The BBC straps a camera onto a Peregrine Falcon and a Gos Hawk for some amazing video. The introduction and video of a Golden Eagle in flight are also available, but the video below is the better of the two.
This is one of my favorite videos from 2009. If you’re not familiar with Auto-Tune, it’s a piece of software that can be used to correct the pitch of a singer’s voice in a recording and it’s became ubiquitous in pop songs, almost to the point of absurdity (see T-Pain). The Gregory Brothers decided to take the absurdity to another level and used news clips covering current events combined with Auto-Tune to create hip hop songs. They’ve release nine videos to date, but this, their second, is one of the best. Be sure to pay attention to the lyrics.
A feel good clip for today.
A gem from Imogen Heap.
An exploding banana mask. The mad-genius work of one William Lamson.
The IEEE spectrum website has an eye-opening video on the cutting edge of upper-limb prosthetics that is worth a moment of your time. The latest arm from Dean Kamen, inventor of the Segway, looks eerily like one from a Terminator. I suspect they are still pretty limited by the bio-interface and battery technology, but it’s just a matter of time.
A great demonstration of emerging technology in image processing and rendering. You’ll find this video interesting even if you’re not technically oriented.
This video is a little long and of poor quality, but the confrontation that is captured is fantastic. Well worth your time if you enjoy nature footage.
If we can’t take the time out of our lives to stay a moment and listen to one of the best musicians on Earth play some of the best music ever written; if the surge of modern life so overpowers us that we are deaf and blind to something like that — then what else are we missing?
Pearls Before Breakfast is a fascinating article from the Washington Post about a simple social experiment in the subways of Washington D.C. The embedded videos, vividly illustrating what people walked past, make it all the better.
Like the general public, I was under the impression that the Enron debacle was caused by a collection of executives who knowingly withheld vital information from their investors. Turns out that wasn’t the case. Everything about their schemes was publicly available, it’s just that there was so much information available that no one bothered to really look and see what they were doing until it was too late. A great article on Enron in “The New Yorker” brought this to my attention.