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You have likely heard Yo-Yo Ma play his most famous piece before. Maybe even dozens of times. But Ma’s rendition of Bach’s Cello Suite No. 1 takes on a whole new dimension when accompanied by a babbling brook and bird calls in the forests of the Great Smoky Mountains. A lovely moment of peace in a world that could really use some right now.
Planet Earth III will begin airing later this year on BBC and, presumably, at some later time in the US. The latest installment in the legendary series, 17 years after the first one was released, will once again be presented by Sir David Attenborough, now 97 years old and still as enthusiastic about sharing the wonders of nature as he ever was.
‘The opening of the series with David was filmed in the beautiful British countryside in exactly the location where Charles Darwin used to walk whilst thinking-over his Earth-shaking ideas about evolution. It seemed the perfect place for David to introduce Planet Earth III and remind us of both the wonders and the fragility of our planet. ….and for him, of course, the sun shined under blue skies one of the only days it did all summer!.’
The video above is a quick first look at the series and here’s a trailer as well:
Looking forward to this…the Planet Earth series is still the gold standard for nature documentaries.
This video from Practical Engineering offers a brief explanation of dozens of different types of railcars, from passenger train cars like the dining car & sleeper car to freight cars like the boxcar, tank car, and hopper cars (for hauling things like sand or grain) to specialized cars the rail companies use to build and maintain their routes like rail grinders, snowplows, and track geometry cars.
Trains are one of the most fascinating engineered systems in the world, and they’re out there, right in the open for anyone to have a look! Once you start paying attention, its pretty satisfying to look for all the different types of railcars that show up on the tracks.
They even made a little checklist to use for your beginner trainspotting. (via the kid should see this)
Erik Wernquist made his short film One Revolution Per Minute to explore his “fascination with artificial gravity in space”. The film shows what it would be like to travel on a large, circular space station, 900 meters (0.56 miles) in diameter that rotates a 1 rpm. Even at that slow speed, which generates 0.5 g at the outermost shell, I was surprised to see how quickly the scenery (aka the Earth, Moon, etc.) was rotating and how disorienting it would be as a passenger.
Realistically - and admittedly somewhat reluctantly — I assume that while building a structure like this is very much possible, it would be quite impractical for human passengers.
Putting aside the perhaps most obvious problem with those wide windows being a security hazard, I believe that the perpetually spinning views would be extremely nauseating for most humans, even for short visits. Even worse, I suspect — when it comes to the comfort of the experience — would be the constantly moving light and shadows from the sun.
I calculated that the outer ring of the space station is moving at 105.4 mph with respect to the center. That’s motoring right along — no wonder everything outside is spinning so quickly.
Fall always brings brisker days, earlier sunsets, and a whole raft of new books that are impossible to find the time to read. Add this memoir by Patrick Stewart to the pile next to your bed: Making It So (bookshop.org). The Hollywood Reporter has a great video excerpt with audio from the audiobook (narrated by Stewart himself, naturally) about his early days on Star Trek: The Next Generation:
From an accompanying article:
So when he was on set shooting the show’s debut season and co-stars like Jonathan Frakes, Denise Crosby and Brent Spiner would tease him or ad-lib a joke or laugh when they flubbed their lines, it would low-key infuriate him.
“I could be a severe bastard,” he writes. “My experiences at the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre had been intense and serious… On the TNG set, I grew angry with the conduct of my peers, and that’s when I called that meeting in which I lectured the cast for goofing off and responded to Denise Crosby’s, ‘We’ve got to have some fun sometimes, Patrick’ comment by saying, ‘We are not here, Denise, to have fun.’”
“In retrospect,” Stewart continues, “everyone, me included, finds this story hilarious. But in the moment, when the cast erupted in hysterics at my pompous declaration, I didn’t handle it well. I didn’t enjoy being laughed at. I stormed off the set and into my trailer, slamming the door.”
Update: Gideon Lichfield has a great interview with Stewart for Wired.
Q: There’s a passage where you say that, from your father, “I drew Picard’s stern, intimidating tendencies. But I like to think that my mother is in the captain too, in his moments of warmth and sensitivity.” Do you see Picard as your way of reconciling that conflict between your parents?
A: Very much so, yes. Both Star Trek and therapy have been responsible for that. Having to open the doors into my childhood in order to be an actor became utterly intriguing to me in a way that it never had been before. And I regret that when I look back on some of the roles I played, what I might have brought to them if I just released myself a little bit more.
(via @samuelwade)
This is a treat: almost 25 minutes of legendary director Martin Scorsese talking about how he made his most iconic movies, from Mean Streets and Raging Bull to Gangs of New York and The Irishman. You have to laugh at the number of times he says, “Well, I didn’t want to make this film, but…” From an accompanying profile/interview with Scorsese (which is quite good as well):
It is a peculiar fact about Martin Scorsese that he does not enjoy actually making movies. “I don’t mean to be funny,” he said, “but, the thing is, you get up real early.” And Scorsese has never been a morning person. For most of his life, he recalled, “I’d stay up late watching movies on TV or reading late, or doing homework late, or trying to write scripts late. I lived at night and the streets were dark, and I never saw the light. It took me many years to understand where the sun set and where the sun rose. I didn’t know. I’m not kidding. I learned it in LA. When you’re going on Sunset Boulevard and you hit the Pacific Coast Highway and it’s seven o’clock and the sun is setting — it’s right there.”
He likes to borrow a complaint from Kubrick. “They said, ‘What’s the hardest thing about directing?’ He said, ‘Getting out of the car.’ Because once you get out of the car, the questions start.” Now, when Scorsese gets out of the car in the morning, he looks at his AD and says, “What can’t I have today?”
You really have to applaud the effort here: YouTuber Todd in the Shadows made a 33-minutes supercut of every song he could find that stops, even momentarily, on the word “stop”. Here are the ground rules:
If there was even the briefest of stops, I counted it. It’s okay if the band holds the note rather than complete silence. But the entire band has to stop, not just a couple instruments; the singer can keep singing though.
I gotta say I did not watch the whole thing, but the very last clip is *kisses fingers*. (via @peterme)
Perhaps the most prominent part of the most well-known painting of Henry VIII (a now-lost work by Hans Holbein the Younger) is the giant codpiece poking through the male-heirless king’s tunic. Evan Puschak analyzes the painting and fills us in on what makes this a particularly effective work of 16th-century propaganda.
Puschak had some fun with this one…I lol’d at “triple dick”, which under no circumstances should you google (like I did) at work or really anywhere else. Although, “triple dick art history” did lead me to this interesting piece on “ostentatio genitalium”:
Ostentatio genitalium (the display of the genitals) refers to disparate traditions in Renaissance visual culture of attributing formal, thematic, and theological significance to the penis of Jesus.
This bit got me laughing again:
…these Renaissance images shock us because they are so frequently ithyphallic: Christ has risen, but not in the way we have come to expect.
These days, instead of writing down lyrics and bringing them to the studio to record, many rappers are using the improvisational “punch-in method” to craft songs during the recording session.
Is this good for the music? The jury is out, even within hip-hop. But in this behind-the-scenes video — the latest entry in our Diary of a Song series, which documents how popular music is created — we track the generational shift through exclusive studio footage of young rappers like Doechii, Veeze and Lil Gotit, plus interviews with genre veterans including the artist Killer Mike and the producer Just Blaze, to track this creative shift and its effects on the still-experimental genre of hip-hop, 50 years after its birth.
Interesting technique, but there is definitely some music in that video that is not for me.
There I Ruined It is fast becoming one of my favorite web delights — musician Dustin Ballard remixes and mashes beloved songs in an attempt to ruin them. The video embedded above features Eminem’s Lose Yourself sung to the tune of the Super Mario Bros theme song…and it makes me laugh every time I watch it.
You can check out more of There I Ruined It on YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram.
P.S. My idea for a song to ruin: the Happy Days theme song, but it just keeps repeating the days of the week (“Sunday Monday happy days / Tuesday Wednesday happy days…”) in a loop, using the Shepard tone to (seemingly) keep the pitch ever-rising.
European cities are transitioning to the use of cargo e-bikes and other micro-mobility solutions for package and other urban deliveries because they are safer, cleaner, and even faster in some cases than using vans or large trucks. The US isn’t making that same shift right now — this video from Vox explores why…and how we can move in that direction.
Fortunately, there’s a hero waiting in the wings: the e-cargo bike. Not only can these bad boys deliver packages in urban environments just as quickly (and sometimes faster) than delivery vans, they take up far less space and are much less likely to cause pedestrian deaths. Companies like Amazon, DHL, and UPS are using them in several European cities, but American cities haven’t followed suit.
In this video, we explore why that is, and lay out some of the big steps American cities would need to take to join the e-bike delivery revolution.
See also No Cars Allowed in This Swiss Town (Except Tiny Electric Ones).
As a tribute to Brian Eno, visual artist Thomas Blanchard made this video of Emerald and Stone, a 2010 song that Eno collaborated on with Jon Hopkins & Leo Abrahams. According to Blanchard, he made the video with no digital visual effects — “the visual compositions have been created out of paint, oil and soap liquid.”
Eno himself is still working and mentoring younger artists…he and Fred Again released an ambient album back in May.
Here’s a fun thought experiment: can you destroy a black hole? Nuclear weapons probably won’t work but what about antimatter? Or anti black holes? In this video, Kurzgesagt explores the possibilities and impossibilities. This part baked my noodle (in a good way):
Contrary to widespread belief, the singularity of a black hole is not really “at its center”. It’s in the future of whatever crosses the horizon. Black holes warp the universe so drastically that, at the event horizon, space and time switch their roles. Once you cross it, falling towards the center means going towards the future. That’s why you cannot escape: Stopping your fall and turning back would be just as impossible as stopping time and traveling to the past. So the singularity is actually in your future, not “in front of you”. And just like you can’t see your own future, you won’t see the singularity until you hit it.
🤯
Using a phrase popularized by reproductive justice activist Renee Bracey Sherman, The National Network of Abortion Funds teamed up with Molly Crabapple and Padma Lakshmi to produce a video about their mission to support abortion access in the US.
In order for abortion to be truly an option, it must not only be legal, but actually available, without the shame. It’s time we worked together towards a world where all people have the power and resources to care for and support their bodies, identities, and health — for themselves and their families. We need to take the hassle, hustle, and harassment out of healthcare. It’s time to change the conversation about abortion, to make it a real option, available to all people without shame or judgment. We all love someone who has had an abortion, whether we know it or not.
The video is three years old and from the very first line (“Abortion is legal in all 50 states”), you can tell how much the situation has changed in the United States — and how the NNAF’s mission is even more urgent. If you’d like to join me in donating, step right this way.
Talk to anyone who lives near the flight path of Burlington, Vermont’s airport and it won’t be too long until they are complaining to you about the F-35 jets that routinely disrupt their lives. The loud, expensive weaponry arrived in the state in 2019 and have upset and angered residents ever since.
A sudden roar announced that the military jets were taking to the sky again.
Julia Parise’s son had developed a routine for whenever this happened: He would look to his mother and assess whether it was “one of them” — the F-35 fighter jets that had become such a constant presence in his young life — before asking her to cover his ears. He might do it himself, recalling aloud her reassurances as he did: “They won’t hurt me. They won’t hurt me.”
To capture the community unrest created by what one resident calls “Lockheed Martin’s welfare program” (the jet program will cost taxpayers $1.7 trillion over its lifetime), filmmakers Patrick McCormack and Duane Peterson III made a short film called Jet Line: Voicemails from the Flight Path featuring residents’ concerns from a complaints hotline the pair set up.
This short film employs an anonymous hotline to elevate the voices beneath Vermont’s F-35 flight path, the first urban residents to live with one of the military’s most controversial weapons systems overhead.
Tranquil scenes of unassuming neighborhoods near Burlington International Airport are juxtaposed with voicemails of the unheard, those drowned out by the ear-shattering “sound of freedom.” Exploring the relationship between picturesque residential areas and the deafening fighter jets overhead, Jet Line is a poetic portrait of a community plagued by war machines, documenting untenable conditions in a small city once voted one of the best places to live in America.
I hear the F-35s almost every time I am up in the Burlington area and they are very loud. I hear them when I’m on the phone with friends who live in Winooski. I hear them during my weekly Zoom session w/ my Burlington-based therapist and we have to pause for a few seconds so everyone can hear again. I live 30 miles away and they flew loudly over my house earlier today, as they do at least once a week. Over the weekend, the Marine Corps tweeted that they’d lost an F-35 somewhere in South Carolina and — yes, you heard right: they lost a whole-ass $100 million lethal weapon over a populated area. (They found the wreckage yesterday.) Hopefully when one of VT’s F-35s decides to drop out of the sky someday, it somehow misses everyone.
On their current US tour commemorating the 20th anniversaries of their two seminal albums (Give Up and Transatlanticism), The Postal Service and Death Cab For Cutie have been coming together to perform an encore rendition of Depeche Mode’s Enjoy the Silence. The video above is their version of it from last weekend’s show in New Haven, which I attended and very much enjoyed, but there are several other versions to choose from on YouTube: Boston, Wash DC, Portland, Rhode Island, etc.
In this ASMR stop motion cooking video, a chef butchers a huge Lego salmon and prepares a salmon and rice bowl. This video is surprisingly visceral, what with the sound effects and the (Lego) blood.
This reminds me more than a little of the sushi scene in Isle of Dogs. (thx, caroline)
I don’t think I’ve ever seen the animation style Gabriel Gabriel Garble uses in his short film Well Wishes My Love, Your Love — it’s so cool and unique. Everything in the film has this sort of radiating energy that interacts with everything else. (via it’s nice that)
Deadline’s Robert Lang compiled a bunch of short films (that you can watch for free online) that were later developed into feature-length films like Reservoir Dogs, Marcel the Shell with Shoes On, Boogie Nights, Bottle Rocket, Napoleon Dynamite, and District 9.
For instance, here’s Quentin Tarantino’s original Reservoir Dogs:
Wes Anderson’s original Bottle Rocket:
The original short version of Marcel the Shell with Shoes On:
Peluca, upon which Napoleon Dynamite was based:
The Dirk Diggler Story, the short film by PT Anderson on which Boogie Nights was based:
Ok, this is a little bit bonkers: HeyGen’s Video Translate tool will convert videos of people speaking into videos of them speaking one of several different languages (incl. English, Spanish, Hindi, and French) with matching mouth movements. Check out their brief demo of Marques Brownlee speaking Spanish & Tim Cook speaking Hindi or this video of a YouTuber trying it out:
The results are definitely in the category of “indistinguishable from magic”.
If you expand the default iPhone alarm into a piano ballad, it sounds quiet lovely actually. The sheet music is available here.
See also Steve Reich Is Calling, two iPhones ringing at slightly different tempos.
The first teaser trailer for season four of the Apple TV+ series For All Mankind takes the form of a recruitment video encouraging people to join the burgeoning workforce in space. It doesn’t give us much in the way of plot or character updates, but here’s the season synopsis (spoilers if you’re not caught up to the end of season three):
Rocketing into the new millennium in the eight years since Season 3, Happy Valley has rapidly expanded its footprint on Mars by turning former foes into partners. Now 2003, the focus of the space program has turned to the capture and mining of extremely valuable, mineral-rich asteroids that could change the future of both Earth and Mars. But simmering tensions between the residents of the now-sprawling international base threaten to undo everything they are working towards.
I have to admit my interest in the show waned a bit after the first season, but it’s still a pretty great show and I will be tuning in for season four on November 10. And is it just me or, if you tilt your head and squint, can you see For All Mankind as a prequel/origin story for The Expanse? (via gizmodo)
This is pretty clever actually: Disney+ and ESPN+ will air a real-time, Toy Story-ified version of the Oct 1st Jacksonville Jaguars and Atlanta Falcons NFL game. From Deadline:
Using the NFL’s Next Gen Stats and on-field tracking data, every player and play will be presented in “Andy’s Room,” the familiar, brightly colored setting for the Toy Story franchise. The action will be virtually simultaneous with the main game telecast, with most plays recreated after an expected delay in the neighborhood of about 30 seconds. Woody, Buzz Lightyear and many other characters will be visible throughout, and a press release notes they will be “participating from the sidelines and in other non-gameplay elements.” Along with game action, the announcers, graphics, scoreboard, referees’ penalty announcements, celebrations and other parts of the experience will all be rendered in a Toy Story-centric fashion.
I stopped watching the NFL years ago, but I might tune in to see how this works.
I love reading about speedrunning, specifically Super Mario Bros speedrunning, so this piece in Ars Technica about a new world record by Niftski is right up my alley. Here’s the run if you want to watch it:
Four particular things caught my eye about this run:
👏👏👏
A group of students from ETH Zurich and Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts recently set a record for the fastest 0-62mph time with their hand-built electric car: 0.956 seconds. The 309-lb car got up to 62mph in just 40.3 feet, which is ~10 feet shorter than the width of a basketball court. The old record was 1.46 seconds, which this car just absolutely obliterated. For reference, the Tesla Plaid’s 0-60 time is 1.99 seconds.
The video of their run is kind of amazing…the car is just so ludicrously quick that I started giggling when it leapt off the line.
About once a year, boat owners on Wisconsin’s Lake Chippewa gather to move a small floating island from blocking access under a bridge. It’s a simple application of Newtonian physics: the boats all just nose into the island, gun their motors, and slowly shove the island out of the way.
The floating clump of mud and plant material is technically a bog, not an island, but it’s hefty enough to support the growth of trees all the same. Looking at it, you could easily believe it was a fully-fledged island. That is… until it starts drifting around.
“It’s one of the first things you look for when you come out here in the morning; where’s the bog?” Denny Reyes, owner of The Landing in Chippewa, told Arizona News.
The problematic bog is actually one of many, but it’s one of the biggest and close to a bridge that can get blocked when it goes for a wander. In 2022, with the wind on their side, it took around 25 boats to budge the bog and collectively push it back out into the lake.
Nature does its thing so quickly sometimes that you have to slow it down to appreciate the beauty and power of it. This is a video of a kingfisher plucking fish out of the water, with views from both above the water (which catches the dive and takeoff) and below the water (which shows the efficient grab of the fish). The underwater view is amazing…I’d never seen that before.
Going to the movies used to be a somewhat different experience than it is today: people wandered into a theater at any point in a film and would just watch until it looped back around when they came in. From a piece in the Hollywood Reporter:
Throughout the classical Hollywood era, moviegoers dropped in on a film screening whenever they felt like it, heedless of the progress of the narrative. In the usual formulation, a couple go to the movies, enter midway into the feature film, sit through to the end of the movie, watch the newsreel, cartoon, and comedy short at the top of the program, and then sit through the feature film until they recognize the scene they walked in on. At this point, one moviegoer whispers to their partner, “This is where we came in,” and they exit the theater.
This began to change in the 40s and 50s for a variety of reasons — theater owners and movie studios didn’t like it, movies were getting more complex, the rise of TV, etc. — but the real shift occurred with the premiere of Psycho in 1960. The studio put out a promotional blitz before it’s release stating that no one would be allowed entrance to the theater after the start of the film.
On June 16, 1960, after a saturation campaign giving fair warning, the DeMille and Baronet theaters in New York premiered Psycho with the see-it-from-the-beginning edict in place. In a practice later to be known as “fill and spill,” exhibitors hustled audiences in and out with military efficiency (the staggered showtimes — every two-hours for the 109-minute film — made for a tight squeeze). Uniformed Pinkerton guards were on hand to enforce the policy.
Here’s a video of Hitchcock laying out the policy for moviegoers (via open culture):
Psycho didn’t singlehandedly stop the practice, but Hitchcock’s stand was an important part in shifting moviegoing practices to the set start times we have today.
Really interesting video from Moth Light Media about how hummingbirds evolved into the unusual little creatures they are today.
The story of hummingbird evolution is how they have reaped the advantages of drinking a natural energy drink and then have had to evolve alien features to quell the disadvantages that have now gone on to define them.
Other popular videos from Moth Light Media include Evolution of Spider Webs, What Happens to Whale Bodies When They Die?, When Fungus Grew to the Size of Trees, and How Plants Became Meat Eaters.
In this short video essay, Evan Puschak explores the typical life cycle of superhero storytelling, where things move from standalone stories to crossovers and interconnections, the stakes continually rise, and things get so complicated that entertainment becomes homework. Marvel in particular is in the later stages of this cycle,1 where casual fans are dropping off because they haven’t watched increasingly mediocre movies and full seasons of shows to keep up to date on what’s to come.
Star Wars is getting there too, and Star Trek seems like they’re trying their hardest to catch up.↩
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