Three minute philosophy
YouTube user CollegeBinary does a video series called Three Minute Philosophy. Each episode describes the views and beliefs of a noted philosopher: Galileo, Kant, Descartes, Locke, and more.
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kottke.org posts about video
Sir Arthur Conan Doyle interview
In this filmed interview, the Sherlock Holmes author discusses how and why he came up with the famous detective.
He refers to Watson as Holmes’ “rather stupid friend”. (via mr)
MRI videos of fruits and vegetables
Here’s what it looks like when you put a variety of fruits and vegetables into an MRI machine.
Someone took all of the corn slices and stitched them together in some 3-D modeling software to remake the whole cobs. See also Big Mac MRI and hot dog MRI. (via mr)
Tarp surfing
Get yourself a skateboard, a big blue tarp, have someone lift the edge of the tarp over you as you skateboard by, and guess what that looks like:
(via mathowie)
Tony Hawk does a 900
At 42 years old, with the smile crinkles around his eyes to prove it, Tony Hawk can still do a 900 on a skateboard.
According to Wikipedia, Hawk is one of only four men in the world who have done this trick (he first did it in 1999). He announced on Twitter that he’d done the trick — “P.S. I made a 9” — and on his way out of town left one of his boards at the airport for a lucky fan to find. (thx, dens)
Dieter Rams video interview
The legendary Braun designer talks about his craft.
A design should not dominate people.
And hey, I didn’t know that a book had been published on Rams’ work. I bet Jony Ive has at least three copies. (via monoscope)
Total solar eclipse video
It’s not so much a video of a total solar eclipse (the recent one, as seen from Argentina on July 11) as a video of people watching a total solar eclipse.
The sound is key…the reaction is very much The Rapture/End Times/high on ecstasy. If I had a bucket list, seeing a total solar eclipse would be on it. (via bobulate)
How to trick people into thinking you’re good looking
Hair, makeup, and style tips from an ugly girl about “creating a human optical illusion”.
(via clusterflock)
Jewel Does Undercover Karaoke
Funny or Die got Jewel to dress up in a disguise and go sing some of her own songs at a karaoke bar. Instant classic.
Dueling Carls
Talking Carl is an iPhone app that records snippets of audio and then plays it back at a higher pitch. If you put two Talking Carls next to each other, this is what you get:
Note to Mouser and Aaron: parrot feedback! (thx, matt)
There is Bergkamp
Congratulations to the Dutch for reaching the World Cup final. To celebrate, here’s a great Dutch moment from a past World Cup…Dennis Bergkamp’s epic goal vs. Argentina in the 1998 WC. Turn the speakers up…the sound is everything.
Congrats also to Spain, but I couldn’t find a Spanish WC highlight as entertaining to match.
Super realistic human masks
Holy. Crap. Let’s get some of these and rob a bank or train or confuse some celebrities or something. (thx, lauren)
Early films of NYC
The Library of Congress has uploaded a whole bunch of early film footage of NYC to their YouTube account. Like this 1905 pararama from the top of the Times Building in Times Square:
Open Culture has more information. (via @brainpicker)
100 greatest movie insults
Pretty good…except that they forgot Corky St. Clair’s “I hate you and I hate your ass face” from Waiting for Guffman.
Fame in the movies
Razzle Dazzle is a six-part video series on how fame is portrayed in Hollywood films.
Razzle Dazzle is a six-part video essay that looks at how movies have examined the many facets of fame (heroism, infamy, and everything in between) and how they have shaped the audience’s perception of what fame offers. Chapter 1, “The Pitch,” lays out how movies are just one component of an all-consuming media that is constantly shaping the modern image culture. Subsequent chapters look at certain archetypes — the Hero, the Fraud, the Parasite, the Maverick — that have become staples of the media cycle.
Part one and part two are currently available.
Kirk/Spock musical slash fiction
This mashup of Star Trek with Kesha’s Tik Tok just makes me really really happy.
Turns out there’s a whole mess of Kirk/Spock musical slash fiction (mash fiction?) on YouTube…there’s Kirk/Spock vs. Lady Gaga’s Monster, Kirk/Spock vs. She Blinded Me With Science, Kirk/Spock vs. I Kissed a Boy, Kirk/Spock vs. Jerry Mungo’s In the Summertime, Kirk/Spock/McCoy vs. The Beatles’ Come Together, Kirk/Spock vs. You Spin Me Round and many more. (via david)
Update: And here is Kirk/Spock vs. Closer by NIN, perhaps the Citizen Kane of Kirk/Spock musical slash fiction:
(thx, mark)
Kubrick vs. Scorsese, a tribute
Warning: this video contains spoilers, violence, and cinematic greatness.
Many friends after seeing my video “Tarantino vs Coen Brothers” requested me to do a new video duel of directors, so I decided to do now a tribute to my two favorite directors, Stanley Kubrick and Martin Scorsese, were 25 days re-watching 34 films, selected more than 500 scenes, and a hard work editing.
Tarantino vs. Coen Brothers is here; and here’s Scorsese on Kubrick, in which I was delighted to learn that Scorsese thinks, as I do, that Eyes Wide Shut is underrated.
Mail trains
This is the third part of a 1936 documentary film about a mail train traveling from London to Scotland. Be sure to watch the mail exchange process that starts about 50 seconds in.
The train doesn’t even slow down to exchange the mail…the outgoing mailbags are hung low and snared by a net near the track and incoming mailbags are collected up high using a similar net.
Drive-through fast food should work more like this. (via sveinn)
Vortex cannon!
The vortex cannon creates “a 200 mile-an-hour cloud”…basically an air blast that can knock stuff over at a distance.
Awesome! (thx, brandon)
Ada Lovelace, the first computer programmer
Charles Babbage built one of the first mechanical calculating machines but Ada Lovelace was the first to show how the machine’s arithmetic function could be abstracted to produce things other than numbers: language, graphics, or music.
There are several other Information Pioneers shorts available on Vimeo, including profiles of Tim Berners-Lee, Alan Turing, and Hedy Lamarr.
Toy Story + The Wire mashup
Woody = McNulty, Buzz = Stringer, and Mr. Potato Head = Bunk. (via stevey)
A 2 Live Crew cover video (sorta)
I have no idea who the singer is or what this music video is about, but I kinda can’t stop watching it.
And hey, look, an informative YouTube comment:
I’m gonna take a stab at interpreting the plot of this video. The child is dying and as some sort of make a wish type thing he’s wants to be a warlord, have an entourage if hot ladies and meet 2 live crew (which I’m guessing the police man and business man have set up, with 4 stand-ins but they are nervous about him realizing its not actually them) … but he buys it, and when he fulfills the three wishes cosmic energy leaves his body and all that glorious trippy shit happens at the end.
NSFW if looking at a live version of 2 Live Crew’s As Nasty As They Wanna Be album cover is frowned upon in your place of employ.
Goal of the Century: Maradona vs Messi
Split-screen view comparing Diego Maradona’s 1986 Goal of the Century with a very similar goal by current Argentinian star Lionel Messi.
The shortest possible game of Monopoly
Here are two people playing the world’s shortest Monopoly game (21 seconds long):
The four turns required are detailed here.
How to stick your hand into molten lead
Can’t get enough of the Leidenfrost effect? I know! Me either! In addition to helping with nonstick cooking, the L. effect also allows you to stick your hand into an 850° pot of molten lead without injury.
Skip to 1:55 for the good stuff. Bananas! Absolutely bananas! Oh, and this also works for liquid nitrogen as well. (thx, kyle)
Real-world Minority Report computer interface
John Underkoffler was one of the science advisors for Minority Report. After doing that, he helped build a computer with an interface very much like the ones in the movie…you know, where Tom Cruise flings stuff around on a screen with his hands. In this TED talk, Underkoffler demonstrates the system.
The whole thing is worth watching but skip to 5:20 (or even 6:30) if you want to see some crazy ass shit go down. (via lonelysandwich)
Crazy underwater base jump
Guillaume Nery is a world champion free diver; here he is “jumping” from the top of Dean’s Blue Hole and falling towards the bottom. No tanks or anything.
Insane. According to the info on YouTube, Nery’s jump was filmed by free diver Julie Gautier, who was also holding her breath the whole time. Insaner!
What’s your time perspective?
A fascinating 10-minute animated talk by Philip Zimbardo about the different “time zones” or “time perspectives” that people can have and how the different zones affect people’s world views.
The six different time zones are:
- Past positive: focus is on the “good old days”, past successes, nostalgia, etc.
- Past negative: focus on regret, failure, all the things that went wrong
- Present hedonistic: living in the moment for pleasure and avoiding pain, seek novelty and sensation
- Present fatalism: life is governed by outside forces, “it doesn’t pay to plan”
- Future: focus is on learning to work rather than play
- Transcendental Future: life begins after the death of the mortal body
Find out which time zone you’re in by taking this survey.
Fun fact: Zimbardo conducted the famous Stanford prison experiment in 1971. (thx, sean)
Video of a man exposed to total vacuum
Remember the boiling tongue water story from yesterday’s post about how long a human can last in the vacuum of space? Here’s the video of that depressurization event, with the participants taking about it:
(thx, brad)
Dear Leader meets Sim City
A 22-yo architecture student from The Philippines has “beaten” Sim City 3000 by building a city with the largest possible population that sustains itself for 50,000 years. The city, called Magnasanti, is not somewhere you would want to live.
There are a lot of other problems in the city hidden under the illusion of order and greatness: Suffocating air pollution, high unemployment, no fire stations, schools, or hospitals, a regimented lifestyle — this is the price that these sims pay for living in the city with the highest population. It’s a sick and twisted goal to strive towards. The ironic thing about it is the sims in Magnasanti tolerate it. They don’t rebel, or cause revolutions and social chaos. No one considers challenging the system by physical means since a hyper-efficient police state keeps them in line. They have all been successfully dumbed down, sickened with poor health, enslaved and mind-controlled just enough to keep this system going for thousands of years. 50,000 years to be exact. They are all imprisoned in space and time.
Update: In 1922, Le Corbusier designed an “ideal” city with 3 million inhabitants. (thx, diana)
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