The climbing excavator
Watch as this massive piece of machinery climbs up a steel post that must be 60 or 80 feet tall.
The good stuff starts around 2:45.
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kottke.org posts about video
The magic levitating top
When this magnetic top is set spinning over another magnet, it levitates. No superconduction necessary.
(via @ebertchicago)
Report on online newspapers, circa 1981
To go along with James Fallows’ 1982 report on personal computing, a 1981 TV report about reading newspapers online.
It takes over two hours to recieve the entire text of the newspaper over the phone and with an hourly use charge of five dollars, the new telepaper won’t be much competition for the 20-cent street edition.
The report was done back in the days when “Owns Home Computer” was a useful differentiating label.
(via @aliotsy)
Velcro + iPad = love
Affix Velcro to the back of your iPad and you’ve got yourself a dashboard GPS map, a TV on the ceiling, an on-stove cooking guide, or a digital picture in your front hallway.
A pixel art documentary
Pixel is a short documentary film exploring the artistic use of pixel-style animation in contemporary video games.
(via waxy)
Unanswered Lost questions
I am glad that someone compiled a list of all of the unanswered questions that the Lost producers/writers left when the show ended.
I don’t really care about the answers to most of these but watching it irritates me that they jerked us around with the Dharma/Others/Walt/4-toed statue crap when it didn’t matter at all. Oh, and the fucking numbers and the whole ARG thing. “All of this matters”, Jack? Uh, no.
Biking in Utrecht
I couldn’t tell exactly what I loved about that skateboarding video the other night, but I figured out it reminded me of the Danny MacAskill video from last year that you really should have seen by now. I went fruitlessly looking for a bike video that might have the same feeling and then this showed up in my feed this morning and I figured it could be what takes you through the night (play your favorite song while watching).
I’ve watched it 3 times and I still can’t figure out how those left turns into our face work.
(via nevver)
San Francisco artists’ soapbox derby, 1975
In 1975, a bunch of artists competed in a soapbox derby in San Francisco. It is “far out, man”.
The banana is the fastest fruit I could think of.
The Nevermind baby works for the Obama poster guy
The baby pictured here:
now works for Shepard Fairey, the artist who did the iconic Obama HOPE posters.
Yo dawg, I herd you like pop culture, so I put some pop culture in your pop culture so your brain can fucking explode from all the popular you’ve cultured. (via mediabistro)
The fastest gun in the world
There are so many really fantastic things about this video and its subject, Bob Munden. To start: look at how fast he can shoot his gun and re-holster it! I’ve seen it 20 times and I still can’t believe it.
The only thing that rivals Munden’s quickness with a gun is his confidence.
BM: Fast-draw is the fastest thing a human being does. Nodody does anything faster than what I do with guns.
Q: Can you give a comparison with something that would come close but is not as fast?
BM: Speed of light. Which is far beyond it. There is nothing next to it.
Shades of Ali. (Or as Munden might put it, in Ali, we can see shades of Munden.) To date, he has not shot himself in the crotch, which seems to me to be a minor miracle. (thx, dan)
Capturing Somali pirates: first-person shooter view
Watch as some Dutch marines board a container ship that had been hijacked by Somali pirates. The footage is from a camera mounted on one of the marines’ helmets.
Salami sorting robot
It’s no secret that I could watch food-sorting robots all day. This salami sorter is no exception:
The good stuff starts around 55 seconds.
Around the world in 80 seconds
Using clever editing transitions, this video takes the viewer around the world in just 80 seconds.
The best TV commercial ever
Or so says Errol Morris. It’s certainly the most honest advertising I’ve ever seen.
A bouncer in Birmingham hit me in the face with a crescent wrench five times and my wife’s boyfriend broke my jaw with a fence post. So if you don’t buy a trailer from me, it ain’t gonna hurt my feelings. So come on down to Cullman Liquidation and get yourself a home. Or don’t. I don’t care.
(via fimoculous)
European airspace timelapse, before and after the volcano
Here’s European airspace shutting down as the ashcloud from Eyjafjallajokull drifts over the continent:
The music is an inspired choice. And here’s European airspace starting back up again:
(via infosthetics)
Apollo 11 slow-motion launch
The view is from one of the cameras close to the engines. The narration is great; you really get a sense of how many things had to be considered to make it to the Moon (like the launch pad paint that burned and charred in order to protect the underlying materials). (via df)
Clever train doesn’t stop at stations
No time is wasted. The bullet train is moving all the time. If there are 30 stations between Beijing and Guangzhou, just stopping and accelerating again at each station will waste both energy and time. A mere 5 min stop per station (elderly passengers cannot be hurried) will result in a total loss of 5 min x 30 stations or 2.5 hours of train journey time!
Factor in slowdown/speedup time and it’s even longer. (thx, nick)
The fake problems in infomercials
We love these in our household. My wife was howling with laughter at the Shoe Dini commercial just last night…the “problem” was that if you bent over to put on your shoes, your shirt would get wrinkled. Oh, the humanity. (thx, mark)
New LCD Soundsystem video by Spike Jonze
LCD Soundsystem is back with a new album and a new music video directed by Spike Jonze, who is also back. Directing music videos that is.
Fun! Not sure what Jonze was going for there though…maybe a visual representation of a typical YouTube comments thread?
Nike shoe DJs
Watch as a pair of Tokyo DJs play a bunch of musical shoes.
Please note:
The NIKE FREE RUN+ is absolutely a running shoe.
Shoes sold at retail will NOT make music when bent or twisted.
(via @ftrain)
Pomplamoose covers Lady Gaga’s Telephone
Love it. Robin Sloan has previously discussed this type of “production as performance” video on Snarkmarket but Pomplamoose has started using the term “VideoSong”:
This cover is a VideoSong, a new medium with 2 rules:
1. What you see is what you hear (no lip-syncing for instruments or voice).
2. If you hear it, at some point you see it (no hidden sounds).
As NPR explains, the band is actually making a living from their covers…they sold 100,000 songs last year. Here’s their album of covers on iTunes.
David Lynch’s favorite filmmakers in 60 seconds
David Lynch likes a lot of different filmmakers. These are some of them:
(via @brainpicker)
The robot who considers towels
Who knew that watching a towel-folding robot could be so funny and fascinating?
I found this on Mike Migurski’s site and I cannot improve upon his description of the video:
There is so much here. The “previously-unseen towel” part of the title, the slightly-femmy movements of the robot, the way the 50X speed-up makes it look like a Svankmajer film, the diligent care with which it smooths out each towel when it’s done, and the palpable shock when it returns to the towel table and there aren’t any left to fold.
Big Wheel backflip on a Megaramp
A. Travis Pastrana. He’s that guy who can do a double backflip on a motorcycle.
B. Megaramp. The massive ramps used by skateboarders and BMXers to launch themselves dozens of feet into the air.
C. Big Wheel. Beloved children’s toy.
Here’s A backflipping a C on a B. Just watch:
Bonus: Big Wheel downhill racing by future Pastranas. (via that’s how it happened)
Video games attack NYC
Pixelized video game characters lay waste to NYC.
Give it a few seconds to get going…things get good right around Tetris time.
Baseball play of the year
We’re only a game or two into a long baseball season, but you might not see a better play all year than this one. Here’s a YouTube embed, although I don’t know how long it will last.
40 yard dash: average dude vs pro athlete
Video from the NFL Combine showing just how fast prospective NFL players can run compared to normal people.
It is almost unbelievable how quickly Jacoby Ford (the top performer in the 40 this year) covers that distance.
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