Topic - kottke.org

Burn this guy at the stake because he's a witch! You can't separate out the water from Coca-Cola with a simple water filter. Coke is elemental, inviolable. It's The Real Thing. Coke Is It. A Coke is a Coke. (via digg) Tags: Coca-Cola video

What happens when you wring a washcloth out in zero gravity? Something cool. Commander Hadfield is the best. I love when he casually lets go of the wireless mic and it just floats there right in front of his face. (thx, dusty) Tags: gravity science space video

The first features TAKASKE, a Dance Dance Revolution player with ballerina-quick feet. Here he plays all eight footpads at ludicrous speed. Then there's Kara Black, a higly-ranked women's doubles tennis player with a killer net game. Here she's practicing volleys off the wall at close range. She reels off 115 volleys in 43 seconds, beating the performance of her 16-year-old self. Tags: Dance Dance Revolution Kara Black sports TAKASKE tennis video games

Dove employed Gil Zamora, a FBI-trained forensic sketch artist, to help with an interesting experiment about self-perception. Zamora first sketched a series of women as they described themselves (they were hidden from his view) and then he sketched portraits of the same women based on descriptions by people who had met them. The difference between the two drawings, self-described vs. peer-described, were striking. More on the experiment here. Tags: Gil Zamora video

Major League Combat is a sport that combines juggling, rugby, Capture the Flag, and maybe Quidditch? I can't make out how you score, but keeping your juggle from end-to-end seems important. Weird sport or the weirdest sport? It's definitely up there with chessboxing. (thx, benjamin) Tags: juggling sports video

Watch as wingsuit pilot Alexander Polli flies through a hole in a mountain. And it's not that big of a hole either. Watching this, I kept seeing an image of Wile E. Coyote wearing an Acme-brand wingsuit smacking into the side of the mountain. (via stellar) Tags: Alexander Polli sports video

Designer and artist Rolf Sachs renovated the Olympic stadium that was used in the 1928 and 1948 Winter Games in St. Moritz and turned it into his private residence. And wow, St. Moritz still has a naturally made bobsled run...the entire thing is made out of ice and snow. Tags: 1928 Winter Olympics 1948 Winter Olympics architecture Rolf Sachs

Great article by Burkhard Bilger about NASA's Curiosity mission to Mars. The search for life on Mars is now in its sixth decade. Forty spacecraft have been sent there, and not one has found a single fossil or living thing. The closer we look, the more hostile the planet seems: parched and frozen in every season, its atmosphere inert and murderously thin, its surface scoured by solar winds. By the time Earth took its first breath three billion years ago, geologists now believe, Mars had been s...

This is supposedly a leaked version of the song Get Lucky from Daft Punk's forthcoming album, but from what I can tell, this is just an extended version of the song cobbled together from this minute-long commercial that ran during SNL this weekend. Not that that's a bad thing...I've had it on repeat for the last 30 minutes. The duo have, however, given their first interview about the album to Rolling Stone. (via kyleread) Tags: Daft Punk music

Starting with cubes of four simple materials (bone, tissue, 2 types of muscles) and one simple rule (faster bots have more offspring) results in a surprising amount of complexity among walking robots. (via buzzfeed) Tags: evolution robots science video

If you're compiling a list of the least cool brands, Kmart deserves serious consideration. But you've got to give them props for this daring ad touting free home shipping of out-of-stock merchandise. I almost shipped my pants laughing at this. (via ★interesting) Tags: Kmart advertising video

Deceptive Practice is a documentary about Ricky Jay which features, among other things, a shaggy-haired Jay playing Three-card Monte with Steve Martin on an 80s chat show. Jay is a fascinating guy, as this 1993 New Yorker profile of him by Mark Singer demonstrates. Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher's named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hote...

This video would be a lot better without the first 15 seconds (sippy cups? talking? who cares?) but the rest of it is pants-wettingly amazing. Tags: food video

I remember tearing baseballs apart as a kid and seeing the rubber core, but I guess I had forgotten that a baseball is mostly a leather-covered yarn ball. See also how footballs are made and homemade soccer balls. (via @marklamster) Tags: baseball how to sports video

The other day I posted a video about how differential gears work to help cars go smoothly around curves. Trains don't have differential gears, so how do they manage to go around curves without slipping or skidding? Richard Feynman explains: Ha, it looks like I've posted this one before as well. Can never get enough Feynman. (thx, kerry) Tags: physics Richard Feynman science video

I've posted this before, but it's so good, here it is again: a super-simple explanation of why differential gears are necessary in cars and how they work. (via @stevenstrogatz) Tags: cars science video

Caught a rerun of an episode of This American Life on reruns the other day. The first segment is about a movie I'd never heard about before, The Beaver Trilogy. I don't want to spoil it too much (the Wikipedia page contains spoilers as well) but the first part of the film features documentary footage of a kid from Beaver, Utah doing impressions and putting on a talent show. The second and third parts are recreations of that footage featuring, well, just listen to the story or watch the first ...

Leigh Singer gathered more than 50 clips from movies that break the fourth wall (where the characters acknowledge they're in a movie). Sadly my favorite broken fourth wall moment didn't make the list: Billy Ray Valentine in Trading Places getting a commodities lesson from the Dukes. (via smarter in five) Tags: Leigh Singer movies video

If you need a little pick-me-up, try this video of two nonagenarians racing each other in the 100-meter dash. Seems like there's gonna be a clear winner from the start but... Both men were born in 1918; if the video were filmed this year, that would make them 95. (via @gavinpurcell) Tags: sports track and field video

This is an episode of Computer Chronicles from 1995 showing what you could do on the internet. (via mental floss) Tags: video

Vice made a 24-minute documentary film about Cody Wilson, who is designing a semi-automatic weapon that can be printed out on a 3-D printer. You just download the plans, print it out, and there you go. "Gun control is a fantasy" indeed. Tags: 3D printing Cody Wilson guns video

Daft Punk is coming out with a new album called Random Access Memories. It's out on May 21 but you can preorder on iTunes. Here's a brief ad for the album: Tags: Daft Punk music

It does what it says on the tin. My favorite part is how it shoots the airplane out at the end. "Be gone, good sir, I am quite done with you!" (thx, Alex) Tags: Legos robots video

The new iOS gaming hotness is Ridiculous Fishing. In it, you try to get your hook as deep as you can, then catch as many fish as you can on the way up, and finally shoot as many of the fish as you can with a gun. There are also chainsaws and an in-game Twitter clone called Byrdr. This game is ten times more charming than that Arnold on Green Acres and fun as hell. Highly recommended. If you need an extra nudge, here's the trailer: Tags: iPad games Ridiculous Fishing video games

If it's got wheels, extreme sports enthusiasts will do tricks on it. The push scooter your five-year-old rides at the playground is no exception: If they ever to a Back to the Future reboot, they know who to call for the downtown Hill Valley chase scene. (via @DavidSimkins1) Tags: video

A Danish TV show called Dumt & Farligt (which translates as Stupid & Dangerous) films all sorts of crazy things at 2500 frames/sec with a super HD camera. You may have seen the first video from last April...here's a follow-up that just came out: The highlights for me were the bottle of red wine in the microwave and the rocket-powered drying rack from the first video and the bottle of Diet Coke shot with a bullet and gas leak in a camper. The Diet Coke scene is almost cinematic, the way the bo...

Watch as Ludovic Woerth & Jokke Sommer fly through a hole in a building in central Rio de Janeiro that looks not much more than 15 feet wide. Jesus. And speaking of Jesus, another pair of wingsuiters flew under the arms of the Christ the Redeemer statue in Rio a few years ago. (via @rands) Tags: Rio de Janeiro sports video

A nascent trend on YouTube is to take contemporary dramas and imagine what their 1995-style opening credits sequences might look like. The first one appears to be this Walking Dead one, followed by Breaking Bad, which is the best of the bunch: The Game of Thrones one is pretty great as well: These seem to be a variation on the recut trailers meme, e.g. The Shining as a romantic comedy or Toy Story as a horror film. (via @aaroncoleman0) Tags: Breaking Bad Game of Thrones remix TV video

In the pages of Sidereus Nuncius, Galileo described the four large moons of Jupiter in a series of 64 sketches which looked a lot like ASCII art in the text: Using an online tool for computing the positions of Jupiter's moons, Ernie Wright compared Galileo's sketches to the moons' actual motions. Click through for an animated GIF of all the comparisons. Not bad for the telescopic state of the art in 1610. For a taste of how celestial objects actually appeared when viewed through Galileo's tel...

9 minutes and thirty nine seconds of Ron Swanson dancing to Daft Punk. Years from now this video could be the basis of a religion. Tags: Daft Punk Ron Swanson video

Broadcasters are starting to experiment with using footage taken from cameras worn by in-game referees. Here's footage from a rugby ref's vantage point: And from a hockey ref: PRIDE Fighting Championships has been using ref cams since at least 2004. Also: roller derby, girls high school basketball, and paintball. (thx, david) Tags: sports video

Poignant video profile of Ralph Baer, the inventor of the Magnavox Odyssey, the first home console gaming system. He's still inventing at age 90. Tags: David Friedman Ralph Baer video video games

Your endurance challenge for today: see how much of this video of the final round of the 2012 O. Henry Pun-Off World Championship you can watch before flinging your computing device across the room. For bonus points, see if you can get through some of the comments...they are PUNishing. (Gah, I've been infected.) Tags: language video

This is a clip from the BBC series Edwardian Farm that shows how rope was made in the olden days. The entire series is available to watch online. Tags: Edwardian Farm TV video

Wearable computing is heating up. Jawbone and Nike are vying for your wrists, Google and Lat Ware want your face, Fitbit owns the hips, and Apple might want to make your shoes smarter. But one of the most intriguing demos I've seen, if the footage in the video is to be believed, is the Myo gesture control armband. It's an eye-popping demo. The copy on the site reads "unleash your inner Jedi" and you pretty much do look like Obi-Wan using the thing. Which is to say, like a crazy person cosplay...

Tony McCabe demonstrates how to jump on eggs without breaking them. If this is what Britain was like in the 70s, it's possible that Monty Python's Flying Circus was a documentary. (via @scottlamb) Tags: Tony McCabe video

Here's a video that shows how scientists believe the human face has changed over the past 7 million years: Tags: science video

I don't want to stand in the way of all science, but I am completely on board with the banning of all research into the creation of a dancing dog robot that throws cinder blocks with ease. Oops, I am too late. And now this is happening. This place isn't too far from me in Boston, so if anyone wants to meet up for a little Terminator 2 style future saving, let me know. Tags: robots video

Since the Sun moves relative to the other stars around it at about 45,000 miles/hr, if you change the frame of reference from the Sun to the surrounding stellar system, you get planetary motion that looks something like this: I would take this video with a grain of salt though, especially when it says things like "the Sun is like a comet, dragging the planets in its wake"...the planets don't lag behind the Sun. Better to think of the thing as a conceptual schematic: resembling reality but not...

And the TED Prize ("awarded to an extraordinary individual with a creative and bold vision to spark global change") this year goes to this guy, who invented a machine for separating Oreos: Congratulations! (thx, brad) Tags: Oreo video

The third episode of the first season of Charlie Brooker's Black Mirror was called The Entire History of You, in which many people have their entire lives recorded by implants. Brooker's take on the self-recorded future and Google's rosier view meet in this video: Black Mirror is currently in its second season in the UK, with no US release on the horizon. Here's what one of the season two episodes is about: A CG character from a TV show is jokingly put forward to become a member of Parliament...

A popular option for moving companies to offer in Japan is, not only to transport your belongings, but to pack them and unpack them for you. I'd move to Japan just so I'd never have to pack up my own apartment again... except I'd have to pack up my apartment to get there. (via @ohheygreat) Tags: Japan video

You've gotta wait for it. Nope, not that one. Not that. Or that. THAT. THAT'S THE SHOT. Literally unbelievable. Totally lucky but unbelievable. (via @DavidGrann) Tags: badminton sports video

Last weekend, Sarah alerted us that the Criterion Collection movies on Hulu were available to watch for free all weekend long. It was a classic kottke.org post: here's something of very high quality that everyone can experience right now. Spot on, nailed it, I personally got excited and I would have taken full advantage had I not been out of the country. The funny thing is that Hulu's Criterion movies are almost always nearly free. There are many films -- like Hoop Dreams, Babette's Feast, A ...

The electric lighbulb, the phonograph, and the movie camera were invented (or significantly improved upon) by Thomas Edison, so lets give him credit for one more: LOLcats: This short film was shot at the world's first movie studio, The Black Maria, located in West Orange, NJ. The entire building was built on a turntable so that the building could rotate with the sun for the best lighting conditions. (via "robin sloan") Tags: movies Thomas Edison video