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Comedian Mark Malkoff set out to disprove that New Yorkers are unfriendly and unhelpful by cajoling people into carrying him the length of Manhattan.
Hilarious. He made it all the way up to 141st St & Broadway! (thx, micah)
I really can’t do a good job, any job, of explaining magnetic force in terms of something else you’re more familiar with, because I don’t understand it in terms of anything else you’re more familiar with.
This is why science is so maddening for some and so great for others.
I couldn’t find the entire first hour of the season six premiere of Lost that was supposed to have leaked online, but this contains the first two minutes (plus two minutes from last season):
Update: I’ve gotten some angry emails saying that I have spoiled the Lost season premiere for people by embedding this video showing the still frame of Jack on an airplane. To rebut:
1. Lost is unspoilable. What you think is happening either didn’t happen, won’t happen, will happen again, and has nothing to do with with happened previously or afterwards.
2. Seeing the first two minutes of a TV show doesn’t spoil the TV show…that’s just watching the show.
3. At the end of last season, if you picked the most obvious scenario for season six to open with, it would have been that the bomb reset the timeline and then seeing everyone on Flight 815 headed safely for Los Angeles, oblivious of all that we’ve witnessed in the past five years. You can’t spoil the obvious.
Update: Ok, here’s the first hour of the season premiere (starts at around 1:35:20). It’s a poor recording with even worse sound, but it’s watchable if you have to know RIGHT NOW. (thx, jeffrey)
I’m not sure what to the call the effect in this video — timelapse stop-motion? panorama time-stitch? — but I haven’t seen its like before.
For all you UI nerds out there, a four-minute video collection of some of the multi-touch gestures and actions on the iPad from Wednesday’s event.
Here are the annotations. (via @h_fj)
Remember those CNN videos of Haiti that I linked to last week? The ones where you could pan around in the scene as the video played? It’s probable that CNN used the Yellowbird camera to do them.
The camera uses six cleverly divided lenses in order to capture every possible viewing direction. The data stream generated by the camera is impressive. Through a double glass-fiber connection, a stream of 1200 Mbit per second is captured and saved in an uncompressed format.
Check out the demo. (thx, rakesh)
Update: Or perhaps they used Immersive Media’s rig. Their bridge-jumping demo is pretty crazy. They also did some videos for Red Bull of surfing the monster waves at Teahupoo. (thx, carl & kevin)
Nunchuck skills, bowhunting skills, computer hacking skills, tape measure skills. Girls only want boyfriends who have great skills.
We’re about a week away so this synchronized view of the crash of Flight 815 in realtime is a good amuse bouche for the season six premiere of Lost.
The National Board of Review gave Wes Anderson a Special Filmmaking Achievement award for Fantastic Mr. Fox; Anderson accepted the award in the medium of stop motion animation.
Mike Le has collected 20 great extended takes from a variety of movies, including no-brainers like The Shining and The Player but also some you may not have noticed before. (via @sippey)
The accent isn’t perfect (Herzog’s distinctive voice is difficult to impersonate well) but there are some great lines in this.
This is a pretty amazing effect: CNN is doing panoramic videos that allow the user to pan around while the video plays. Watching and panning feel as though you’re actually walking around in the scene holding the camera. (thx, jed)
A touching (but not sentimental) short documentary about the filmmaker’s mother and her birds.
This video deftly skewers the food industry’s current fixations, including This-Is-Why-You’re-Fat-grade hamburgers, fancy TV dinners, and junk food masquerading as wholesome:
We take the finest ingredients and put them in a bowl with salt and butter.
And “hide your salad” describes my salad dressing technique perfectly…it ends up more like ranch soup, really.
A species of orchid from Israel that looks and smells like a female bee tricks male long-horned bees into pollinating them.
Update: Michael Pollan recently discussed orchids in a piece for National Geographic.
Update: There was a scene in Adaptation about the bee orchid. (thx, charley)
Of course Andy Warhol made a TV show for MTV called Andy Warhol’s Fifteen Minutes.
The whole thing is a perfect snapshot of everything to love and hate about the 1980s: the art bull market, Manhattan, fashion’s hardworking LGBT backbone, and the nature of celebrity in the dawn of the fractured and streaming media world we live in now.
The link above has pointers to downloads of footage from three shows. (via fimoculous)
Watch the moon rise, planes land, smokestacks smoke, traffic pulse, and the sun rise.
Update: Coates posted an HD version of the same video.
Update: Here’s another NYC timelapse, this one by Dale Short. He also made a timelapse of the construction of the Cooper Union Academic Building:
This is two and a half years of construction at about 4 frames per day up until May 24, 2009.
From Maya Lin, a short video about deforestation.
The unchopped tree bit in the last minute is particularly beautiful.
Here’s the trailer for The Avon Barksdale Story, a documentary about the real-life Baltimore gangster than inspired the Avon Barksdale character on The Wire.
Barksdale’s real name, Nathan Avon Barksdale, and his nickname, “Bodie,” were both used in the series as composite characters. Avon Barksdale was The Wire’s first season’s central character. The storyline focused on the Barksdale clan and their ruthless hold on Baltimore’s underworld and the intense efforts of law enforcement to stop them. Barksdale was a real crime figure in Baltimore.
(thx, mark)
And not just any soccer ball…the official match ball for the 2010 World Cup.
There’s not a whole lot to do at work this week, right? So how about tucking into all ten hours of a PBS documentary featuring economist Milton Friedman called Free to Choose. Here’s part one:
Here’s part two and part three…all the rest are available on Google Video (aside from part six for some reason). From Wikipedia, a brief description of the series:
PBS telecast the series, beginning in January 1980; the general format was that of Dr. Friedman visiting and narrating a number of success and failure stories in history, which Dr. Friedman attributes to capitalism or the lack thereof (e.g. Hong Kong is commended for its free markets, while India is excoriated for relying on centralized planning especially for its protection of its traditional textile industry). Following the primary show, Dr. Friedman would engage in discussion with a number of selected persons, such as Donald Rumsfeld (then of G.D. Searle & Company).
From Vimeo’s list of favorite videos of 2009, the music video for Luv Deluxe by Cinnamon Chasers:
Also worth watching is the Tarantino Mixtape, which hovers somewhere between an analysis of the themes in QuentinTarantino’s films and a toe-tapping remix of all the great music, visuals, and sounds he uses in them. (via @brainpicker)
Nation’s Pride is a fictional Nazi propaganda film that appeared in Inglourious Basterds. The six-minute clip above was released as a promotion for IB and was shot by Eli Roth, who played the baseball bat-wielding Bear Jew (and is also a director of some repute). (thx, jeffrey)
Darth Vader and a number of Storm Troopers from the Star Wars Saga rang the opening bell at the New York Stock Exchange.
(via @kngofwrld)
I confess that I only had time this morning to watch the first 10 minutes, but from that viewing I can safely conclude that this is the best 70-minute video critique of The Phantom Menace that exists in the world. If the first 20 seconds don’t get you, stick around until “protagonist”. Or don’t take my word for it; here’s Lost’s Damon Lindelof’s reaction:
Your life is about to change. This is astounding film making. Watch ALL of it.
Part the first:
After watching the last 3-4 minutes of this first segment, I wanted to give Lucas a hug because I feel so bad for the guy for failing in public in such a huge way. (thx, scott)
A bunch of clips from movies and TV that show people enhancing things on computer screens:
And a more artful collection of hyperspace scenes from movies:
Both are via Andy, Mr. Supercuts himself.
Magazine publishers Bonnier and BERG, a London design consultancy, have collaborated on a digital magazine prototype called Mag+. The conceptual device is impressive in its restraint and its truth to form and function.
We find that the graphical page-turning metaphors that you see quite frequently in web-based e-magazine readers are not terribly believable, and they don’t feel very honest to the form of the screen. […] Scrolling systems are more appropriate to what we’re dealing with.
Sing it, brother! Also of note is the way that the video takes the conventional “let me talk over some graphics” screencast and presents it in a much more compelling way.
The Known Universe zooms out from Tibet to the limits of the observable universe. Dim the lights, full-screen it in HD, and you’re in for a treat.
Like Powers of Ten, except astronomically accurate. It’s not a dramatization, it’s a map; the positioning data was pulled from Hayden Planetarium’s Digital Universe Atlas, which is available for free download.
Since 1998, the American Museum of Natural History and the Hayden Planetarium have engaged in the three-dimensional mapping of the Universe. This cosmic cartography brings a new perspective to our place in the Universe and will redefine your sense of home. The Digital Universe Atlas is distributed to you via packages that contain our data products, like the Milky Way Atlas and the Extragalactic Atlas, and requires free software allowing you to explore the atlas by flying through it on your computer.
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