The natural curves of human movement
No one has been able to figure out why humans can’t walk, swim, or even drive in straight lines without reference points. Instead, we go in circles:
(via df)
Advertise here with Carbon Ads
This site is made possible by member support. 💞
Big thanks to Arcustech for hosting the site and offering amazing tech support.
When you buy through links on kottke.org, I may earn an affiliate commission. Thanks for supporting the site!
kottke.org. home of fine hypertext products since 1998.
Beloved by 86.47% of the web.
kottke.org posts about video
IBM centennial films
IBM is celebrating 100 years of business with a pair of videos; the following is a 30-minute film by Errol Morris (music by Philip Glass) on the history of the company.
A second film, 100 x 100, shows 100 people each presenting an IBM milestone that occurred the year they were born; not sure if Morris did this one as well. (via df)
Human Planet
The Blue Planet, Planet Earth, Life. These BBC nature series have all neglected to showcase our planet’s most amazing animal. Human Planet is an upcoming nature series about human beings.
No David Attenborough?! Still looks fantastic, though. (via @dunstan)
Precorder
Precorder is an iPhone app that constantly buffers video and only saves the last few seconds when you press the record button.
By constantly saving the previous few seconds of video before you hit record, Precorder lets you wait until something interesting happens to start recording, and you’ll never miss a precious moment or get stuck with hours of boring video to painstakingly edit down.
More info here. The creators were inspired by the camera used by the Planet Earth team to capture Great Whites jumping out of the water to catch seals.
Antiqued digital video is the new antiqued digital photography
8mm is an iPhone app that shoots videos that look like stuttery 8mm films.
8mm Vintage Camera brings your iPhone and iPod Touch back in time to capture the beauty and magic of old school vintage movies. By mixing and matching films and lenses, you can recreate the atmosphere of those bygone eras with 25 timeless retro looks. Dust & scratches, retro colors, flickering, light leaks, frame jitters — all can be instantly added with the swapping of a finger.
Lyndon Johnson buys pants
This is a hoot: in want of slacks, President Lyndon Johnson called up the Haggar clothing company and requested several pairs be made in the style of a pair he already owned. Except a little bigger in the crotch…”down where your nuts hang” as Johnson put it. Just listen:
MLK
kottke.org is off today in remembrance of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Here’s his I Have a Dream speech, which remains as powerful and relevant today as it was in 1963.
The full text of the speech can be found here.
Fun music video
Reminds me of Gondry’s Star Guitar video with a bit of MC Escher mixed in.
(viva la sandwich)
How croissants are made
Maybe it’s because I have an oddly intense interest in croissants, but I found this 10-minute video about how to make them fascinating. Watch at least until the 1 kg sheet of butter is placed on the dough to be folded over several times.
Spoiler: they turn out great, which was unexpected because so often croissants are more bready and dry than flakey and moist, even in France. (thx, aaron)
The Dude Abides
PBS is airing a documentary about Jeff Bridges tonight called Jeff Bridges: The Dude Abides. In a short clip from the episode, Bridges visits a The Big Lebowski memorabilia store called The Little Lebowski. Watch the cashier’s mind explode as he recognizes who just walked into his store.
And I love how he calls Joel and Ethan “The Brothers”. (via devour)
Quentin Tarantino’s first movie
No, not Reservoir Dogs. It’s called My Best Friend’s Birthday, which he made for $5000 in 1987. Here’s the surviving 36 minutes of footage; the rest was destroyed in a fire.
Some of the ideas and material in this film would be recycled for the Tarantino-penned True Romance screenplay. (via sly oyster)
Photoshop rap with CMYKiller
Watch as CMYKiller, Philter Phil, DJ Dodge, MC Burn and the rest of the posse rap us through some Photoshop tutorials.
I’m ropin’ all the honeys with my magnetic lasso
Short documentary on The Sartorialist
A really lovely seven-minute documentary about Scott Schuman, aka The Sartorialist.
Watching the concentration, focus, and determination in Schuman’s eyes and body as he walks around looking for photographic subjects immediately reminded me of an elite athlete; that same look was documented at length in Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait. And that’s no accident…what Schuman does is an athletic pursuit as much as anything else. The way he holds his camera while walking, down by his side, slightly behind his back, hiding it from his potential subjects until he sees an opening…he’s like a running back cradling a football, probing for an opening in the defensive line.
Michael Caine’s impersonation of Michael Caine
Everyone has a Michael Caine impression. Even Michael Caine:
Se7en ending with stuffed animals
Surprisingly, the ending scene of Se7en is no less effective with stuffed animals standing in for the actors.
(via @sippey)
The Muppets sing Kanye West’s Monster
This is surprisingly well done.
Continuing with the unexpected Kanye groove on kottke.org this morning.
How NFL footballs are made
The manufacturing process for the official NFL football made by Wilson:
It’s fascinating that every football used in the NFL for the past 20-30 years has been made by Deb, Loretta, Peg, Glen, Emmitt, Tina, Etta Mae, Pam, and Michelle. Also, they call the pre-laced, pre-inflated ball a carcass! (thx, peter)
Update: The NY Times takes a slightly different look at the Wilson factory, through the eyes of Jane Helser, who sewed footballs there for almost 50 years.
And then after the teams get the balls, they go through further procedures that vary from team to team. Here’s how the NY Giants prep their footballs for Eli Manning:
The new ball is rubbed vigorously for 45 minutes with a dark brush, which removes the wax and darkens the leather.
Next, a wet towel is used to scour the ball until the ball’s outer surface is soaked through. “You’re not done until the ball is waterlogged and water will no longer bead on it,” Ed Skiba said.
While the ball is wet, it is brushed again.
Then the ball is taken over to an electric spin wheel, where it undergoes another high-speed scrubbing.
At this point, the ball is put aside overnight. Then the process is repeated twice over the next couple of days.
But under-inflating by a couple of PSI is a scandal? Absurd.
Boardwalk Empire visual effects
Brainstorm Digital showcases some of the visual effects that they did for HBO’s Boardwalk Empire.
The Joy of Stats
An hour-long documentary on statistics and infoviz produced by the BBC.
Documentary which takes viewers on a rollercoaster ride through the wonderful world of statistics to explore the remarkable power thay have to change our understanding of the world, presented by superstar boffin Professor Hans Rosling, whose eye-opening, mind-expanding and funny online lectures have made him an international internet legend.
(via waxy)
Sword-tip video camera
What does it look like when you put a video camera on the tip of a sword and swing it around? Pretty cool, is what.
(thx, matt)
Blizzard timelapse
A 20-hour span of blizzard in about 40 seconds. There are several points at which it seems the snow should stop accumulating on the table, but it never does.
Liquid sculpture
Shinchi Maruyama throws water from his hands or from glasses and catches the temporary sculptures they make with his camera.
The Morning News has an interview with Maruyama and a photo gallery of his work; this one is really cool.
James Burke’s Connections online
Every episode of the classic science/history series Connections (as well as Connections 2 and 3) is available online at YouTube.
Connections is a ten-episode documentary television series created, written and presented by science historian James Burke. The series was produced and directed by Mick Jackson of the BBC Science & Features Department and first aired in 1978 (UK) and 1979 (USA). It took an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention and demonstrated how various discoveries, scientific achievements, and historical world events were built from one another successively in an interconnected way to bring about particular aspects of modern technology.
Connections explores an “Alternative View of Change” (the subtitle of the series) that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. Burke contends that one cannot consider the development of any particular piece of the modern world in isolation. Rather, the entire gestalt of the modern world is the result of a web of interconnected events, each one consisting of a person or group acting for reasons of their own motivations (e.g. profit, curiosity, religious) with no concept of the final, modern result of what either their or their contemporaries’ actions finally led to. The interplay of the results of these isolated events is what drives history and innovation, and is also the main focus of the series and its sequels.
Here’s the first episode to get you started.
Warning: you may not be able to stop. If you’d like to watch the series in a less irritating format, you can always purchase it on DVD.
Getting stuff done
Robert Hodgin is continuing his experiments in manipulating Kinect data in realtime with increasingly hilarious results. Here he multiplies himself to get more work done:
The year in film, 2010
Some gloriously crazy person took clips from 270 films that were out in 2010 and mixed them together into a coherent narrative:
This year’s movies have legitimately transformed my idea of what is creatively possible. To commemorate, I’ve remixed 270 of them into one giant ass video.
Wonderful. Here’s a list of all the films used. (thx, aaron)
Hand supermodel
Ellen Sirot is one of the world’s top hand models. CBS News interviewed her a couple of years ago:
Everything I do is to protect [my hands] from being in any jeopardy or any danger in any way. So for me, that means no cooking, no cleaning, no taking out the garbage, no opening cans, no opening windows, no opening doors, no gardening, no sports…
This is a really strange and fascinating video…Sirot is constantly performing with her hands but it’s also like she hasn’t got any hands, not functional ones anyway. She holds them like atrophied T. Rex arms! (via @zagata)
Socials & More