Freeman, Feynman, and Hawking, autotuned
The giants of physics (and Morgan Freeman, who can be a giant of anything he wants) explain quantum mechanics using relatively simple terms and autotune.
(via devour)
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kottke.org posts about video
Kurt Vonnegut explains the shapes of stories
Using a chalkboard and a simple graphical axis, watch as Kurt Vonnegut explains the different shapes that stories can take.
(via @coudal)
Update: This is part of a longer talk that Vonnegut gave…a transcript is here.
I want to share with you something I’ve learned. I’ll draw it on the blackboard behind me so you can follow more easily [draws a vertical line on the blackboard]. This is the G-I axis: good fortune-ill fortune. Death and terrible poverty, sickness down here-great prosperity, wonderful health up there. Your average state of affairs here in the middle [points to bottom, top, and middle of line respectively].
(thx, clifford)
The first digital 3-D rendered film, circa 1972
This short film of a 3-D rendered hand made by Ed Cattmull (Pixar founder) and Fred Parke in 1972 might be the first digital 3-D rendered film ever.
This is kind of amazing…from 1972! The story that goes along with the film is worth a read as well.
The best part of this film is not even the 3D rendering itself, but the outtakes and “making of” footage that has been interwoven throughout, including footage of a plaster replica of Ed’s hand onto which he is meticulously mapping the polygon vertices that make up the three dimensional model (around 1:30). That’s really remarkable. The math that we take for granted for rendering 3D was being invented, real time, to create this video. (Ed’s credited for having working out that math to handle things like texture mapping, 3D anti-aliasing and z-buffering.)
See also Vol Libre, a film from 1980 that, for the first time, used fractals to generate graphics. (via @beep)
Washing Machine Self-Destructs
This is what we do in America: instead of fixing expensive household machinery, we destroy it on video and put the results up on YouTube. It’s our gladiatorial pastime.
You’ll want to click away from this about halfway through (boring!) but stick with it until the end; it gets a lot better suddenly. (via stellar)
Update: Well, so much for being clever. This video was filmed in the UK, not the US. Perhaps I should have said “what we do in the first world” instead?
100 years of East London fashion
A couple dances their way through 100 years of fashion, from 1911 to 2011.
Magnetic soap
This is beautiful:
I combined everyday soap bubbles with exotic ferrofluid liquid to create an eerie tale, using macro lenses and time lapse techniques. Black ferrofluid and dye race through bubble structures, drawn through by the invisible forces of capillary action and magnetism.
(via stellar)
As Seen on TV hardships
This one is mostly for my wife, who gleefully mocks TV infomerical actors who have trouble flipping a simple pancake or operating a mop.
(via devour)
Animated Sheet Music
Watch the sheet music go by as Miles Davis and his bandmates play So What.
See also Confirmation by Charlie Parker and Giant Steps by John Coltrane.
Now this is something
I’d been looking for something to post to say goodnight, so it was good that Rogre sent something over. It’s a fitting way to end the weekend considering it features Killian Martin and Danny MacAskill (featured here earlier in the week). The video is goofy and not as jaw-droppingly jaw-dropping as their solo videos, but they do seem to be doing their thing in a fancy theater the name of which I should know. This reminds me of the commercials where the sneaker commercials get ALL of their athletes into one commercial.
Danny MacAskill Industrial Revolutions
I usually like these videos at the end of the night, but they’re also quite nice in the morning. As Jason said, “He rides across a rope. On a bike!”
Coming to America
I’m not sure what this is — some National Geographic thing? — but it’s fascinating. The short clip follows a group of young Sudanese men who move to the United States and remark on the cultural differences they observe.
Their reaction to the food and the characterization of the US as unfriendly are especially interesting.
Update: Several people wrote in to say that this clip is from the 2006 documentary God Grew Tired of Us. (thx, all)
Really being John Malkovich
Using facial recognition in realtime via a webcam, this system lets you control the face of another person…like, say, John Malkovich.
Given a photo of person A, we seek a photo of person B with similar pose and expression. Solving this problem enables a form of puppetry, in which one person appears to control the face of another. When deployed on a webcam-equipped computer, our approach enables a user to control another person’s face in real-time. This image-retrieval inspired approach employs a fully-automated pipeline of face analysis techniques, and is extremely general-we can puppet anyone directly from their photo collection or videos in which they appear. We show several examples using images and videos of celebrities from the Internet.
MTV News report on the internet from 1995
Lots of footage from The Net, Johnny Mnemonic, etc., virtual reality, Moby with hair, and websites of yore.
Advertising’s quiet pitchman
Fast Company has a nice piece on Adam Lisagor, known around these parts as lonelysandwich. After doing a well-received promo video for a Twitter app he developed with a friend, Adam found himself in demand to do similar videos for a growing roster of technology companies.
But his tone is his real strength. “I try to identify that thing in a product that matters most to me,” Lisagor says. “I’ll glom onto that element and try to recreate it in this linear story I’m telling.” That calm, Billy Mays-free approach conveys an inherent trust. It assumes that the viewer is the kind of person smart enough to appreciate the product’s value. That’s exactly the kind of customer tech startups want, which does much to explain their love for him: Lisagor is sui generis — “the best and only one doing what he does,” Dorsey says — and his promos blend “the aesthetics and techniques of advertising with the storytelling of an instructional video,”says Malthe Sigurdsson, Rdio VP of product design.
He’s got himself a web site on which you can view his work. Congrats on all your success, Adam…you smell great!
Personal style
The seventh episode of Put This On covers personal style…for which they interviewed Gay Talese.
Taylor Swift covers Eminem’s Lose Yourself
Not even country music can ruin that song. But as you well know Taylor, Eminem’s version is the best of all time. (via @anildash)
TV Appearance of Lincoln Assassination Witness
In 1956, 96-year-old Samuel Seymour appeared on a game show called I’ve Got A Secret…his secret was that he saw Lincoln’s assassination when he was five years old.
Mind-blowing…the Civil War & Lincoln’s assassination directly linked to something as modern as a TV game show. That same year, Seymour gave an interview about witnessing the assassination to the Milwaukee Sentinel. His father was an overseer on a Maryland estate and his boss, Mr. Goldsboro needed to travel to Washington to check on “the legal status of their 150 slaves”. Seymour got to go along.
It was going on toward supper time — on Good Friday, April 14, 1865 — when we finally pulled up in front of the biggest house I ever had seen. It looked to me like a thousand farmhouses all pushed together, but my father said it was a hotel.
[…] When I finally had been rushed upstairs, shushed and scrubbed and put into fresh clothes, Mrs. Goldsboro said she had a wonderful surprise.
“Sammy, you and Sarah and I are going to a play tonight,” she explained. “A real play — and President Abraham Lincoln will be there.”
After Lincoln was shot, Seymour saw Booth fall from the balcony and run off.
Super freaky dancing squid dish
This is a Japanese dish called odori-don.
A live squid with its head removed is served on top of a bowl of sushi rice, accompanied by sashimi prepared from the head (usually sliced ika (squid) and ika-kimo (squid liver)) as well as other seafood. Seasoned soy sauce is first poured on top of the squid to make it “dance”.
AGHHHH!! Gak! That is just about the freakiest thing I’ve ever seen. Delicious torture! (via mlkshk)
Beastie Boys vs. Sesame Street
Sesame Street characters, including Grover on the flute, perform the Beastie Boys’ Sure Shot.
(via devour)
nytimes.com front page time lapse
Seven-minute video of 12,000 screenshots of the front page of the NY Times website taken over a period of several months by “an errant cron task”.
Kids show references The Wire
This scene from iCarly, a Nickelodeon show for tweens and pre-tweens, references the scene in season five of The Wire where (highlight text to show spoilers!) Michael kills Snoop.
(via @aliotsy)
The Royal Tenenbaums’ House
The Onion’s A.V. Club takes a field trip to see the Harlem house where the exteriors (and many of the interiors) were shot for The Royal Tenenbaums.
(via devour)
Les Twins
I’ve seen other more formal on-stage performances by these amazing French twin dancers, but I like this one the best…even fooling around, their precision is impressive.
Harry Potter summed up in seven minutes
If you’re headed out to see the final Potter movie this weekend, here’s a recap of the previous seven films in just seven minutes:
A day in the life of John Lasseter
I wasn’t going to watch all twenty-five minutes of this day-in-the-life feature about Pixar’s John Lasseter, but I got sucked in after the first two minutes for some reason and couldn’t stop. The main takeaway is that Lasseter is a relentlessly upbeat, absurdly rich, hugging, cheeseball train freak.
Watching it, I found it almost impossible to reconcile his cheeseball personality with the kind of movies that Pixar makes, except to note that the Pixar films he’s been involved with in a directorial or story capacity (Toy Storys 1-3, Cars 1-2) are the studio’s syrupiest (and Randy Newmanest). (via devour)
You can 3-D print working tools now
Did you know 3-D printers could make complex objects with moving parts like gears and crescent wrenches? I had no idea…this is kind of mind-blowing. The guy at the beginning likens the technology to Star Trek’s replicator.
Ten hour videos
YouTube user TehN1ppe has been uploading a series of 10-hour repetitive videos. Here’s Super Mario climbing a vine for ten hours in a row:
There’s also epic sax guy playing for 10 hours, badger badger (mushroom! mushroom!) for 10 hours, 10 hours of Tetris, 10 hours of the Inception horn, 10 hours of vuvuzela, and, oh my yes, 10 hours of Hypnotoad.
Somehow, these aren’t even close to the longest videos on YouTube…here’s one that plays for 518 hours (more than 21 days).
The Xbox version of Dock Ellis’ LSD-fueled no-hitter
In 1970, professional baseballer Dock Ellis, who was good at pitching baseballs, threw a no-hitter while under the influence of LSD. In 2011, professional blogger A.J. Daulerio, who isn’t so good at video game baseball, attempted to throw a no-hitter while on LSD…playing a customized Dock Ellis in MLB 2K11 on Xbox.
But by the fourth game I started to pick up tendencies in all the batters. Jason Bartlett swung at first-pitch changeups. Will Venable couldn’t hit the palm ball. In fact, most of these free-swinging Padres couldn’t hit Dock’s funky palm ball. I threw it often. But by then, also, the first acid distractions entered: the TV flickered; the cracks in the wall started to move; the hand soap started to breathe — those sorts of things. Plus I was drawn to the outdoor garden between innings. Rain was near, I sensed.
Talking Funny
Who knows how long this is going to be up because it doesn’t appear to be from a legit source, but Talking Funny, a one-hour HBO special featuring Ricky Gervais, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Jerry Seinfeld talking about comedy, is available on YouTube in four parts. Here’s part one to get you going:
Here are parts two, three, and four. (via waxy)
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