the history of the typewriter recited by Michael Winslow”.
I was a little disappointed they didn’t have him do an ImageWriter II (I know, technically not a typewriter), but I still love this to pieces. Frieze has a bit more info.
For nearly 21 minutes, the camera moves gently around Winslow in a recording studio as he impersonates the noises of 32 typewriters. Inter-titles announce the dates of the respective machines’ manufacture, their brand and model number. It is an absorbing feat of mimicry. From the frantic clucking and strenuous creaking of his ‘1895 Barlock Mod. 4’, through to the ping-pong sounds of the ‘1954 Hermes Mod. Baby’, and concluding with the ‘1983 Olympia Monika Deluxe’, Winslow produces a percussive tour de force that could take its place alongside the Dada sound poetry of Raoul Hausmann or Kurt Schwitters and the cartoon exuberance of voice actor Mel Blanc.
(via ★tangentialism)
Michael Winslow gets the Led out
There is a sense amongst my generation that Michael Winslow’s best performing days are behind him. (You’ll remember Winslow as Officer Sound Effects from Police Academy.) After all, we live in the age of the beatboxing flautist. You might change your tune after watching Winslow do Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love. The first 28 seconds are like, oh, I’ve heard this before yawn zzzzzzzzzz WHOA, WHERE THE HELL DID THAT GUITAR NOISE COME FROM??!
And then it goes bananas right around 1:30. This is a must-see. (via @beep)
Quantum levitation!
What the what? This video gives a little more explanation into the effect at work here (superconductivity + quantum trapping of the magnetic field in quantum flux tubes) and an awesome demonstration of a crude rail system. You can almost hear your tiny mind explode when the “train” goes upside-down.
Wingardium Leviosa! (via stellar)
American made
Fuck Yeah Made in USA is a collection of videos showcasing products that are made in the US. These are chock full of “how things are made” goodness.
Skin cell gun
Scientists have developed a spray gun that sprays the burn victim’s own skin cells onto the affected area heals them within a matter of days, not weeks or months.
The guy doesn’t even look like he got burned. (via @delfuego)
Apple predicted Siri 24 years ago
In 1987, Apple made a video showcasing a concept they called Knowledge Navigator:
The crazy thing is that the year in the video is 2011…and Apple announced something very much like Knowledge Navigator (Siri, a natural language voice assistant) at their event yesterday. (via waxy)
Richard Feynman on Beauty
Richard Feynman talking about the beauty of science and of the natural world over a bunch of video footage taken from NASA, Microcosmos, and BBC nature docs like Planet Earth? This is fantastically right up my alley.
Part two is Honours and part three is Curiosity. If I ever go on hallucinogenic walkabout in the desert, I’d want Richard Feynman to be my spirit animal. (via ★interesting)
Four-year-old learns Darth Vadar is Luke’s father
You’ve never seen a literally slack jaw until you’ve seen a four-year-old watching Empire Strikes Back for the first time and learning that Darth Vader is Luke’s father.
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
A couple years ago, I pointed to a 10-minute clip of a longer documentary called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Some kind soul has put the whole thing up on Vimeo.
This witty and original film is about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others don’t. Beginning at New York’s Seagram Plaza, one of the most used open areas in the city, the film proceeds to analyze why this space is so popular and how other urban oases, both in New York and elsewhere, measure up. Based on direct observation of what people actually do, the film presents a remarkably engaging and informative tour of the urban landscape and looks at how it can be made more hospitable to those who live in it.
Update: The Vimeo video has been taken down, but you can find it on The Internet Archive.
The physics of the riderless bike
Why do riderless bicycles not fall over? Science Friday looks at the science behind bike self-steering.
(via robottke!)
Rare footage of live Nirvana concert
YouTube has 45 minutes of previously unreleased footage of a Halloween concert Nirvana played in 1991 at the Paramount Theater in Seattle.
The DVD contains the full performance (there’s also a Blu-ray version out in a few months). I think this might be one of my answers to “what would you do if you had a time machine?”… (via devour)
Update: The video seems to be down right now…not sure if it’ll be back or not. Sorry…
Won’t You Be My Neighbor?
Watch Fred Rogers sing the opening theme from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood from 1967 to 2000.
(via ★aaroncohen)
An actual working mind probe
This is incredible…researchers at Berkeley have developed a system that reads people’s minds while they watch a video and then roughly reconstructs what they were watching from thousands of hours of YouTube videos. This short demo shows how it works:
Nishimoto and two other research team members served as subjects for the experiment, because the procedure requires volunteers to remain still inside the MRI scanner for hours at a time.
They watched two separate sets of Hollywood movie trailers, while fMRI was used to measure blood flow through the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual information. On the computer, the brain was divided into small, three-dimensional cubes known as volumetric pixels, or “voxels.”
“We built a model for each voxel that describes how shape and motion information in the movie is mapped into brain activity,” Nishimoto said.
The brain activity recorded while subjects viewed the first set of clips was fed into a computer program that learned, second by second, to associate visual patterns in the movie with the corresponding brain activity.
Brain activity evoked by the second set of clips was used to test the movie reconstruction algorithm. This was done by feeding 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into the computer program so that it could predict the brain activity that each film clip would most likely evoke in each subject.
Finally, the 100 clips that the computer program decided were most similar to the clip that the subject had probably seen were merged to produce a blurry yet continuous reconstruction of the original movie.
The kicker: “the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories”. First time travelling neutrinos and now this…what a time to be alive. (via ★essl)
Super freaky realtime facial substitution
That shit cray! Puts this system to shame. See also Tom Selleck’s Moustache. (via ★interesting)
Crazy audiovisual illusion
The McGurk effect: the same sound plus two different mouth movements produces two different sounds.
Read more about the McGurk effect. (via ★interesting-links)
The amazing lyrebird can mimic anything
I knew the male lyrebird is an amazing mimic (other birds, camera shutters, car alarms, chainsaws):
but I didn’t know he could sing the Seinfeld theme song:
Seriously though, that chainsaw noise is amazing. (via ★aaroncohen)
Earth orbit time lapse
Time lapse movie composed of photographs taken from the International Space Station as it orbits the Earth at night.
This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.
(via stellar)
Back to school with Mister Rogers
After reading the fantastic Tom Junod piece on Fred Rogers earlier in the week, I poked around on YouTube for some Mister Rogers clips and shows. There are only a few full episodes on there but two of them are particularly relevant as kids across the nation go back to school for the fall:
I watched the first episode with Ollie yesterday (he was a big fan of the trolley, which was always my favorite part of the show too) and then we watched how crayons are made and how people make trumpets.
After our YouTube supply is exhausted, we’ll move on to DVDs (here’s a music compilation and episodes from the first week of the show), Netflix, or Amazon Instant Video, which has a bunch of episodes available for free (!!) for Prime subscribers.
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