What's in Spock's scanner? (part one) Niiiice bit of editing, lovely job lovely job.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=vs2l38DoqsQ]
Continuing in the vein of people filming their pets, I enjoyed いろいろな髪形とねこ。(trans: various hairstyles and Maru). Next stop? Brighton Pier. [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lcxL1-OH2hI]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=AMp-zThk7Xg] Sort of slightly odd but kind of maybe funny.
Cats nod their heads to The Magnetic Fields [vimeo http://vimeo.com/20732587]
The lovely James Harrison sent me a link to a Wikipedia page that lists inventors killed by their own inventions. Some unfortunate, some through over-confidence, some just plain idiotic. Some of the stranger ones:
Ismail ibn Hammad al-Jawhari (died ca. 1003–1010) was a Muslim Kazakh Turkic scholar from Farab. He thought that with two wooden wings and some rope, he would be able to fly. Apparently his last words were: "O people! No one has ever tried what I am about to do right now. I am going to fly now. The most important thing to do in this world is flying. Now I am going to do that." He didn't. He leapt from the roof of a mosque in Nijabur and fell to his death. Splat.
In a similar vein, tailor Franz Reichelt (above) had a brand new invention: The Coat Parachute. Having told officials he was first going to test it using a dummy, on 4 February 1912 he climbed up to the first level of the Eiffel Tower and sprang off. It didn't work. He died.
Li Si was chief advisor to Chinese emperor Qin Shi Huangdi. He invented a form of execution called The Five Pains, in which first the victim's nose was cut off, followed by a hand and then a foot; the victim would then be castrated and finally cut in half at the waist. Li Si, however, said the wrong thing to Shi Huangdi, and in 208 BC was executed in this way. Yuck.
Wan Hu (below), a sixteenth-century Chinese official, is said to have attempted to launch himself into outer space in a chair to which 47 rockets were attached. The rockets exploded and, it is said, neither he nor the chair were ever seen again.
===
Researching this list I also came across a list of unusual deaths. Most of them are apocryphal, so here they are in note form:
c. 620 BC: Draco, Athenian law-maker, was smothered to death by gifts of cloaks showered upon him by appreciative citizens at a theatre on Aegina.
6th century BC: Legend says Greek wrestler Milo of Croton came upon a tree-trunk split with wedges. Testing his strength, he tried to rend it with his bare hands. The wedges fell, trapping his hands in the tree making him unable to defend himself from attacking wolves, which devoured him.
207 BC: Chrysippus, a Greek stoic philosopher, is believed to have died of laughter after giving his donkey wine then seeing it attempt to eat figs.
1649: Sir Arthur Aston, Royalist commander of the garrison during the Siege of Drogheda, was beaten to death with his own wooden leg, which the Parliamentarian soldiers thought concealed golden coins.
1673: Molière, the French actor and playwright, died after being seized by a violent coughing fit, while playing the title role in his play Le Malade imaginaire (The Hypochondriac).
1814: London Beer Flood, 9 people were killed when 323,000 imperial gallons (1,468,000L) of beer in the Meux and Company Brewery burst out of their vats and gushed into the streets.
1871: Clement Vallandigham, U.S. Congressman and political opponent of Abraham Lincoln, died from a self-inflicted gunshot wound while defending a murder suspect in court. Vallandigham was demonstrating for the jury how the victim could have accidentally shot himself while drawing the gun, when his own gun that he had believed to be unloaded, discharged.
...actually I think I'll stop there. it's getting disturbing. You can always look at the Darwin Awards if you want more.
[vimeo http://www.vimeo.com/20328782]
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0PAy1zBtTbw] A follow-up to THIS POST on French street artist JR who won the 2011 TED prize. Lovely talk from JR as he explains what makes him tick and how we can use art to turn things inside out and upside down.
Find out more about and get involved in his projects here. Watch that film all the way through. Listen to what he says. It's really very beautiful and will bring tears to your eyes.
"What we see, changes what we are."
German photographer Adonis Pulatus made this short film of the giant cruise liner’s December voyage from New York to the Caribbean. [vimeo http://vimeo.com/19901869]
Camera: Panasonic Lumix GH1 (1.32) with the kit (14-140mm) lens and B+W ND 106 or 110 filter.
Tripod: Manfrotto 745B and 701RC2 video head.
Settings: Manual, ISO 100, 1/2 second exposure (“dragging the shutter”). The images were shot at 1 second intervals.
Post Processing: Image set adjusted in Adobe Lightroom 3.2 (contrast only, no colouration) Image set imported into an Adobe Premiere Pro CS5 2K 24p project Exported as 2048x1024 24p MP4
Soundtrack: Adagio of Spartacus and Phrygia (Aram Khachaturian, 1903-1978)
(via)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PgU0YSHYlCc] “My grandparents are the BEST! They got a real kick out of these lyrics and thought this was a lot of fun. ‘Big John’ & ‘Evel Bevel’ met in the 6th grade. They are now almost 89. Grandparents are such treasures!”
It's a cute little songbird, the ortolan. But rather than let it flutter around and chirrup away, our French cousins have - at least until recently - taken rather a different approach. Songbirds have always been something of a delicacy (lark tongue was, after all, a favourite of ancient Rome), but the classic ortolan recipe is... well maybe I should just get into it and let you make up your own mind.
First, catch your ortolan (with a net). Blind it or pop it in a lightless room and fatten it up on millet seed, grapes and figs. After a while, get some Armagnac, and drown the ortolan in it. Pluck it and then roast it whole. Cover your head with an embroidered napkin (I'll explain later). Eat it whole (it's okay to cut it in half first, no one will know if you're under a napkin). Pop it in your mouth whole, with only the head poking out from between your lips (you can leave that bit to one side). The little bones will prick your mouth a bit, but that should sort of mix your blood into the taste of the flesh and the gamey innards.
Quite the gourmet experience, n'est ce pas? You wear the napkin not just to hide the grease dripping down your face and to capture the fragrance but because it's supposed to be such an outrageously sensuous experience that you need to hide your shame from god. As in, it's the original guilty pleasure. Eating is done in silence but for the crunching of bones. The bird is served sizzling, so you have to rest it on your tongue as it cools and the fat runs down your gullet. With the cloth over your head, you concentrate on nothing but the food in your gob.
According to Stewart Allen's book, "It should take about 15 minutes to work your way through the breast and wings, the delicately crackling bones, and on to the inner organs. Devotees claim they can taste the bird's entire life as they chew in the darkness: the wheat of Morocco, the salt air of the Mediterranean, the lavender of Provence. The pea-sized lungs and heart, saturated with Armagnac from its drowning, are said to burst in a liqueur-scented flower on the diner's tongue. Enjoy with a good Bordeaux."
On New Year's Eve in 1995, ortolan was, quite literally (and illegally), President Mitterand's last supper. He died eight days later without having eaten anything else. It's illegal to eat them now, and catching ortolan has been outlawed, but that's apparently more because they were running out of them rather than France's gourmands no longer being able to take the shame of their desires. Go to the right chef, though, and you can still get them, served on the sly in sizzling ramekins to gastronomes and hedonists - they probably taste all the better for their status as forbidden food.
For Benjamin Disraeli they were, quite simply, the best thing going. As he said in The Young Duke: "All paradise opens! Let me die eating ortolans to the sound of soft music.”
Here's a video of Jeremy Clarkson (quelle surprise) getting stuck in:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y4MS7mSzX8]
(ortolan, not to be confused with Autobahn - that's just a great piece of Kraftwerk)
The Museum Studio's take on starting the morning with a smile. (via). [slideshow]
James McMorow, Hear the Noise that Moves so Soft and Low: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0yNuighAgU]
And so it goes. This is beautiful too, I'd like to hear an acoustic version:
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KeCwdXfS_vI]
Some of Liam Brazier's amazing Star Wars polygonal art. You can buy them here. There's more on his website too. (via). [slideshow]
Interesting piece from Slate.com on what it takes to keep cool under pressure. By Taylor Clark. Read the whole piece here. In January, the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords produced a half dozen bona fide heroes, including Patricia Maisch, a 61-year-old woman who snatched ammunition out of alleged gunman Jared Loughner's hands as he tried to reload. For good reason, people like these earn our respect and adulation; their grace under pressure strikes us as almost superhuman. Yet as we marvel at their deeds, we're always left wondering about where, exactly, this composure comes from. Do these people emerge from the womb with sanguine looks on their faces, ready to perform life-saving surgery in the next room if necessary? Or is their coolness something they picked up through life experience?
Let's start with the "nature" side of the equation. For every one of us, the starting point for cool-headedness comes bundled within our DNA: our innate disposition toward anxiety. It's never been a secret that anxiousness is partially inherited (my parents, for example, had me pegged as a future neurotic from the first time my brow furrowed), but no one knew how much influence our genes threw around until psychiatrist Kenneth Kendler came along. In a 2001 study, Kendler and his colleagues examined 1,200 pairs of male twins, some identical and some fraternal, probing into each brother's individual phobias. Because all of the twins shared the same upbringing, yet only the identical twins shared the same DNA, Kendler could filter out environmental factors altogether and calculate a pure figure for our genetic susceptibility to anxiety. The answer? Genes account for around 30 percent of our anxiousness.
"Aha!" we might exclaim. "Cool under pressure is 30 percent genetic, then." Well, not quite. After all, anxiety certainly influences our poise in stressful situations, but being anxious doesn't always lead to falling apart—far from it. Some of history's coolest customers have also been nervous wrecks. Boston Celtics center Bill Russell, who led his team to 11 NBA championships, was legendary among his teammates for his pre-game anxiety; until the end of his career, Russell grew so nervous that he threw up before every single game. When Laurence Olivier was delivering the most lauded theatrical performances of his life, he too suffered from such intense stage fright that he asked people to physically push him onstage. Feeling anxious and flopping while under fire, then, don't necessarily go hand in hand.
The first people to perform useful studies specifically on composure in crisis were World War II combat researchers, who could examine soldiers under literal fire. In 1943, one of these men, a British officer named Lionel Wigram, noticed a pattern in his studies of infantry units on the Italian front. Whenever a 22-man platoon encountered enemy fire, Wigram realized, the troops always responded in the same proportions: A few soldiers would go to pieces and try to escape, a few more would react valiantly, and the vast majority would enter a sheeplike state of bewilderment, unsure of what to do. Wigram wasn't a scientist, but his insight about our instinctive reactions to crisis was remarkably accurate. According to modern research by survival psychologist John Leach, when a random group of people finds itself in a sudden emergency like a fire or a natural disaster, 10 to 15 percent will consistently freak out, 10 to 20 percent will stay cool, and the rest will become dazed and hesitant sheep.
These aren't exactly inspiring figures for those of us who fantasize that we'd respond to a mugger with a heroic flurry of karate kicks—and the situation is about to get bleaker. When researchers have studied those who naturally stay composed in crisis, they've uncovered evidence that their poise has a biological underpinning. Yale psychiatrist Andy Morgan, for example, has studied elite Special Forces recruits as they undergo "Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape" training, a three-week course designed to simulate the tortures of enemy capture. The program is brutally stressful, yet many recruits preserve an amazing amount of mental clarity in the midst of it. When Morgan examined the poised trainees' blood tests, he saw that they were producing significantly more of "a goofy little peptide called neuropeptide Y" than other, more rattled recruits. The extra NPY was like a layer of stress-deflecting mental Kevlar; its effects are so pronounced that Morgan can tell whether a soldier has made it into the Special Forces or not just by looking at a blood test.
At this point, the evidence appears to be stacking up against cool-headedness as something we can learn. Our anxiety is one-third predetermined? Less than one-fifth of us naturally react well to crisis? But not so fast! Before you start fretting about the size of your NPY endowment, consider this: While we may have a few coolness-thwarting tendencies encoded in our genes, these predispositions still don't even tell half of the story of how we become poised under pressure. Recent research overwhelmingly shows that with effort and smarts, we can more than counteract our natural inclinations and cultivate enduring cool.
Our first route to heightened poise is through training. Although the studies on WWII soldiers and disaster victims might seem grim, a vital caveat is in order: Virtually none of those people had been well-trained for the situations in which they found themselves. (These days, even recreational paintball players receive better live-fire preparation than WWII troops ever got.) Most of them reacted like dazed sheep not because they couldn't show composure, but because they simply didn't know what to do. Training changes this. Psychologist Anders Ericsson has shown that whether we want to keep cool amid machine gun fire or just stay poised in a presentation at work, the most effective single thing we can do is to practice the task under realistic conditions until it becomes second nature. As Ericsson's colleague David Eccles told me, even simple chores like fire drills can radically help to produce a better response when crisis strikes. Solid preparation "washes out" our natural dispositions, planting the seed for adaptive behavior in our brains well ahead of time.
Another, newer method for building coolness hinges on a different kind of training: teaching ourselves resilience-enhancing beliefs about stressors. If that idea sounds like Grade A psychobabble to you, then you obviously haven't been reading Consulting Psychology Journal. (What, you don't subscribe?) Study after study has shown that people who function well under stress share several core beliefs: They tend to see times of change and uncertainty not as dangerous but as exciting opportunities; they focus on what they can do to improve a stressful situation, rather than growing helpless; and they maintain a sense of commitment to the world around them, instead of withdrawing. Some people are simply born with these attitudes, but psychologists have demonstrated that they can be learned as well. One of them, University of California-Irvine's Salvatore Maddi, says kids who complete his "hardiness" course—in which students learn new coping behaviors and beliefs about stress—earn higher GPAs than those who don't. The U.S. Army is such a believer in these classes that it now puts all of its 1.1 million soldiers through its own stress resilience course.
And finally, we arrive at what may be the most crucial ingredient in composure, an idea that is simple to understand but tricky to master. In all of the hours I spent researching Nerve, I almost never came across a case in which a cool-headed hero didn't feel afraid; the vast majority dealt with plenty of fear, just like Russell and Olivier. What truly separated them from the pack was this: While many who fizzle under fire battle against anxiety and vilify their nerves, these poised people understand that fear doesn't have to hold them back—it can even help them. This switch to a friendlier view of fear is more than mere sleight of hand. Studies of everyone from classical musicians to competitive swimmers have found no difference at all between elites and novices in the intensity of their pre-performance anxiety; the poised, top-flight performers, however, were far more likely to describe their fear as an aid to success than the nonelites. No matter what skill we're trying to improve under pressure—working on deadline, public speaking, staying cool on a first date—learning to work with fear instead of against it is a transformative shift.
Of course, following these tips won't make you into a paragon of poise overnight. (As Charlie Sheen has taught us, only people with tiger blood and Adonis DNA are capable of instantly achieving feats like that through the power of their minds.) Make no mistake, though: Regardless of what our genes have to say about it, smart training, building resilient attitudes, and developing a better working relationship with fear can help us achieve true grace under pressure. It takes effort to get there, but hey—after you become the next cool-headed hero in the news, it'll make a great story for your bestselling inspirational memoir.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sv3tadz5Q3o] "My name is Anna and this is my final for a college level sign language class. I am not deaf and still learning sign language and encourage others to learn sign language as well!"
(thanks Dana!)
[vimeo http://vimeo.com/19981379] Emilio Gomariz noticed that Photoshop remembered the original size and position of windows before they were minimised. So Gomariz did the most logical thing he could think of — he created a font based on the careful arrangement of 114 colorful Photoshop files. (via)
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_CljmgSLkEU] I heard the Nick Lowe version first, so I always kind of instinctively hum that, but Mister Cash - who was Lowe's father-in-law - SMASHES it every time. Lowe's version was, if I remember rightly, in the first issue of The Sopranos. I'm not going to go into the meaning of it, everyone's is different. I do particularly like the enjambement in the lyrics - works really well at this pace.
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Oxb0lj-7_0U]
The beast in me Is caged by frail and fragile bars Restless by day And by night rants and rages at the stars God help the beast in me
The beast in me Has had to learn to live with pain And how to shelter from the rain And in the twinkling of an eye Might have to be restrained God help the beast in me
Sometimes it tries to kid me That it's just a teddy bear And even somehow manage to vanish in the air And that is when I must beware Of the beast in me that everybody knows They've seen him out dressed in my clothes Patently unclear It it's New York or New Year God help the beast in me
The beast in me
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BONUS TRACK!
[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NwDQ-PyXAqQ]