Smooth jazz version of Enter Sandman
Well done. Vocals by Metallica frontman James Hetfield.
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kottke.org posts about video
Green Eggs and Ham in Jamaican patois
Me no like
green eggs and ham
Me no like dem
Sam-I-Am.
(via cyn-c)
A nice iPad magazine
Based on their great Mag+ concept unveiled late last year, Bonnier and BERG have developed a really nice looking iPad version of Popular Science. No page-turning business…you swipe left/right to page through stories and then scroll to read through single stories.
What amazes me is that you don’t feel like you’re using a website, or even that you’re using an e-reader on a new tablet device — which, technically, is what it is. It feels like you’re reading a magazine.
It’s nice to see the original concept come to life so quickly and completely. Get it in the App Store.
Mercedes-Benz indoor tornado
The ventilation system at the Mercedes-Benz Museum can be repurposed to form a 100+ foot tall indoor tornado.
BLDGBLOG has more info and pics.
Douglas Adams on Parrots, The Universe, and Everything
Recorded the month he died, a talk by Douglas Adams on Parrots, The Universe, and Everything.
Unassuming long takes in movies
Jim Emerson collects eight of his favorite long takes that you might not have noticed before (no Touch of Evil, The Player, or Children of Men).
If you study all eight of these shots, you should learn enough to pass any film class.
Nor’easter timelapse
This is a radar timelapse of the 22 major storms to hit the Northeastern United States this winter.
From the Accuweather site:
These winter storms have dropped 30-40 inches of rain (and liquid snow) in the I-95 corridor, which would normally only receive 20-25 inches over the winter.
(via infectious greed)
Chatroulette cover of Lady Gaga’s Telephone
There are many Telephone video remixes out there; this one is my favorite. (thx, jacob)
The internet in 1969
What the wife selects on her console, will be paid for by the husband at his counterpart console.
Master bladesmith Bob Kramer
Bob Kramer’s handcrafted knives take more than a full day to make and cost $300 per inch (8” chef’s knife is $2400). The New Yorker did a interesting piece on Kramer in 2008. (via 37signals)
Photoshop 5’s magical fill tool
This is stunning. A version of this was presented at SIGGRAPH in August 2009. (via jimray)
Spin spin mesmerizing
From Cory Arcangel, two dancing display stands that spin at slightly different speeds. I actually watched the whole thing.
These sculptures are made from 2 over the counter ‘Dancing Stands’ (the tacky kinetic product display stands you can often see in down market stores) which have been modified to spin at slightly different speeds. When my modified stands are placed next to each other they go in and out of phase slowly.
Werner Herzog as Plastic Bag
I didn’t know it until just now, but I had been waiting all my life to watch a short film featuring Werner Herzog voicing a plastic shopping bag.
Struggling with its immortality, a discarded plastic bag ventures through the environmentally barren remains of America as it searches for its maker.
Fantastic. (via greg)
Viacom vs. YouTube
In defending itself against a copyright lawsuit brought by Viacom, YouTube notes that the media company has been surreptitiously uploading its copyrighted content to YouTube for years.
For years, Viacom continuously and secretly uploaded its content to YouTube, even while publicly complaining about its presence there. It hired no fewer than 18 different marketing agencies to upload its content to the site. It deliberately “roughed up” the videos to make them look stolen or leaked. It opened YouTube accounts using phony email addresses. It even sent employees to Kinko’s to upload clips from computers that couldn’t be traced to Viacom. And in an effort to promote its own shows, as a matter of company policy Viacom routinely left up clips from shows that had been uploaded to YouTube by ordinary users. Executives as high up as the president of Comedy Central and the head of MTV Networks felt “very strongly” that clips from shows like The Daily Show and The Colbert Report should remain on YouTube.
This jibes with what I heard a couple of years ago:
I heard that the staff of the Daily Show and Colbert Report upload the shows to YouTube as soon as they can after the shows air and then the next day, lawyers from Comedy Central hit YouTube with takedown requests for the uploaded shows.
(thx, @peretti)
Virtual choir on YouTube
Almost 200 people singing while sitting at home in front of their own computers are stitched together into one big virtual chorus:
Nice presentation. Here’s how it was organized. A bunch of audition videos from the singers are available on YT as well (for example).
(thx, claude)
History of freestyle aerial skiing
From the early 80s, a video history of freestyle aerial acrobatic skiing.
Note the smooth-skiing gent in the first minute and the almost aggressive lack of helmets.
The hidden meaning of Lady Gaga’s Telephone video
Almost more fun than watching Lady Gaga’s music videos is watching people try to figure out what it all means. One of the most entertaining analyses of the Telephone video is this Robert Langdon-esque take:
Lady Gaga’s 9-minute video featuring Beyonce is steeped in weirdness and shock value. Behind the strange aesthetic, however, lies a deeper meaning, another level of interpretation. The video refers to mind control and, more specifically, Monarch Programming, a covert technique profusely used in the entertainment industry. We’ll look at the occult meaning of the video “Telephone”.
Telephone, music video, Lady Gaga, Beyonce
This might be the last great music video. Beyonce picks up Gaga from jail in the Pussy Wagon from Kill Bill! But Christ, the product placement. This thing has more brands in it than Logorama.
Miniature NYC, a movie
Do yourself a favor: take the next five minutes and watch this tilt-shift video of NYC in fullscreen HD. The construction stuff that starts about a minute in is just great.
Whereas Koyaanisqatsi made NYC look big and busy, The Sandpit turns the city into something you can hold in your hands or put in your pocket. The making of is worth a read…all the tilt-shift effects were done in post. (via quips)
Pink Terror
An ultra slow motion video clip featuring firecrackers, smashed watermelons, and Stephen Hawking.
Skiing down Mount Everest
Forty years ago, Yuichiro Miura skied down Mount Everest.
“When I planned to ski Everest, the first thing I faced was ‘How can I return alive?’” he recalls. “All the preparation and training was based on this question. But the more I prepared, I knew the chance of survival was very slim. Nobody in the world had done this before, so I told myself that I must face death. Otherwise, I am not eligible.”
Miura’s exploits were the subject of The Man Who Skied Down Everest, which won the Oscar for best documentary.
Ten things you didn’t know about orgasm
In a TED talk, Mary Roach discusses ten things that you didn’t know about orgasm.
A woman had an orgasm every time she brushed her teeth.
A bit NSFW here and there. (via 3qd)
First-person perspective of a bus crash
A security camera on the front of a bus rolls as the bus smashes into about 20 cars on the highway.
The view from the side-view cameras are even worse.
Green screened
I had no idea how many outdoor scenes on TV shows are shot on a green screen. Here’s a reel with several before and after examples.
(via that’s how it happened)
Insanely deep fractal zoom
I was really into fractals in college (I know…) when I was making rave flyers (I know!) for a friend’s parties in Iowa (I know! I know! Shut up already!). Anyway, the thing that I really used to love doing with this fractal application that I had on my computer was zooming in to different parts of the familiar Mandelbrot set as far as I could. I never got very far…between 5 or 6 zooms in, my Packard Bell 486/66 (running Windows 3.11) would buckle under the computational pressure and hang. Therefore, I absolutely love this extremely deep HD zoom into the Mandelbrot set:
Just how deep is this computational rabbit hole?
The final magnification is e.214. Want some perspective? a magnification of e.12 would increase the size of a particle to the same as the earths orbit! e.21 would make a particle look the same size as the milky way and e.42 would be equal to the universe. This zoom smashes all of them all away. If you were “actually” traveling into the fractal your speed would be faster than the speed of light.
After awhile, the self-similarity of the thing is almost too much to bear; I think I went into a coma around 5:00 but snapped to in time for the exciting (but not unexpected) conclusion. Full-screen in a dark room is recommended.
Update: This 46-minute video seems to be the deepest fractal zoom out there right now, with a zoom level of 10^10000.
The magnification factor is so much less in the video above but that one’s more fun/artistic. And 10^10000 is such an absurdly large number1 that there’s no way to think about it in physical terms…the zoom factor from the size of the universe to the smallest measurable distance (the Planck length) is only about 10^60.
But as we’ve previously learned, it’s not actually that large.↩
Meat stylus for the iPhone
Sales of CJ Corporation’s snack sausages are on the increase in South Korea because of the cold weather; they are useful as a meat stylus for those who don’t want to take off their gloves to use their iPhones.
It seems that the sausages, electrostatically speaking, are close approximations of the human finger. Here’s the not-entirely-useful English translation of a Korean news article about the soaring sausage sales. (via clusterflock)
Update: More than one person has suggested that this whole thing is a hoax. Video or it didn’t happen? Feast thine eyes on someone playing a rhythm game on the iPhone with two of the meat sticks in question:
Twitter code visualization
Watch Twitter’s engineering team and code base grow as the site gets more and more popular. It gets nuts at the end.
(thx, chris)
The auteur’s Super Bowl
What if the Super Bowl was directed by Wes Anderson or Quentin Tarantino? You’d get something like this. The Werner Herzog bit at the end is great.
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