I’m feeling this space-themed music video after all of the recent space news and moon gazing.
The video was directed by Erik Wernquist and the photography is credited to “NASA/JPL/University of Arizona/Goddard Space Flight Center Scientific Visualization Studio,” which kinda makes me want to track down the original sources.
Link via Synesthesia
President Obama’s speech is worth watching in its entirety. Starts at 23:18.
We are not the only country on earth that has people with mental illnesses, or want to do harm to other people. We are the only advanced country on earth that sees these mass shootings every few months.
Somehow this has become routine. The reporting is routine. My response, here at this podium, ends up being routine. The conversation in the aftermath of it, we’ve become numb to this.
Have news organizations tally up the number of Americans who’ve been killed through terrorist attacks in the last decade and the number of Americans who’ve been killed by gun violence, and post those side-by-side on your news reports.
Vox’s Zack Beauchamp took up Obama’s challenge.
At work I have a desktop computer that’s dedicated to long-running processes—currently doing OCR on magazine archives—while I use a laptop to write and debug code. I have a few go-to videos I play on top of the background tasks, to offer a kind of virtual window out into the world when I need to look away from my text editor.
Two of my favorite options, both deemed “too fast moving” by nearby colleagues, are Bergensbanen: minutt for minutt (the 7 hour single take, the purest form of Norwegian slow television I’ve found online) and The Gunhilde Maersk container ship timelapse. The latter of these makes me think of Allen Sekula, who gave a good interview on the role of shipping in the global economy.
The container ship timelapse is shot by Toby Smith, who’s also posted a slower moving 90 minute view from a container ship, as seen in real time. Nothing is visible but the ocean and a distant horizon. Played at HD on a large screen, it has an amazingly soothing effect. This has emerged as the best option all around, and coincides nicely with my maritime-themed name plate (see also: The Loop).
Link via Jason Kottke (This post’s title is borrowed from Allan Sekula’s excellent film, The Forgotten Space.)
In honor of today’s big event, here’s a video my friend Tom (Vimeo) made a couple years ago.
Each year more and more of the Arctic is comprised of “young ice.”
This animation tracks the relative amount of ice of different ages from 1987 through early November 2014. The first age class on the scale (1, darkest blue) means “first-year ice,” which formed in the most recent winter. (In other words, it’s in its first year of growth.) The oldest ice (>9, white) is ice that is more than nine years old.
An excerpt from a longer video by Nadav Assor.
I am a big fan of pretty much all of the women who appear in this video. It’s worth setting aside 18 minutes and listening to what they’ve been up to. There is also a book, available in both pulp and downloadable PDF formats.
It’s heartening to see all-women teams coming together to produce awesome things. More like this, please!
Testing out how to make time lapses. I might do some more of these.
I was interviewed about Occupy.here for a recently-launched Dutch news site called de Correspondent. It was produced by Kel O’Neill and Eline Jongsma, who are wonderful people and doing very interesting things in addition to de Correspondent.
(And yes, I am posting here again!)