Something to brighten your day.
[Discovery Channel: I Love the World – YouTube]
It’s a shame the program planners don’t put more science based shows on the Discovery Channel (TLC). I mean, the house renovation/tattoo parlour/chop shop shows might get high ratings, but they don’t come close to making me sing.
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Can you imagine being trapped in an elevator for 41 hours? The New Yorker just published a brilliant article, Up and then Down: the lives of elevators which features the story of Nick White, a man trapped for 41 hours in a New York City elevator. Their site includes a must-see time-lapse security cam video of the ordeal that changed Nick forever.
How many passes does the team in white make? An experiment in awareness.
[Test your awareness – YouTube]
This elephant is simply incredible! I wonder if he came up with the design himself or if he was taught it and that’s all he does. Either way, WOW.
[Elephant Painting – YouTube]
This particular “artist” appears to be an elephant called Hong who lives at the Maetaman Elephant Camp in Chiang Mai, Thailand. An article about Hong published on The Asian Elephant Art & Conservation Project (AEACP) website notes:
Two years ago, Hong began painting with her mahout, Noi Rakchang, and has steadily developed her skills. After learning how to paint flowers, she moved on to more advanced paintings. She now has two specialties. One is an elephant holding flowers with her trunk, and the other is the Thai flag. An elephant with so much control and dexterity is capable of amazing work. Just for clarification, with these realistic figural works, the elephant is still the only one making the marks on the paper but the paintings are learned series of brushstrokes not Hong painting a still life on her own.
We are sure that as Hong continues to investigate her artistic side, her paintings will become even more beautiful.
Back in February 2006, CBC’s The Hour made a road trip through Alberta. They interviewed me for a short segment about backmasking in which they featured my website.
For your viewing pleasure, here is the clip. (Just bear with me getting through the first 15 seconds).
[The Hour: Backmasking – YouTube]
The producer that arranged the interview gave me a DVD with this clip. She said she didn’t have any problem with me putting it on YouTube so please enjoy!
I just watched Dave Eggers TED talk about the 826 Valencia project. It’s inspiring and funny; please enjoy:
Accepting his 2008 TED Prize, author Dave Eggers asks the TED community to personally, creatively engage with local public schools. With spellbinding eagerness, he talks about how his 826 Valencia tutoring center inspired others around the world to open their own volunteer-driven, wildly creative writing labs. But you don’t need to go that far, he reminds us, “it’s as simple as asking a teacher: How can I help?” He asks that we share our own volunteering stories at his new website, Once Upon a School.
From http://www.googlelunarxprize.org/:
“The Google Lunar X PRIZE is a $30 million competition for the first privately funded team to send a robot to the moon, travel 500 meters and transmit video, images and data back to the Earth.”
[Moon 2.0 – YouTube]
Cheesy video? Yes. Feeling inspired anyway? How could you not?
Control Room is a documentary on the perception of the United States’ war with Iraq, with an emphasis on Al Jazeera’s coverage. It makes it clear that the endeavor for unbiased reporting is a difficult, almost impossible task.
Control Room running time is 1 hours and 26 minutes. Part 1:
Part 2:
Part 3:
[Control Room – YouTube]
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Last fall Robert Scoble and Thomas Hawk interviewed Marc Levoy, Stanford University Professor of both computer science and electrical engineering.
Levoy shows them leading edge research about automatically stitching images together, digitizing real world three dimensial objects like statues, and among others, camera technology that allows you to refocus the image AFTER you shoot it!
You can view the interview here.
See also: CNet’s article about the multi-dimensional focusing technology.
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This amazing music video by Director Simon Laganière, for the Quebec duo Tricot Machine, uses artwork of entirely knitted yarn to animate each frame. (A tricot is a plain, warp-knitted cloth of any of various yarns.)
Over 700 unique knitted pieces were created for the video by designer Lysanne Latulippe of the fashion label Majolie.
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