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NASA - The Frontier Is Everywhere

In December, I asked whether y'all could handle more Carl Sagan remixes. The overwhelming answer was YES, so today I bring you "NASA - The Frontier is Everywhere," a promotional social media video created for NASA, but not by NASA, featuring Carl Sagan's famous "Pale Blue Dot" narration. The video was made by Reid Gower, who was frustrated by NASA's bad PR and thought he'd go ahead and promote the agency by himself. Here's what Gower wrote: I got frustrated with NASA and made this video. NASA is... READ ON

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The Late Movies: The Mona Lisa Curse

Tonight, a documentary in twelve parts about how money has ruined art. Well, it's a bit more nuanced than that, but let's just say this is a scathing critique of the current state of the art world, and it comes from Robert Hughes, a former TIME magazine art critic, who has seen a lot. He's a cranky old bastard, and what he has to say about art is fascinating, partly because he is so thoroughly convinced that he's right. My favorite quote from the documentary: Apart from drugs, art is the biggest... READ ON

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The Joy of Stats: Statistics Explained

Hans Rosling is best known for his visualization of statistics data: he makes engaging animated displays that show how statistics (like AIDS rates, economic data, and even census data) change over time. By animating the data, Rosling helps laypeople understand what the statistics mean over time, and how to draw meaningful comparisons between data points. Last month, fellow blogger Ransom posted a short clip from Rosling's documentary The Joy of Stats, an engaging hour-long look at Rosling's work, and an... READ ON

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Legend of Zelda Song Performed on Wine Glasses

In my own geeky way, I find this festive. Here's a man performing the "Song of Healing" from the video game The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask...on wine glasses. Using tight choreography, he multiplies himself and plays five parts simultaneously. Lovely and weird. More from this guy ("Sp0ntanius") after the... READ ON

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The Late Movies: Portlandia

Tonight: sketch comedy by Fred Armisen and Carrie Brownstein about Portland, Oregon. As a longtime Portland resident, I can tell you that these videos are made with love and respect for the inherent contradictions of Portland's youth culture. Portland isn't so much a place as it is a state of mind -- a sort of blissed-out, shaggy-haired, "Wow, is is still raining?" kind of thing, that's equal parts ridiculous and wonderful. This is a place where a bumper sticker reading "Keep Portland Weird" is found... READ ON

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The Late Movies: 11 Video Game Speedruns

A speedrun is the act of playing a video game (usually the entire thing from start to finish) as fast as possible. In some cases a speedrun may use glitches in the game or other shortcuts to get through it quickly -- an example of a shortcut that people of a Certain Age may remember is the warp tubes in Super Mario Brothers. On the other hand, Glitching is actually a whole gaming subculture, in which gamers do stuff like run through walls in order to reach unexpected parts of the map. Who knew? So... READ ON

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Symphony of Science: A Wave of Reason

In the seventh "Symphony of Science" installment by John Boswell, Carl Sagan sings: "Science is more than a body of knowledge: it's a way of thinking; a way of skeptically interrogating the universe. If we are not able to ask skeptical questions, to be skeptical of those in authority, then we're up for grabs." That's the theme of the song/video, which features Sagan, Bertrand Russell, Sam Harris, Michael Shermer, Lawrence Krauss, Carolyn Porco, Richard Dawkins, Richard Feynman, Phil Plait, and James... READ ON

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"Minority Report" Computing Gets Slightly More Real

Since 2002, the film Minority Report has inspired computer geeks the world over. At the time, touch interfaces were relatively rare, and where they did exist, they were typically limited to one finger at a time. In the film, Tom Cruise's character famously interacts with his computer by standing in front of a projected screen and basically waving his hands at it, manipulating objects without even touching them. In the film, computers had lept past mere touch, and moved to gestures, performed in the air.... READ ON

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The Late Movies: 3-2-1 Contact!

3-2-1 Contact was an educational TV show that aired from 1980 to 1988. Produced by the Children's Television Workshop, it aired on PBS in the US, and I used to love the heck out of it -- it featured science as well as my favorite crimefighters, "the Bloodhound Gang," who used science to solve crimes. I had no idea that, so many years later, I could easily sing along with the theme song. Can you? Theme Song/Intro This brings back lots of memories. The shots of the frog, the cat, and the baby?... READ ON

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Donald Duck on the Futility of Nuclear War

In 1952, Disney released the 7-minute cartoon "Applecore" featuring Donald Duck and Chip 'n Dale, the mischievous fast-talking chipmunks. In this short, Donald plays an apple farmer whose crops are being eaten by Chip 'n Dale, so Donald retaliates, only to be foiled at every turn. This short is cute, but there is a hugely powerful Cold War undertone here. In the wake of World War II, this short is about the futility of nuclear war, showing the escalation of an arms race, the loss of Donald's crops,... READ ON