Tag: video

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Things 81: the TV show, Spotify Poetry, Mad Scientists

Video
Laurence correctly identified that this is exactly the kind of multi-level high-speed animated insanity that I enjoy (and am currently wondering if I can design an infographic for):

Link
Share a Spotify playlist, make poetry. A nice little art form. I like this one:

Don’t Look Back Into The Sun
Choose
The Whole Of The Moon
Instead
It Won’t Hurt
Too Much
I Don’t Know Why
But It’s Better If You Do
Wish Upon A Star
Just
Not The Sun
It’s Too Hot For Words
Think About It
Be Careful
Remember
Everybody’s Free (To Wear Sunscreen)

Quote
I’ve wanted to post this quote for a while, but couldn’t remember it well enough to find it. Here it is courtesy of The Week, via The Times:

Max Planck: “A new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up familiar with it.”

Picture
An excellent observation from the webcomic Cowbirds in Love, as conveniently recommended to me by the futuristic magical curation power of Google Reader Play (click to view full size on their site):

Last Week’s Puzzle
Last week I asked how a very strange photo of a physically impossible propeller was achieved. The answer is simply this, and you can see more examples here.

Puzzle
Each week a different section of Things is skipped in order to cut down the length. This week there is no puzzle. This is not a trick. There is no puzzle.

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Things 20: Cake Division, Dinorun, Christian the Lion

(Originally sent July 2008)

This week’s film – one line reviews :
Hancock was like a TV mini-series compressed into 90 minutes, with the first half used to trick people into going to see it, and a plot that looks like it suffered from too many cooks.

Next Week’s film
Kung Fu Panda

Actually I saw this on IMAX last weekend, but would rather see it again in the cinema than see Prince Caspian, which I find so unappealing even Eddie Izzard as Reepicheep can’t make up for it. Kung Fu Panda was a very solidly entertaining piece of work, as the figures below attest.

IMDb rating: 8.1/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 88%

My youtube review:

A Puzzle
Alternatives to a first mover or an infinite past:

-time as a loop

-space and time merge as you go back in time (this makes no sense to me but is apparently one theory)

-time is an illusion

The real lesson here is that we have absolutely no right to expect our intuition for what makes sense, which we developed in our own particular tiny bit of the universe, to be any kind of a guide on this scale of issue.

This week’s puzzle
When you find yourself having to divide a cake between two children you know that at least one will complain they got the smaller slice. There is a classic strategy to solve this problem that is well known, which I won’t reveal since if you’re not familiar with it then that is an excellent puzzle already. For those that know: what if there are three children?

A Quote
A wonderfully distilled observation on what I think is one of the most fascinating debates of our generation:

Stewart Brand: “Information wants to be free. Information also wants to be expensive […] that tension will not go away.”

A Link
Dinorun – an old-school style game in which you play a dinosaur attempting to outrun extinction. Worth playing at least once just to see how awesome it is to be wiped out by an unstoppable wave of annihilation:

http://www.pixeljam.com/dinorun/

A video
Another bit of cross-species friendship – “Christian the Lion”, who was friends with some 70s dudes.

Short version with the best-suited music but, er, inappropriate message at end:

Longer version with the full story but annoying text:

A picture
An illustration of how technology will help us in the future:

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Things 80: Underwater, 3D, Propeller Puzzle

Video
A simple idea, but no less amazing for it:

Read more about this here.

Link
As soon as 3D cinema started to see regular releases, many of us wondered if there was a market for designer 3D glasses, or at least nicer ones than the pairs you get at the cinema. I suspect with the advent of 3D TV using the same technology, the market becomes viable, and so the product duly emerges.

Quote
Marvellously surreal, but also interpretable as a variation on carpe diem:

Bill Murray as Phil in Groundhog day: “Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn’t one today!”

Puzzle
Given that no Photoshop is involved, how was this photo achieved?

Photo credit (and by its context, answer to the puzzle) is here.

Categories
Old

Thing 19: The Beginning of Time, Cat game, Animal Friendship

(Originally sent June 2008)

This week’s film – one line review
Wanted was an extraordinary hotch-potch of the ridiculous and the sublime, and I highly recommend it to anyone that liked the look of the trailers. Incidentally, it now has 71% on rotten tomatoes, and I can’t help noticing that WALL-E is on 98%, but we have to wait another 3 weeks for that.

My review of Wanted:

Next Week’s film
Hancock.

A comedy about what it would be like if someone with Superman-like powers was a degenerate reprobate played by Will Smith, which actually looks as if it could be a highly original kind of superhero story.

IMDb rating: 6.8/10
Rotten Tomatoes rating: 33%

A Puzzle
This week: philosophy.

One of the weirdest things about the universe is that it exists at all. Without even bringing God into it, either there was nothing and then suddenly it began, or something has been around (one way or another) forever, and neither of these two concepts seems plausible to our intuition. But in fact these are not the only two options. Can you think of any others?

A Quote
James Richardson: “The Man who sticks to his plan will become what he used to want to be.”

A Link
A game involving cats:
http://www.ferryhalim.com/orisinal/g3/cats.htm

A video
A wild crow with “no known history of humanitarian benevolence” adopts a kitten:

A picture
Continuing the theme of cross-species friendship, an infra-red triggered camera set up to try to capture a picture of Bigfoot ended up capturing something even more bizarre – a raccoon riding on a wild hog:

All part, incidentally, of an ingenious marketing strategy by the makers of the camera:

http://www.cryptomundo.com/cryptozoo-news/bushnell-bf/