A few years ago a jukebox owned by John Lennon was discovered. On it were 40 of the famous musician’s favorite tunes. This is a documentary about the songs on that Jukebox and the influence they had on the Beatles.
[John Lennon’s Jukebox | YouTube]
The Amazing Intelligent Resize
Currently if you have a large image that you need to make smaller for the web you can either scale it or crop it. Scaling makes everything smaller and cropping can cut out important content. This incredible video demonstrates an image re-sizing algorithm that is content-aware. It’s pretty cool and I figure it’s something that is going to make someone a boatload of money.
[Content Aware Image Sizing – YouTube]
Surrendipity: 2012
Billions and billions of dollars have been spent in the pursuit of new drugs but vanishingly few useful drugs are actually being developed. Dr. Safi Bahcall, the president and C.E.O. of the biotechnology company Synta Pharmaceuticals, and Malcolm Gladwell talk about how mistakes lead to great scientific discoveries and how big drug companies hamper innovation.
Check out their talk, Surrendipity: 2012 from the 2007 New Yorker Conference.
The Last Lunch
Dawkins on Why We’re Here
Richard Dawkins takes a stab at why we’re here, using science and reason to back up his answer. It’s an interesting and inspiring perspective on an old question.
[The Big Questions – YouTube]
Sagan on Evolution
The following is a clip from Cosmos, where the late Dr. Carl Sagan speaks about 4 billion years of evolution. In the background simple animations morph from one species to another illustrating the point.
Sagan on Evolution – YouTube]
Attack of the Glowing Tomatoes
Check out this clever how-to video that explains how to make your own glowing tomato. The instructions over at diylife are worth the read.
[Make A GLOWING TOMATO ! – Metacafe]
Green Tongue
Here is another kayaking video from the Kananaskis. In this one, I’m surfing the feature known as The Green Tongue.
[Green Tongue – YouTube]
‘Big Brother State’ Motion Graphics
Big Brother State is a nice motion graphics video that uses the examples of closed circuit TV and trusted computing to warn about the dangers of a surveillance society.
It is released under a Creative Commons sampling licence by David Scharf and you can download the short film in several formats.
If your finding the download a bit slow, the YouTube mirror is nice and fast.
(via)
How Would You Attack?
Over on the Freakonomics blog, Steven D. Levitt asks the thought provoking question, what would you do to maximize terror if you were a terrorist with limited resources. Readers’ responses to the post were a mixed bag of terror suggestions and hate mail. In a follow-up post, Levitt says that, “The people e-mailing me can’t decide whether I am a moron, a traitor, or both.”
Personally I think it’s an interesting topic, and not one that will give “the terrorists” any ideas they never had before. Hopefully it will provide those in charge of terrorist prevention and response to be better prepared in the event of domestic terror attacks.
In Canada, I think the biggest vulnerability to terrorism would be if they took out a couple of train bridges and brought Canadian commerce to a stand-still.
Because of the layout of the country (something like 80% of our population lives within a couple hours of the border) the transportation networks run basically east to west. I”ve been told there are only two main lines that run parallel across the country. A huge percentage of our goods arrive via sea in Vancouver and are shipped across the country by train. Disabling the tracks in the middle of the country would cripple this process, and doing so probably isn”t much more complicated than a couple of properly placed explosives.
Removing just two very vulnerable bridges, one in Medicine Hat and another in Edmonton, would be enough that virtually no goods could travel across Canada. I have no idea how long it would take to rebuild a train bridge, but it would definitely be the worst terror attack in our country’s history.
So what could be done to prevent such an attack? Building bomb proof bridges is not exactly an option. Putting up security guards around the bridges probably would work, but who wants to pay for that — not to mention the fact that because on any given day the chances of a terrorist strike against the bridges is so slim, it might be ineffective anyway unless the guards are always particularly vigilant.
I guess the best I can do for peace of mind is try not to think about it.
Update: Levitt’s third post on terrorism.