Fotoshop, the world's best beauty product
Fotoshop is a new beauty product from Adobé (say aah-DOE-bay) that slims, gets rid of wrinkles, and can even lighten your skin color.
(via stellar)
30 giant hornets vs. a whole honey bee hive
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.
(via ★aaroncohen)
What the hell is dubstep anyway?
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!
Touch interfaces everywhere
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.
(via ★johnpavlus)
Wipeout track using quantum levitation
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)
Comet time lapse
A short time lapse of Comet Lovejoy appearing in the pre-dawn sky over the Andes. Wait for the last sequence...it's the best one.
Lovejoy was only discovered in Nov 2011 by an amateur astronomer. (via ★interesting)
Ink and paper
A lovely short film by Ben Proudfoot about a letterpress company and a paper company who are scraping by next door to each other in Los Angeles.
Craziest possible mountain biking video
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.
(via ★interesting)
Shufflin' grandpa
One of my favorite things on the internet is footage of old styles of dancing set to contemporary music. Like this:
See also Daft Punk Charleston and Russian dancing (w/ Run DMC). (via ★dunstan)
Steve Jobs: Billion Dollar Hippy
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.
(thx, jteve)
Lizard squashes ants in touchscreen game
An increasingly frustrated lizard plays a game called Ant Crusher on an Android phone. He's pretty good, but is no less hungry than before he started.
(via stellar)
Camera shooting at a trillion frames/sec can see photons move
At the beginning of this video, Ramesh Raskar, associate professor at the MIT Media Lab, announces calmly:
We have built a virtual slow-motion camera where we can see photons, or light particles, moving through space.
Yeah, no biggie.
Game of Thrones season two teaser
When this came on right before the season finale of Boardwalk Empire, I shushed my talking wife so hard I nearly threw out my back.
April! April is coming!
Rare Steve Jobs speech from 1980
Video of a Steve Jobs speech circa 1980. This was just recently donated and presented by the Computer History Museum.
(via @itscolossal)
Update: Well, that didn't last long..the Vimeo embed ist kaputt. But it's still available on the Computer History Museum's site. Perhaps we can persuade them to throw it up on their YouTube channel?
Ice Cube opines on Charles and Ray Eames
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.
(via ★interesting)
Update: The NY Times has an interview with Ice Cube about the video.
Q: How are your drafting skills these days?
A: You don't want to live in nothing I draw. I got a certificate. For a year. In '88. I don't think I picked up a T-square since.
Philip Glass speaks at Occupy Wall Street
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.
(via stellar)
Opening quotes from The Wire
The beginning of each episode of The Wire featured a short quote of dialogue from that episode...here are the characters saying all those quotes:
(via supercut.org)
Street snowboarding
The street skiing video has more narrative structure but the tricks pulled in this urban snowboarding video are just filthy.
(thx, river)
Stephen Colbert in conversation with Neil deGrasse Tyson
80-minute video of a conversation between Neil deGrasse Tyson and of an out-of-character Stephen Colbert "about science, society, and the universe". Someone needs to get this on YouTube or something...the video streaming is slooooow.
Update: Ah, here's a mirror on YouTube. (thx, aaron)
The ice finger of death
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:
Street skiing
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.
(thx to @gnuhaus for the better embed)
The craziest thing you'll ever see on the web
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)
Terry Gilliam talks about his Monty Python animations
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.
(via ★thoughtbrain)
The Umbrella Man
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?
The film pairs nicely with Morris' recent interview of Stephen King about the latter's new novel based on the Kennedy assassination.
Either the best or the worst DVD commentary ever
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)
Year-long sky time lapse
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.
Best viewed at YouTube in full-screen HD. (via data pointed)
Downhill skateboard racing
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.
(via ★acoleman)
Remote control helicopter coverage of Warsaw riots
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)
What does 462 mph look like?
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)
Hip hop horse
Andreas Helgstrand at the World Equestrian Games 2006 wowing the crowds with his unconventional music choice.
Compare with the original. (via ★acoleman)
Michael J. Fox performs Johnny B. Goode at Parkinson's benefit
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!
And if that's not Mike Fox awesomeness for one day, here he is on a recent episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Amazing HD time lapse taken from the International Space Station
Perhaps you've seen the recent videos of the Earth at night taken from the ISS...they were a bit rough. This? This is five minutes of gorgeous HD:
You can watch it embedded here but what you'll really want to do is head over to Vimeo so that you can watch it in fullscreen HD. (via colossal)
Classic video game deaths
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.
A billion years in the blink of an eye
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.
Bullet time surfing
Using a rig of 30 GoPro cameras, these guys captured surfers in Matrix-esque bullet time.
(via petapixel)
M83 vocal audition
If you like M83 and have listened to their new album, Hurry Up, We're Dreaming, you'll probably love this M83 backup singer audition video.
I literally LOL'd when he started singing. (via stellar)
Do the dishes like nobody's watching
Be honest...isn't this how we all do the washing up when no one's around? (via interesting)
Dam breached, reservoir drained
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)
A collection of starlings is called a murmuration
I wish the video were of better quality, but it's still something to see.
(via @daveg)
Knives, made by hand
Another excellent video by Made By Hand: The Knife Maker.
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.
Made By Hand's first video was about the Breuckelen Distilling Company.
Robot rides bicycle
Watch until at least 45 seconds in.
I wanna see three of these riding a team sprint in a tiny velodrome.
Watch complete games of the Dream Team from the 1992 Olympics
Here's a little weekend viewing for you...Ballislife has put several complete 1992 Dream Team games up on YouTube. Here's their game versus Croatia to get you going:
(via @fchimero)
The history of the typewriter recited by Michael Winslow
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.
(via ★tangentialism)
Michael Winslow gets the Led out
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)
Gates. Ballmer. Night at the Roxbury.
No words. No. Words. They should have sent a poet.
Quantum levitation!
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.
Wingardium Leviosa! (via stellar)
Skin cell gun
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)
Apple predicted Siri 24 years ago
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 on beauty
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)
Four-year-old learns Darth Vadar is Luke's father
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.
The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces
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.
The physics of the riderless bike
Why do riderless bicycles not fall over? Science Friday looks at the science behind bike self-steering.
(via robottke!)
Rare footage of live Nirvana concert
YouTube has 45 minutes of previously unreleased footage of a Halloween concert Nirvana played in 1991 at the Paramount Theater in Seattle.
The DVD contains the full performance (there's also a Blu-ray version out in a few months). I think this might be one of my answers to "what would you do if you had a time machine?"... (via devour)
Update: The video seems to be down right now...not sure if it'll be back or not. Sorry...
Won't You Be My Neighbor?
Watch Fred Rogers sing the opening theme from Mister Rogers' Neighborhood from 1967 to 2000.
(via ★aaroncohen)
An actual working mind probe
This is incredible...researchers at Berkeley have developed a system that reads people's minds while they watch a video and then roughly reconstructs what they were watching from thousands of hours of YouTube videos. This short demo shows how it works:
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)
Super freaky realtime facial substitution
That shit cray! Puts this system to shame. See also Tom Selleck's Moustache. (via ★interesting)
Crazy audiovisual illusion
The McGurk effect: the same sound plus two different mouth movements produces two different sounds.
Read more about the McGurk effect. (via ★interesting-links)
The amazing lyrebird can mimic anything
I knew the male lyrebird is an amazing mimic (other birds, camera shutters, car alarms, chainsaws):
but I didn't know he could sing the Seinfeld theme song:
Seriously though, that chainsaw noise is amazing. (via ★aaroncohen)
Earth orbit time lapse
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.
(via stellar)
Back to school with Mister Rogers
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.
After our YouTube supply is exhausted, we'll move on to DVDs (here's a music compilation and episodes from the first week of the show), Netflix, or Amazon Instant Video, which has a bunch of episodes available for free (!!) for Prime subscribers.
Freeman, Feynman, and Hawking, autotuned
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.
(via devour)
Kurt Vonnegut explains the shapes of stories
Using a chalkboard and a simple graphical axis, watch as Kurt Vonnegut explains the different shapes that stories can take.
(via @coudal)
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].
(thx, clifford)
The first digital 3-D rendered film, circa 1972
This short film of a 3-D rendered hand made by Ed Cattmull (Pixar founder) and Fred Parke in 1972 might be the first digital 3-D rendered film ever.
This is kind of amazing...from 1972! The story that goes along with the film is worth a read as well.
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)
Washing machine self-destructs
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?
100 years of East London fashion
A couple dances their way through 100 years of fashion, from 1911 to 2011.
Magnetic soap
This is beautiful:
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.
(via stellar)
As Seen on TV hardships
This one is mostly for my wife, who gleefully mocks TV infomerical actors who have trouble flipping a simple pancake or operating a mop.
(via devour)
Animated sheet music
Watch the sheet music go by as Miles Davis and his bandmates play So What.
See also Confirmation by Charlie Parker and Giant Steps by John Coltrane.
Coming to America
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)
Really being John Malkovich
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.
MTV News report on the internet from 1995
Lots of footage from The Net, Johnny Mnemonic, etc., virtual reality, Moby with hair, and websites of yore.
Advertising's quiet pitchman
Fast Company has a nice piece on Adam Lisagor, known around these parts as lonelysandwich. After doing a well-received promo video for a Twitter app he developed with a friend, Adam found himself in demand to do similar videos for a growing roster of technology companies.
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!
Personal style
The seventh episode of Put This On covers personal style...for which they interviewed Gay Talese.
Taylor Swift covers Eminem's Lose Yourself
Not even country music can ruin that song. But as you well know Taylor, Eminem's version is the best of all time. (via @anildash)
TV appearance of Lincoln assassination witness
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.
That blew my mind. (via devour)
Super freaky dancing squid dish
This is a Japanese dish called odori-don.
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)
Beastie Boys vs. Sesame Street
Sesame Street characters, including Grover on the flute, perform the Beastie Boys' Sure Shot.
(via devour)
nytimes.com front page time lapse
Seven-minute video of 12,000 screenshots of the front page of the NY Times website taken over a period of several months by "an errant cron task".
Kids show references The Wire
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.
(via @aliotsy)
The Royal Tenenbaums' House
The Onion's A.V. Club takes a field trip to see the Harlem house where the exteriors (and many of the interiors) were shot for The Royal Tenenbaums.
(via devour)
Les Twins
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.
Harry Potter summed up in seven minutes
If you're headed out to see the final Potter movie this weekend, here's a recap of the previous seven films in just seven minutes:
A day in the life of John Lasseter
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)
You can 3-D print working tools now
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.
Ten hour videos
YouTube user TehN1ppe has been uploading a series of 10-hour repetitive videos. Here's Super Mario climbing a vine for ten hours in a row:
There's also epic sax guy playing for 10 hours, badger badger (mushroom! mushroom!) for 10 hours, 10 hours of Tetris, 10 hours of the Inception horn, 10 hours of vuvuzela, and, oh my yes, 10 hours of Hypnotoad.
Somehow, these aren't even close to the longest videos on YouTube...here's one that plays for 518 hours (more than 21 days).
The Xbox version of Dock Ellis' LSD-fueled no-hitter
In 1970, professional baseballer Dock Ellis, who was good at pitching baseballs, threw a no-hitter while under the influence of LSD. In 2011, professional blogger A.J. Daulerio, who isn't so good at video game baseball, attempted to throw a no-hitter while on LSD...playing a customized Dock Ellis in MLB 2K11 on Xbox.
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.
Talking Funny
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:
What the hell is a singing bird pistol?
Christie's recently sold a pair of matching singing bird pistols at auction for $5.8 million. The objects themselves are impressive and nutty.
(thx, raza)
How to beat a chess grandmaster
Watch as magician Derren Brown beats a room full of grandmasters and other top chess players even though he doesn't really play chess all that well. At the end, he explains how he did it...it's a dead simple clever method.
Fastest driven lap around Manhattan
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.
(via ★fakeisthenewreal)
Drunken African animals
Watch and listen as Randall narrates some footage of animals getting drunk from the fruit of the Marula tree. You may remember Randall from the narration on this honey badger video ("Honey Badger don't care, Honey Badger don't give a shit"). (via ★moth)
Slo-mo cymbal strike
A drumstick hitting a cymbal at 1000 frames/sec. More flex there than I would have assumed.
(via mlkshk)
Splitscreen: A Love Story
Lovely editing and shot entirely on a Nokia mobile phone. (via stellar)
Everything is a Remix, the ideas episode
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.
The machine that destroys everything
Forget Will It Blend...this machine asks "will it be destroyed?" and the answer is always yes.
Don't forget the sound on this one...the machine crushing noise and soundtrack shouldn't be missed. (via stellar)
Werner Herzog reads Go the Fuck to Sleep
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!
Go the Fuck to Sleep read by Samuel L. Jackson
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.
Werner Herzog is also voicing an audiobook version of the book. (via devour)
Year-long Moon timelapse
This is a timelapse animation of the surprisingly wobbly Moon over a period of one year.
Note: this is an animation, not a timelapse video...i.e. there's CG involved. More info here.
The amazing pen-spinning, phone-catching, rope-tying robotic hand
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.
See also the universal gripper, the salami sorter, the robot who considers towels, and the pancake sorter. (via ★mouser)
The quicker ketchup picker-upper
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!
Hula hooping from the hoop's perspective
It's just a person tumbling around inside a hoop. (via ★interesting)
London version of "what song are you listening to?"
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.
(via stellar)
The dangerous three-way dance at NYC street intersections
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)
Neverending shampoo
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.
(via ★interesting)
Timelapse clouds
A ten-minute video shows clouds forming and dissipating at timelapse speed. Quite relaxing.
Best viewed in fullscreen HD.
Subway waltz
Two NYC subway trains dancing down the tunnels...what a charming little video.
(via ★leela)
Rough space
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.
(via stellar)
Tour of Earth from orbit
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.
Never knew that about the Great Salt Lake, but you can see the effect on Google Maps as well. (via ★interesting)
Doctor Who gonna bust a cap in yo ass
Sometimes the simple things in life are best...like a compilation of clips of The Doctor shooting guns with a gansta rap soundtrack.
(via ★interesting)
Weezer covers Paranoid Android
Depending on how you feel about Weezer and Radiohead, this is either the best thing in the world or nails on a chalkboard.
(via devour)
Night sky timelapse...with a twist!
This will be the hundredth night sky timelapse video you've seen but probably the first one that shows the Earth rotating instead of the stars.
Best viewed full screen. (via stellar)
What song are you listening to?
Tyler Cullen went out on the streets of NYC and asked random passers-by what song they were listening to on their headphones.
Turned out to be more interesting than I expected.
A history of the crossover dribble
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)
World's best Tetris player
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, !!!!!
ASCII videos
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:
i'm on my datamosh, glitchin up vide0000ooos
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
(via ★philgyford)
Delia Derbyshire, the first DJ
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)
The boy with the backwards leg
Instead of amputating entirely, doctors removed the cancer from Dugan Smith's leg and put it back on backwards.
Now Smith wears a prosthesis, uses his ankle as a knee, and plays sports.
Hot! Origami! Capillary! Action!
Watch as pieces of micro-origami unfold on water through capillary action.
(via constant seige)
Movie references in Kill Bill
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.
(via @kbandersen)
Noisy fruit and veggies
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.
Original ending of Election found at flea market
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.
(via @kombuchakamp)
Pendulum waves
Mesmerizing video of a series of pendulums moving in an out of sync with each other until at the end...well, I won't spoil it.
(thx, john)
I wonder what happens when Wooden Flip Switch Box gets really angry?
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.
(via @davidfg)
Update: Claude Shannon had such a box on his desk, although probably not so aggro as the one above. It was called the Ultimate Machine. (thx, @joshu)
Angry Birds theme, covered by Pomplamoose
Angry Birds is still the top paid app in the App Store. And Pomplamoose is still twee and adorable. (via ★glass)
OS X Inception
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.
(via stellar)
Graffiti is a crime
From the NYC transit authority, a 1988 video about the consequences of painting graffiti in the subway.
Intense! (via ★vuokko)
Spider attack!
Watch as a spider quickly subdues an ant in its web...and then something unexpected happens.
This is the Sixth Sense of spider nature videos.
Your taste is why your own work disappoints you
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:
It takes four minutes to disassemble and then reassemble a Jeep
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.
See also the Royal Navy Field Gun Competition. (via product by process)
How to make a Model T
Footage from a Ford factory of assembly line workers making Model T cars.
(via product by process)
How an hourglass is made
A three-minute film on how an hourglass is made.
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.
(via ★robinsloan)
Concept camera with detactable lens
The WVIL (Wireless Viewfinder Interchangeable Lens) is a concept camera that uncouples the lens from the viewfinder. Here's a 60-second demo:
I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to make something similar to control a dSLR with an iPhone app via Bluetooth. (via ★pb)
Speed climbing tall mountains
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)
Google Video, RIP
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)
Human Planet: The Douche
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)
Jookin with Lil Buck and Yo-Yo Ma
Spike Jonze caught a collaboration between dancer Lil Buck and cellist Yo-Yo Ma on video the other day:
The style of dancing is called jookin and is very similar to what these fellows and David Elsewhere. (via @veen)
A dramatic reading of Gwyneth Paltrow's cookbook
As my friend Adriana said, "to explain this would be to spoil it".
(via meg)
Inventor of the digital camera
As part of his inventor portrait series, David Friedman profiled Steven Sasson, inventor of the digital camera.
Unicode, all of it
This movie shows all displayable Unicode characters (49000+ characters), one per frame, for more than 33 minutes.
(via waxy)
Machine's waltz
The motions of a Brazilian textile plant set to a classical music soundtrack.
(via stellar)
Hilarious fake TLC promo
Turns out there's not so much learning on The Learning Channel anymore.
Fake shows from the video: 12 Wives, 12 Problems; Dwarf Hoarders; Uterus Cannon; and Hasty Home Surgery.
Real TLC shows: 19 Kids and Counting; Strange Sex; Extreme Couponing; and I Didn't Know I Was Pregnant. (via ★dansays)
Country version of Lady Gaga's Born This Way
Lady Gaga released a country version of her latest single, Born This Way. This isn't a remix or cover...it's an official release by Gaga.
I don't care for country music much, but this really makes me smile. (via ★capndesign)
First person Super Mario
Here's what playing the original Super Mario Bros would look like from a first-person perspective.
(via devour)
Floating soccer pitch
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.
(via @dunstan)
Spoiler alert
A montage of spoilers from 71 different films, including The Usual Suspects, Citizen Kane, The 400 Blows, Inception, and The Graduate.
Or if you prefer, something similar in t-shirt form. (via devour)
Everyday iPhone app
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.
Watch closely for the Noah Durden character...
A Brief History of Title Design
From the excellent blog The Art of the Title Sequence, a short video called A Brief History of Title Design.
The video page has a full listing of the movies from which the opening title sequences are pulled.
Nate Dogg, RIP
Nate Dogg died yesterday; he was 41 years old.
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.
Saturn fly-by video
There is no 3-D CGI involved in this amazing Saturn fly-by video...it's made from thousands of hi-res photographs taken by the Cassini orbiter.
Wait for the full-frame full-color video starting at around 1:00. (thx, sam)
Lessons from MetaFilter
Matt Haughey's SXSW talk, Real World Moderation: Lessons from 11 Years of Community, was quite well received so he posted a version he recorded at home to Vimeo.
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.
(via @pb)
kottke.org on Jeopardy
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)
Video of the tsunami in Japan
Two videos of the tsunami triggered by the 8.9 magnitude eathquake that struck Japan. Both are from Sendai:
400-year-old king signs autographs at the Met
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.
iPad 2 Smart Cover
Both the iPad 2 Smart Cover and the 30-second commercial for it are exceedingly well done.
Upgrading Windows, from 1.0 to 7.0
Watch as some guy upgrades his computer through every version of Windows, from 1985's Windows 1.0 to the present-day Windows 7.
Debating The Hangover
The timeline of events goes like this:
Last night, I posted the trailer for the sequel to The Hangover.
This morning, my friend David posts the following on Twitter:
Poleaxed by indication that pop culture aesthete @jkottke might actually like Hangover, the execrable frat boy flick
To which I replied a few hours later:
@daveg Are you kidding? That movie is hilarious.
Anil suggested a debate:
@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.
That's a pretty accurate five-line bio of me.
Insane boat race
This is a jetsprint boat race; I've never seen a boat turn so sharply at such a fast speed.
Movie sounds guy
A fascinating look at how a Foley artist makes all of the sounds that find their way into Hollywood films.
(thx, deron)
The evolution of lines
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.
Beatles mockumentary from the year 3126
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.
Chocolate face
Watch as a woman gets chocolate sauce poured all over her face for almost ten minutes. I don't know what to think of this one: mesmerizing? yucky? erotic? hunger-inducing? I have a hungry tingling disgust going on here...
Behind the scenes at Pixar
The New York Times gets a rare behind the scenes look at Pixar.
(via devour)
Ronaldo retires
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.
Playmobil Joy Division
A nearly shot-for-shot version of Joy Division performing Transmission live in 1979...with Playmobil characters.
Big wave skiing?
Watch as Chuck Patterson skis (not surfs, skis) the Jaws surf break in Maui.
And for some reason, he's using poles!
Did Usher rip off Homer Simpson?
Usher's OMG sounds suspiciously close to a Christmas carol that Homer wrote in an episode of The Simpsons. Take a listen:
Cliche!
"In France, everyone has a view of the Eiffel Tower" and other French stereotypes:
Also, la version française. (thx, rosecrans)
Clapping music
Angie Dickinson and Lee Marvin "perform" Steve Reich's Clapping Music. This is mesmerizing.
(via @sippey)
Everything is a Remix, part two
Kirby Ferguson is back with the next installment of Everything is a Remix, his examination of remix techniques used in film.
Featured are two of the most extensive borrowers in film: George Lucas and Quentin Tarantino. Part one is available here.
The Global Village Construction Set
The GVCS is a collection of 40 machines needed to "create a small civilization with modern-day comforts...like a life-size Lego set".
Very ambitious, but it sounds like they're making progress. The brick-making machine alone is impressive and actually available for sale.
Auditioning replacements for the Moon
This video shows what various planets (Jupiter, Mars, etc.) would look like in the night sky if they orbited the Earth at the same distance as the Moon.
See also Imagining Earth with Saturn's rings and Helvetica! In! Space!
The natural curves of human movement
No one has been able to figure out why humans can't walk, swim, or even drive in straight lines without reference points. Instead, we go in circles:
(via df)
IBM centennial films
IBM is celebrating 100 years of business with a pair of videos; the following is a 30-minute film by Errol Morris (music by Philip Glass) on the history of the company.
A second film, 100 x 100, shows 100 people each presenting an IBM milestone that occurred the year they were born; not sure if Morris did this one as well. (via df)
Human Planet
The Blue Planet, Planet Earth, Life. These BBC nature series have all neglected to showcase our planet's most amazing animal. Human Planet is an upcoming nature series about human beings.
No David Attenborough?! Still looks fantastic, though. (via @dunstan)
Precorder
Precorder is an iPhone app that constantly buffers video and only saves the last few seconds when you press the record button.
By constantly saving the previous few seconds of video before you hit record, Precorder lets you wait until something interesting happens to start recording, and you'll never miss a precious moment or get stuck with hours of boring video to painstakingly edit down.
More info here. The creators were inspired by the camera used by the Planet Earth team to capture Great Whites jumping out of the water to catch seals.
Antiqued digital video is the new antiqued digital photography
8mm is an iPhone app that shoots videos that look like stuttery 8mm films.
8mm Vintage Camera brings your iPhone and iPod Touch back in time to capture the beauty and magic of old school vintage movies. By mixing and matching films and lenses, you can recreate the atmosphere of those bygone eras with 25 timeless retro looks. Dust & scratches, retro colors, flickering, light leaks, frame jitters -- all can be instantly added with the swapping of a finger.
Lyndon Johnson buys pants
This is a hoot: in want of slacks, President Lyndon Johnson called up the Haggar clothing company and requested several pairs be made in the style of a pair he already owned. Except a little bigger in the crotch..."down where your nuts hang" as Johnson put it. Just listen:
Fun music video
Reminds me of Gondry's Star Guitar video with a bit of MC Escher mixed in.
(viva la sandwich)
How croissants are made
Maybe it's because I have an oddly intense interest in croissants, but I found this 10-minute video about how to make them fascinating. Watch at least until the 1 kg sheet of butter is placed on the dough to be folded over several times.
Spoiler: they turn out great, which was unexpected because so often croissants are more bready and dry than flakey and moist, even in France. (thx, aaron)
The Dude Abides
PBS is airing a documentary about Jeff Bridges tonight called Jeff Bridges: The Dude Abides. In a short clip from the episode, Bridges visits a The Big Lebowski memorabilia store called The Little Lebowski. Watch the cashier's mind explode as he recognizes who just walked into his store.
And I love how he calls Joel and Ethan "The Brothers". (via devour)
Quentin Tarantino's first movie
No, not Reservoir Dogs. It's called My Best Friend's Birthday, which he made for $5000 in 1987. Here's the surviving 36 minutes of footage; the rest was destroyed in a fire.
Some of the ideas and material in this film would be recycled for the Tarantino-penned True Romance screenplay. (via sly oyster)
Photoshop rap with CMYKiller
Watch as CMYKiller, Philter Phil, DJ Dodge, MC Burn and the rest of the posse rap us through some Photoshop tutorials.
I'm ropin' all the honeys with my magnetic lasso
Short documentary on The Sartorialist
A really lovely seven-minute documentary about Scott Schuman, aka The Sartorialist.
Watching the concentration, focus, and determination in Schuman's eyes and body as he walks around looking for photographic subjects immediately reminded me of an elite athlete; that same look was documented at length in Zidane, A 21st Century Portrait. And that's no accident...what Schuman does is an athletic pursuit as much as anything else. The way he holds his camera while walking, down by his side, slightly behind his back, hiding it from his potential subjects until he sees an opening...he's like a running back cradling a football, probing for an opening in the defensive line.
Michael Caine's impersonation of Michael Caine
Everyone has a Michael Caine impression. Even Michael Caine:
Se7en ending with stuffed animals
Surprisingly, the ending scene of Se7en is no less effective with stuffed animals standing in for the actors.
(via @sippey)
Josh Groban sings Kanye's tweets
This might be even funnier than the Kanye Jordan Twitter acct.