Though his several wins came early on in the competition's history, El Wingador is still competing in the Wing Bowl. In the 2012 competition, held today, El Wingador came in third while Takeru Kobayashi completely demolished the competition in his first attempt, eating 337 wings in the process.
From the This Must Be the Place series, a lovely short film about the Prime Burger Restaurant in midtown Manhattan. The restaurant opened in 1938 and one of the servers, Artie, has been there since 1952.
For many of the guys that work here, the restaurant is like a second home -- some of them have been slinging burgers, making shakes, and waiting on customers at this location for decades. Opened in 1938, the place hasn't been altered since the early '60s, and it looks all the better for it. Here the waiters and workers of Prime Burger discuss their views on their chosen profession, and the unique nature of the place itself.
So why the need to order right? Because to keep up with the fast food chains, the DiMicelis started par-broiling their burgers. Par-broiling produces a less juicy burger. So when you order at Prime Burger specify you want your burger ($5.25 for a hamburger, $5.95 for a cheeseburger) made from scratch, and that you're willing to wait the extra few minutes.
You've seen one washing machine self-destruction video, you've seen them all, right? Maybe not. Back in August, I posted this short video of a washer destroying itself (with some help from a brick) but this longer video is mesmerizing and almost poignant at times.
At times, it seems as though the washer is attempting to turn into the Picasso version of itself, a Cubist sculpture manifesting itself over time. (via @aaroncoleman0)
The Eames' Powers of Ten and Eva Szasz's Cosmic Zoom both came out in 1968 and were based on Kees Boeke's 1957 essay called Cosmic View. This seems like an incredible coincidence. I couldn't find anything online about which film came first or if there was any influence one way or the other, so I thought I'd ask if anyone knows anything about which came out first. Hit me at jason@kottke.org.
The Pronunciation Book channel on YouTube shows you how to say various words in American English in a straightforward fashion. Here's how to say Zegna, the men's clothing brand:
This is not to be confused with the Pronunciation Manual channel, which does the same thing in the same format but much funnier and more incorrect.
I could have embedded a dozen more...I have no idea why I think these are so funny but I just cannot stop laughing at them. Ok, one more:
The Bay of Fundy in Eastern Canada has some of the world's greatest tides...at times, high tide is 50+ feet higher than low tide. Here's a time lapse video of those tides in action.
Maybe I'm just way over-cautious but this guy does almost kill himself while bungee jumping off a bridge using a jury-rigged climbing rope and harness, right? This is just totally batshit crazy:
Skip ahead to about 1:30...everything before that is just filler. (via ★bryce)
The Fournitures Generales Pour Le Piano is a shop in Paris that sells parts for piano repair. The owner runs the shop himself, sells fewer and fewer parts each year, and dreams of building a one-string instrument which sounds like a piano, lute, and harp all at the same time.
This is mesmerizing: using Google Image Search and starting with a transparent image, this video cycles through each subsequent related image, over 2900 in all.
The sound and picture are poor, but the entirety of Errol Morris' A Brief History of Time is available on YouTube.
Featuring music from Philip Glass, the film is a documentary about Stephen Hawking and his ideas about the universe. Morris recently stated on Twitter:
Yes. I plan to re-release [A Brief History of Time]. (It was never properly color corrected and is one of my best films.)
The film is difficult, if not impossible, to find on DVD and isn't available on Netflix, Amazon Instant Video, or iTunes. And as far as I can tell, the soundtrack was never released either.
Thirty Japanese giant hornets take on an entire hive of European honey bees and slaughter 30,000 bees in three hours.
Not having evolved alongside the giant hornet, European honey bees don't have a natural defense against them. But the Japanese honey bee does:
The Japanese honey bee, on the other hand, has a defense against attacks of this manner. When a hornet approaches the hive to release pheromones, the bee workers emerge from their hive in an angry cloud-formation with some 500 individuals. As they form a tight ball around the hornet, the ball increases in heat to 47 °C (117 °F) from their vibrating wings, forming a convection oven as the heat released by the bees' bodies is spread over the hornets. Because bees can survive higher temperatures (48 to 50 °C (118 to 122 °F)) than the hornet (44 to 46 °C (111 to 115 °F)), the latter dies.
This video, which takes its audio from a 2007 interview, takes a crack at defining it.
So, a dubstep or grime is kinda like this ultra slow, ultra dirty spawn of hip hop, but it's almost at a breakbeat speed, but it's at a halftime breakbeat speed. So it feels, like, abnormally slow, and just gives this really heavy feel.
Since the evolution of music has slowed since, say, the early 1980s, I thought it would be a long time before a popular genre of music came along that seemed, to my old ears, to be noisy garbage...but then dubstep came along. Industrial, happy hardcore, metal, punk, glitch, and even drum & bass I can appreciate, but dubstep makes me want to yell at children to get off lawns. And I actually like that door stopper noise!
This is kind of amazing: if you put a contact microphone on a hard surface and then process the sound in realtime, you can turn that surface into a touch screen...or a programmable musical instrument.
The quantum levitation videos I showed you a couple months ago are pretty cool, but scientists scienticiens at the Japan Institute of Science and Technology have upped the game by using QL CGI to build a real-world Wipeout track.
Say it with me: science!! Also, do Rainbow Road next! (via ★interesting)
Update: Say it with me: advertising! Or some other such nonsense. Several people have alerted me that this video is a fake...you can see vapor trails passing through walls, etc. Boo. Boo-urns. (thx, all)
Three guys ride on tiny paths next to steep rock faces and over narrow wooden bridges. I could only manage watching a minute of this...I almost threw up in fear.
Get it while you can: an hour-long BBC documentary about Steve Jobs with on-camera interviews with Woz, Stephen Fry, Tim Berners-Lee, John Sculley and many others.
Before Ice Cube became a rapper, he studied architectural drafting at the Phoenix Institute of Technology, so he has some interesting things to say in this short appreciation of Charles and Ray Eames.
They was doing mashups before mashups even existed. It's not about the pieces, it's how the pieces work together. You know, taking something that already exist and making it something special. You know, kinda like sampling.
Occupy Wall Street went up to protest at Lincoln Center last night during a performance of Philip Glass' opera Satyagraha. New Yorker music critic Alex Ross was there and captured the protest on video, which included Glass himself reading the closing lines from the opera, amplified to the crowd by the people's mic. It is an amazing scene.
When the Satyagraha listeners emerged from the Met, police directed them to leave via side exits, but protesters began encouraging them to disregard the police, walk down the steps, and listen to Glass speak. Hesitantly at first, then in a wave, they did so. The composer proceeded to recite the closing lines of Satyagraha, which come from the Bhagavad-Gita (after 3:00 in the video above): "When righteousness withers away and evil rules the land, we come into being, age after age, and take visible shape, and move, a man among men, for the protection of good, thrusting back evil and setting virtue on her seat again." True to form, he said it several times, with the "human microphone" repeating after him. Lou Reed and Laurie Anderson were in attendance, and at one point Reed helped someone crawl over the barricade that had been set up along the sidewalk.
When dense briny water (left behind by newly formed sea ice) sinks, it freezes the water around it, forming an icicle that stretches to the sea floor. Then it freezes water and wildlife on the sea floor. David Attenborough narrates:
This is like street skating except with alpine skis down hilly city terrain. Includes jumps over hung laundry & parked cars, railslides down stairs, etc. Crazy.
I've been on the web for 17 years now, I'm a professional link finder, and I have never in my life seen anything like these guys performing on an Indian talent show. They *start off* by biting into fluorescent light bulbs and it just gets more nuts from there.
You never really see this much bleeding on American Idol... (via unlikely words)
In this 15-minute video, Terry Gilliam talks about how he does the cut-out animations that defined the Monty Python visual aesthetic. Gilliam's technique is all about simplicity and embracing constraint.
On the 48th anniversary of the assassination of JFK, Errol Morris talks to Tink Thompson about "The Umbrella Man", a gentleman who was pictured in the Zapruder film standing with an open umbrella near where Kennedy was shot on a sunny day. The result is a nifty six-minute film.
For years, I've wanted to make a movie about the John F. Kennedy assassination. Not because I thought I could prove that it was a conspiracy, or that I could prove it was a lone gunman, but because I believe that by looking at the assassination, we can learn a lot about the nature of investigation and evidence. Why, after 48 years, are people still quarreling and quibbling about this case? What is it about this case that has led not to a solution, but to the endless proliferation of possible solutions?
The Updike piece from the New Yorker is available here (subscribers only, but the abstract is informative):
For example, "the umbrella man": though the day was clear and blowy, he can be detected, in photographs, standing on the curb just about where the assassination would in a few seconds occur, holding a black umbrella above him; seconds later he is again photographed, walking away, gazing tranquilly at the scramble of horrified spectators. His umbrella is now furled. Who was he? Where is he now?
This is Arnold Schwarzenegger doing the DVD commentary for Total Recall. Instead of adding any context to the film, he simply describes exactly what was happening in each scene.
I have three guesses as to what's going on here:
1. It's a fake from a really good impersonator.
2. Arnold is dumb and he's unaware of how dumb he is.
3. But my money's on this one: Arnold was contractually obligated to do the DVD commentary but when it came to it, he didn't really want to. So he torpedoed the whole thing and had some fun in the meantime. (via stellar)
This is not your typical sky time lapse...instead of looping through 365 days in one video, each day gets its own little movie in a grid.
A camera installed on the roof of the Exploratorium museum in San Francisco captured an image of the sky every 10 seconds. From these images, I created a mosaic of time-lapse movies, each showing a single day. The days are arranged in chronological order. My intent was to reveal the patterns of light and weather over the course of a year.
Speaking of going fast, this is a lovely 22-minute documentary about a downhill skateboarding race in Teutonia, Brazil where the competitors reach speeds in excess of 70 mph on almost unbelievably rough pavement.
Rival protesting groups clashed with police and each other during Independence Day festivities in Warsaw, Poland and someone caught some of it on a camera mounted on a remote control helicopter.
This shorter video of police double-timing it down a narrow Warsaw street is almost cinematic. It reminds me of how the different camera views in the Madden NFL video games inspired the NFL broadcasting networks to invent camera systems to provide similar views. In the future, the news will look more and more like movies. (via @coudal)
One of the many micro-genres featured on kottke.org is the "going fast video". In that spirit, here's a car going 462 mph on the Bonneville Salt Flats.
My favorite part is right around 30 seconds, when he hits the gas and you can see the dirt fly up from the rear wheels. Also, the driver's demeanor is an odd combination of frightened and bored, like Bill Murray on the elliptical in Lost in Translation. Help! (via devour)
Michael J. Fox recently took the stage at his annual benefit for Parkinson's disease and played a familiar favorite: Johnny B. Goode. Marvin, get on the phone to your cousin!
A video compilation of deaths from old school video games, from Pong and Space Invaders right on up to Afterburner.
The music is a MIDI version of Mad World, originally done by Tears for Fears but probably best known in the gaming community as the music in the most poignant trailer ever done for a violent third-person shooter game.
When I was a kid, one of my favorite things on one of my favorite shows (3-2-1 Contact) was Al Jarnow's Cosmic Clock, a short video animation showing a billion years of time passing in fewer than two minutes. There's so much science in this little video.
This is one of those things I thought I'd just never see again. YouTube is truly a global treasure.
On October 26th, a hole was blasted in the base of 125' tall Condit Dam on the White Salmon River in Washington. In less than 2 hours, the reservoir behind the dam drained completely and the White Salmon flowed unimpeded by a dam for the first time in 100 years.
The time lapse at the end of the reservoir draining is awesome. (★interesting)
Writer turned knife maker Joel Bukiewicz of Cut Brooklyn talks about the human element of craft, and the potential for a skill to mature into an art. And in sharing his story, he alights on the real meaning of handmade-a movement whose riches are measured in people, not cash.
At Cut Brooklyn, Bukiewicz also does knife sharpening, holds open shop hours in his workshop, holds knife skills classes, and has various knives for sale.
Ok you guys, apparently Michael Winslow is some sort of national treasure and we didn't know it. First there's the Led Zeppelin thing. And now I've run across this 2009 film of Winslow imitating several different typewriters in chronological order of their year of release...on each typewriter, he "types out" the words "the history of the typewriter recited by Michael Winslow".
I was a little disappointed they didn't have him do an ImageWriter II (I know, technically not a typewriter), but I still love this to pieces. Frieze has a bit more info.
For nearly 21 minutes, the camera moves gently around Winslow in a recording studio as he impersonates the noises of 32 typewriters. Inter-titles announce the dates of the respective machines' manufacture, their brand and model number. It is an absorbing feat of mimicry. From the frantic clucking and strenuous creaking of his '1895 Barlock Mod. 4', through to the ping-pong sounds of the '1954 Hermes Mod. Baby', and concluding with the '1983 Olympia Monika Deluxe', Winslow produces a percussive tour de force that could take its place alongside the Dada sound poetry of Raoul Hausmann or Kurt Schwitters and the cartoon exuberance of voice actor Mel Blanc.
There is a sense amongst my generation that Michael Winslow's best performing days are behind him. (You'll remember Winslow as Officer Sound Effects from Police Academy.) After all, we live in the age of the beatboxing flautist. You might change your tune after watching Winslow do Zeppelin's Whole Lotta Love. The first 28 seconds are like, oh, I've heard this before yawn zzzzzzzzzz WHOA, WHERE THE HELL DID THAT GUITAR NOISE COME FROM??!
And then it goes bananas right around 1:30. This is a must-see. (via @beep)
What the what? This video gives a little more explanation into the effect at work here (superconductivity + quantum trapping of the magnetic field in quantum flux tubes) and an awesome demonstration of a crude rail system. You can almost hear your tiny mind explode when the "train" goes upside-down.
Scientists have developed a spray gun that sprays the burn victim's own skin cells onto the affected area heals them within a matter of days, not weeks or months.
The guy doesn't even look like he got burned. (via @delfuego)
In 1987, Apple made a video showcasing a concept they called Knowledge Navigator:
The crazy thing is that the year in the video is 2011...and Apple announced something very much like Knowledge Navigator (Siri, a natural language voice assistant) at their event yesterday. (via waxy)
Richard Feynman talking about the beauty of science and of the natural world over a bunch of video footage taken from NASA, Microcosmos, and BBC nature docs like Planet Earth? This is fantastically right up my alley.
Part two is Honours and part three is Curiosity. If I ever go on hallucinogenic walkabout in the desert, I'd want Richard Feynman to be my spirit animal. (via ★interesting)
You've never seen a literally slack jaw until you've seen a four-year-old watching Empire Strikes Back for the first time and learning that Darth Vader is Luke's father.
A couple years ago, I pointed to a 10-minute clip of a longer documentary called The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces. Some kind soul has put the whole thing up on YouTube:
This witty and original film is about the open spaces of cities and why some of them work for people while others don't. Beginning at New York's Seagram Plaza, one of the most used open areas in the city, the film proceeds to analyze why this space is so popular and how other urban oases, both in New York and elsewhere, measure up. Based on direct observation of what people actually do, the film presents a remarkably engaging and informative tour of the urban landscape and looks at how it can be made more hospitable to those who live in it.
Nishimoto and two other research team members served as subjects for the experiment, because the procedure requires volunteers to remain still inside the MRI scanner for hours at a time.
They watched two separate sets of Hollywood movie trailers, while fMRI was used to measure blood flow through the visual cortex, the part of the brain that processes visual information. On the computer, the brain was divided into small, three-dimensional cubes known as volumetric pixels, or "voxels."
"We built a model for each voxel that describes how shape and motion information in the movie is mapped into brain activity," Nishimoto said.
The brain activity recorded while subjects viewed the first set of clips was fed into a computer program that learned, second by second, to associate visual patterns in the movie with the corresponding brain activity.
Brain activity evoked by the second set of clips was used to test the movie reconstruction algorithm. This was done by feeding 18 million seconds of random YouTube videos into the computer program so that it could predict the brain activity that each film clip would most likely evoke in each subject.
Finally, the 100 clips that the computer program decided were most similar to the clip that the subject had probably seen were merged to produce a blurry yet continuous reconstruction of the original movie.
The kicker: "the breakthrough paves the way for reproducing the movies inside our heads that no one else sees, such as dreams and memories". First time travelling neutrinos and now this...what a time to be alive. (via ★essl)
Time lapse movie composed of photographs taken from the International Space Station as it orbits the Earth at night.
This movie begins over the Pacific Ocean and continues over North and South America before entering daylight near Antarctica. Visible cities, countries and landmarks include (in order) Vancouver Island, Victoria, Vancouver, Seattle, Portland, San Fransisco, Los Angeles. Phoenix. Multiple cities in Texas, New Mexico and Mexico. Mexico City, the Gulf of Mexico, the Yucatan Peninsula, Lightning in the Pacific Ocean, Guatemala, Panama, Columbia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile, and the Amazon. Also visible is the earths ionosphere (thin yellow line) and the stars of our galaxy.
After reading the fantastic Tom Junod piece on Fred Rogers earlier in the week, I poked around on YouTube for some Mister Rogers clips and shows. There are only a few full episodes on there but two of them are particularly relevant as kids across the nation go back to school for the fall:
I watched the first episode with Ollie yesterday (he was a big fan of the trolley, which was always my favorite part of the show too) and then we watched how crayons are made and how people make trumpets.
The giants of physics (and Morgan Freeman, who can be a giant of anything he wants) explain quantum mechanics using relatively simple terms and autotune.
Update: This is part of a longer talk that Vonnegut gave...a transcript is here.
I want to share with you something I've learned. I'll draw it on the blackboard behind me so you can follow more easily [draws a vertical line on the blackboard]. This is the G-I axis: good fortune-ill fortune. Death and terrible poverty, sickness down here-great prosperity, wonderful health up there. Your average state of affairs here in the middle [points to bottom, top, and middle of line respectively].
The best part of this film is not even the 3D rendering itself, but the outtakes and "making of" footage that has been interwoven throughout, including footage of a plaster replica of Ed's hand onto which he is meticulously mapping the polygon vertices that make up the three dimensional model (around 1:30). That's really remarkable. The math that we take for granted for rendering 3D was being invented, real time, to create this video. (Ed's credited for having working out that math to handle things like texture mapping, 3D anti-aliasing and z-buffering.)
See also Vol Libre, a film from 1980 that, for the first time, used fractals to generate graphics. (via @beep)
This is what we do in America: instead of fixing expensive household machinery, we destroy it on video and put the results up on YouTube. It's our gladiatorial pastime.
You'll want to click away from this about halfway through (boring!) but stick with it until the end; it gets a lot better suddenly. (via stellar)
Update: Well, so much for being clever. This video was filmed in the UK, not the US. Perhaps I should have said "what we do in the first world" instead?
I combined everyday soap bubbles with exotic ferrofluid liquid to create an eerie tale, using macro lenses and time lapse techniques. Black ferrofluid and dye race through bubble structures, drawn through by the invisible forces of capillary action and magnetism.
I'm not sure what this is -- some National Geographic thing? -- but it's fascinating. The short clip follows a group of young Sudanese men who move to the United States and remark on the cultural differences they observe.
Their reaction to the food and the characterization of the US as unfriendly are especially interesting.
Update: Several people wrote in to say that this clip is from the 2006 documentary God Grew Tired of Us. (thx, all)
Using facial recognition in realtime via a webcam, this system lets you control the face of another person...like, say, John Malkovich.
Given a photo of person A, we seek a photo of person B with similar pose and expression. Solving this problem enables a form of puppetry, in which one person appears to control the face of another. When deployed on a webcam-equipped computer, our approach enables a user to control another person's face in real-time. This image-retrieval inspired approach employs a fully-automated pipeline of face analysis techniques, and is extremely general-we can puppet anyone directly from their photo collection or videos in which they appear. We show several examples using images and videos of celebrities from the Internet.
But his tone is his real strength. "I try to identify that thing in a product that matters most to me," Lisagor says. "I'll glom onto that element and try to recreate it in this linear story I'm telling." That calm, Billy Mays-free approach conveys an inherent trust. It assumes that the viewer is the kind of person smart enough to appreciate the product's value. That's exactly the kind of customer tech startups want, which does much to explain their love for him: Lisagor is sui generis -- "the best and only one doing what he does," Dorsey says -- and his promos blend "the aesthetics and techniques of advertising with the storytelling of an instructional video,"says Malthe Sigurdsson, Rdio VP of product design.
He's got himself a web site on which you can view his work. Congrats on all your success, Adam...you smell great!
In 1956, 96-year-old Samuel Seymour appeared on a game show called I've Got A Secret...his secret was that he saw Lincoln's assassination when he was five years old.
A live squid with its head removed is served on top of a bowl of sushi rice, accompanied by sashimi prepared from the head (usually sliced ika (squid) and ika-kimo (squid liver)) as well as other seafood. Seasoned soy sauce is first poured on top of the squid to make it "dance".
AGHHHH!! Gak! That is just about the freakiest thing I've ever seen. Delicious torture! (via mlkshk)
This scene from iCarly, a Nickelodeon show for tweens and pre-tweens, references the scene in season five of The Wire where (highlight text to show spoilers!) Michael kills Snoop.
I've seen other more formal on-stage performances by these amazing French twin dancers, but I like this one the best...even fooling around, their precision is impressive.
I wasn't going to watch all twenty-five minutes of this day-in-the-life feature about Pixar's John Lasseter, but I got sucked in after the first two minutes for some reason and couldn't stop. The main takeaway is that Lasseter is a relentlessly upbeat, absurdly rich, hugging, cheeseball train freak.
Watching it, I found it almost impossible to reconcile his cheeseball personality with the kind of movies that Pixar makes, except to note that the Pixar films he's been involved with in a directorial or story capacity (Toy Storys 1-3, Cars 1-2) are the studio's syrupiest (and Randy Newmanest). (via devour)
Did you know 3-D printers could make complex objects with moving parts like gears and crescent wrenches? I had no idea...this is kind of mind-blowing. The guy at the beginning likens the technology to Star Trek's replicator.
But by the fourth game I started to pick up tendencies in all the batters. Jason Bartlett swung at first-pitch changeups. Will Venable couldn't hit the palm ball. In fact, most of these free-swinging Padres couldn't hit Dock's funky palm ball. I threw it often. But by then, also, the first acid distractions entered: the TV flickered; the cracks in the wall started to move; the hand soap started to breathe -- those sorts of things. Plus I was drawn to the outdoor garden between innings. Rain was near, I sensed.
Who knows how long this is going to be up because it doesn't appear to be from a legit source, but Talking Funny, a one-hour HBO special featuring Ricky Gervais, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Jerry Seinfeld talking about comedy, is available on YouTube in four parts. Here's part one to get you going:
This guy drove the entire way around Manhattan (24 miles) in just 26 minutes, averaging 56 miles/hour and topping out at 111 miles/hour.
Someone left this typically New York comment:
I am an NYC cab driver and I promise I could beat this record in my crown Victoria. Simple factors that are unaware to the civilian driver the cabby knows. This cabby knows to drive sunday night when theres no construction work being done, this cabby knows what speed to maintain to time the lights on the westside highway and this cabby knows the quickest way from the FDR to the West side highway.
The third episode of Kirby Ferguson's excellent Everything is a Remix has been posted. The first episode was about music, the second dealt with movies, and the third is on technological innovation.
"I invented nothing new. I simply assembled the discoveries of other men behind whom were centuries of work. Had I worked fifty or ten or even five years before, I would have failed. So it is with every new thing. Progress happens when all the factors that make for it are ready and then it is inevitable. To teach that a comparatively few men are responsible for the greatest forward steps of mankind is the worst sort of nonsense." -- Henry Ford
FYI: the credits are actually in the middle of the video...there's another few minutes of material after they run.
For completenessesses's sake, here's Werner Herzog reading Go the Fuck to Sleep. The video was shot at the book's launch at the New York Public Library last night.
See also Samuel L. Jackson's reading. All we need now are readings by Walken, Pacino, Oprah, Ian McShane, Joan Cusack, Alec Baldwin, David Ogden Stiers, David Attenborough, and Yeardley Smith as Lisa Simpson. Internet, make it happen!
If you thought a children's book called Go the Fuck to Sleep couldn't get any funnier, here's the ultimate f-bomb thespian, Samuel L. Jackson, reading it.
I think I've featured this robot on the site before (yep, here it is), but she seems to have acquired some new skills. Throwing the mobile phone into the air and catching it is flat-out unbelievable but I liked the quiet deftness of the hand's rice tweezing.
Not quite sure how to describe this semi-liquid picker-upper in an enticing way, but I can say that my mouth dropped open about 5 seconds in to the demo.
And here I am, still using paper towels like a sucker!
You may remember the New York version. This is the same deal -- asking people on the street what song they're listening to on their headphones -- except in London.
3-Way Street is a fascinating video by Ron Gabriel that highlights bad interactions between cars, bikes, and pedestrians at a typical NYC street intersection.
There are lots of ways to show these interactions...the overhead view and highlighting are particularly effective design choices. Well done. (thx, janelle)
This one's pretty simple: one guy tries to rinse off some shampoo while another guy surreptitiously applies more and more shampoo to the first guy's head.
Space photography and videography all looks pretty much the same: high contrast, lots of black backgrounds, smooth, and often sterile. Designer Chris Abbas took a bunch of photos from the Cassini Mission (to Saturn) and made them into something that is definitely not your usual NASA video.
This is a wonderful seven-minute HD video tour of Earth using video shot from orbit.
Look at this neat picture of Great Salt Lake in Utah. And the variation in color? That's due to an almost a complete blockage of the circulation of the lake by a trestle for a railroad that crosses from one side to the other. It stops the circulation and things get a little bit saltier and certainly saltier at the north end of the lake.
The NY Times has a great video on the crossover dribble, one of the most effective moves in basketball. Includes interviews with Allen Iverson, Tim Hardaway, and Dwyane Wade. (thx, aaron)
You think you're good at Tetris? Think again. Hell, you think you're good at anything? Think again, again! Tetris grandmaster Jin8 shows you how it's done:
It starts getting insane around the 3:00 mark and then, at 5 minutes in, all the blocks turn invisible and he keeps right on going! It's like he's playing blindfold speed chess on the hood of a stock car!! I mean, !!!!!
ASCIImeo takes Vimeo video and plays them as ASCII art. Here's an example video: Dogboarding. I love that the player controls are all text as well...here's a screenshot:
Not even going to try to explain this one. Ok, I'll try a little...this is Yung Jake singing about datamoshing and making animated gifs and such.
you think it's connection you think it's your bandwidth but its me. i'll steal your bitch like a bandit see me on YouTube. fucking with video find me on world star. find me on Vimeo im not on PhotoBooth. that shit's different cuz dey told me to step out of the frame but i didnt
Lovely short film clip of BBC Radiophonic Workshop's Delia Derbyshire demonstrating how to make electronic music using tape loops. Look at the beat matching!
It was Derbyshire who gave the original Doctor Who theme its distinctive sound. (via ★danielpunkass)
Following on from the Kill Bill section of episode 2 of Everything is a Remix, this video contains what feels like an exhaustive look at the movies that Tarantino referenced in Kill Bill.
Synesthesia is a short film by Terri Timely that attempts in an artful way to give the viewer a sense of what synesthesia ("the blending or mixing of senses") is like.
In this version, Tracy Flick tries to buy a car from Mr McAllister.
I bought a box of old VHS tapes at the Farmers Market in Wilmington, DE for $5 on Mothers Day. I had no idea that this working print was included in the box when I purchased it.
This wooden box has a switch on it. When the switch is flipped on, the box flips it off again. On, off. On, off. On....off. And then the box gets more creative in making sure the switch remains off.
For those of you who are still confused about what happened to whom and in whose mind, here's a 1-minute silent explanation of Inception using only the OS X Finder.
I love this observation about taste and creative work from Ira Glass:
Nobody tells this to people who are beginners, I wish someone told me. All of us who do creative work, we get into it because we have good taste. But there is this gap. For the first couple years you make stuff, it's just not that good. It's trying to be good, it has potential, but it's not. But your taste, the thing that got you into the game, is still killer. And your taste is why your work disappoints you. A lot of people never get past this phase, they quit.
The quote is an abridged version of the transcript from this video interview with Glass:
Two in a row from Product by Process, but I can't resist this video of a group of Canadian Army engineers taking a Jeep apart and putting it back together again in less than four minutes total.
Each hand made hourglass comprises highly durable borosilicate glass and millions of stainless steel nanoballs, and is available in a 10 or 60 minute timer.
The first ascent of the north face of Eiger, a mountain in the Swiss Alps (13,025 feet tall), happened in 1938 and took three days. Watch as Ueli Steck climbs it in 2 hours, 47 minutes, and 33 seconds.
The whole thing is pretty much insane, but you'll really want to start paying attention around the 2:15 mark. He's running up that mountain! (via devour)
On April 29th, Google is shutting down playback at Google Video. Instead of transitioning everything over to YouTube (which would seemingly make a lot of sense), they're just shutting it down with two weeks notice. If you're comfortable with the command line (can't they make this easier?), you can help archive.org save some of the best of Google Video. (via waxy)
Pitch-perfect take-off of BBC's Human Planet nature series. The subject is The Douche, an urban-dwelling bottom feeder.
Among the progressive forward-thinking citizens, there stands a great cancer, a type of human that is not evolved like the rest of the race: The Douche. For the poor Douche, hunting is still its main priority. This type of human does not hunt for food; they are consistently trying to find their own self esteem.
Human Planet is a pretty great show, but I would love to see an entire series like this: Soccer Moms, The Hipster, Nerds, Trophy Wives, Eurotrash, The Academic, etc. (via devour)
Much of the village on the Thai island of Koh Panyee is actually floating; the island is too rocky to build much of anything on land. So when a group of kids wanted to start a soccer club, they built themselves a floating soccer pitch...which led to some interesting advantages once they started playing against other teams.
What a great idea...Noah Kalina, Adam Lisagor, William Wilkinson, and Oliver White made an iPhone app that helps you remember to take a daily photo of yourself inspired by Noah's Everyday project.
With his deep, melodic voice and smooth soul rumble, Dogg was one of the key elements in the rise of the West Coast G-Funk sound pioneered by Death Row Records in the early 1990s. Though overshadowed by such peers as Dr. Dre, Snoop Dogg and Warren G, Nate was a critical participant in a number of major left-coast gangsta hits, including G's "Regulate" and Dre's iconic solo debut, 1992's The Chronic.
After 11 years of running MetaFilter.com, I (and the other moderators) have been through just about everything, and we've built dozens of custom tools to weed out garbage, spammers, and scammers from the site.
I'll cover how to identify and solve problems including identity, trolling, sockpuppets, and other nefarious community issues, show off custom tools we've developed for MetaFilter, and show you how to incorporate them into your own community sites.
On Jeopardy today, a contestant named Ethan responded incorrectly to a $1000 clue with "What is kottke.org?"
The best part is how disgusted the viewer is..."Are you freaking kidding me? Oh jeeezz..." Ethan, if you're out there and if there was actually such an item, I would totally send you a kottke.org tote bag for working in a reference to kottke.org on a show that has such a storied past on the site. What a lovely 13th birthday present. (thx, justin)
For their latest mission, Improv Everywhere got someone who looked very much like King Philip IV of Spain to sign autographs in front of a Velázquez painting of the monarch.
@jkottke @daveg I will pay you guys for an Oxford debate about the Hangover's merits, or lack thereof.
And Michael Sippey went there and posted a video of an animated David and an animated me having a debate about The Hangover:
I thought you were a pop culture aesthete.
No, I'm from the Midwest.
You live in Manhattan.
But I grew up eating hot dogs.
But you write about expensive conceptual restaurants and post pictures of contemporary art like that thing at the Museum of Modern Art in New York where the woman sat at the table all summer.
Someone draws a straight line. The next person's task is to trace that line as precisely as possible. Repeat 500 times. The lines get really messy surprisingly fast:
As David said, this is a nice demonstration of evolution.
A short documentary report from a thousand years into the future about The Beatles.
First-hand records are certainly scarce. There's a lot we don't know about The Beatles, but we do know that these four young men -- John Lennon, Paul MacKenzie, Greg Hutchinson, and Scottie Pippen -- were some of the finest musicians that ever existed. The Beatles rose to prominence when they travelled from their native Linverton to America to perform at Ed Sullivan's annual Woodstock festival.
Ronaldo Luís Nazário de Lima, more commonly known as Ronaldo, retired from soccer today as one of the most decorated players ever: he won two Ballon d'Ors, three FIFA player of the year awards, was on two World Cup-winning Brazilian teams, and scored the most goals in World Cup history. The video is a bit fuzzy, but here are ten of Ronaldo's greatest goals:
That backheel in #8 is just otherworldly, as is the spin move in #5. See also Ronaldo's skills.
