Category Archives: Video

Video

Friday Anime Remixes

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WARNING: if you have a life, you might not “get” this post.

Sometimes, the creativity of the Internet astonishes me.

No, really. I know I’m a snarky and sarcastic person given to damnation-by-faint-praise, but on occasion, even I am honestly impressed. While much of what goes on in the Network’s twisty little forking passages doesn’t contribute to saving the world, we do have to assure ourselves our world is worth saving, don’t we?

And that’s why I’m embedding the theatrical trailer for The Matrix (1999), recreated using clips from Ghost in the Shell (1995).


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BPSDB, Electromagnetism, Favorites, Neuroscience, Pseudoscience, Quantum mechanics, Video

Michael Egnor: 2400 Years Behind the Times

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BPSDBI nearly sprayed my breakfast across my friend’s new flatscreen monitor when I saw the latest from Michael Egnor:

Clearly the brain, as a material substance, causes movement of the body, which is also a material substance. The links are nerves and muscles. But there is no material link between our ideas and our brains, because ideas aren’t material.

Mr. Spock, are your sensors detecting any signs of intelligent life?
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Video

Friday Animation

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This is not how I imagined Spider Jerusalem would sound.

The text comes from Transmetropolitan volume zero, Tales of Human Waste. Of course, the animator (John Franglen) changed the corporation names to ones which exist today. If I walked outside and saw a franchise gun store, a fast-food joint selling cloned human meat and a giant television screen alternating between images of a Chinese woman eating candy and a news anchor announcing that radical French terrorists released a parasitic hentai fetish meme into the San Francisco fish market, well, I’d be afraid I’d eaten the moldy rye bread again.

Oh yes, if any of my three readers are browsing from work, Spider does use a couple words referring to the biological process which brought us all into being in order to express strong emotion.

Classical Mechanics, Software, String Theory, Video

Video Physics Resources

I’ve mentioned both of these items before, but I figured I should bring them up explicitly. (A nasty stretch of PHP coding lies in my near future, and the need to procrastinate is becoming almost a physical pain.) First is Caltech’s series The Mechanical Universe (1985), which I first saw on PBS many years ago and is now available online for free. If you want a year’s worth of freshman physics, you can now get it in moving-picture form. Early episodes also cover some necessary math: derivatives, integrals and vectors. The videos require a free login before use.

Second in the video department is Barton Zwiebach’s String Theory for Pedestrians (2007). The content should be comprehensible to advanced undergrads. Summary:

In this 3-lecture series I will discuss the basics of string theory, some physical applications, and the outlook for the future. I will begin with the main concepts of the classical theory and the application to the study of cosmic superstrings. Then I will turn to the quantum theory and discuss applications to the investigation of hadronic spectra and the recently discovered quark-gluon plasma. I will conclude with a sketch of string models of particle physics and showing some avenues that may lead to a complete formulation of string theory.

Unfortunately, the CERN people haven’t yet figured out this neat “embedding video” thing. RealMedia is so, like, 2001 (and sucks besides). I was able to use Real Alternative to play the Zwiebach videos on Windows and MPlayer to watch them on Linux.
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Evolution, Popularization, Pseudoscience, Video

Time: You’re On Notice!

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In its quest to avoid irrelevance, Time Magazine has boldly surged into idiocy.

Remember a while back when this magazine-of-former-repute told us that “You” were the person of the year? As it happens, one of the Blagnet’s pixel-stained wretches predicted their choice over two months in advance, suggesting that no, we don’t need magazines to spout this kind of vanity — amateurs will do just as good a job for free.

A pragmatic person, given the job of managing a wood-pulp publication in these wild days of Web 3.1, would direct that publication’s efforts into doing things which the amateurs cannot. For example, they could send reporters to far-off locales, pull their strings to get inside connections, invest serious money in fact-checking and so forth. Alternatively, they could decide to outdo the Blagopelago through sheer force of idiocy. It’s not easy, but it could in theory be done.

Today, that theory has received empirical support.

Richard Dawkins is number 73 on the Time 100, and guess who they paid to write his profile.
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Favorites, Transparency, Video

Mentally Ill People on TV

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A funny thing happened to me this morning in connection with mass murder and the tragic extinction of human life.

I was walking to the office for another day of PHP-coding, and on Kirkland Street, I was stopped by a suit-wearing man whose close-cropped gray hair reminded me distantly of an evil landlord I once knew. He carried a microphone with, I believe, the CBS logo (I’m nearsighted and unobservant), and he was accompanied by another man carrying a TV camera. The microphone man asked, “Could we talk to you for a minute?”

“Sure,” I said. “What about?”

“The shootings at Virginia Tech,” he replied, although he didn’t use hyperlinks (most people don’t, in ordinary speech). “And the footage that NBC put out about the killer.”

“Oh, I hadn’t seen it,” I said, which was true. A bit of web-crawling leads me to suspect that this “video manifesto” is what they were talking about, or part of it. See also Google Video. I’m not sure if there was any reason they picked me as opposed to any other pedestrian, and I don’t know how many other people they filmed. Perhaps a guy in a black trenchcoat, black fedora and Sinfest T-shirt is automatically the best guy to interview about a school shooting; I dunno.

They said that NBC had put video online from the killer (Cho Seung-Hui), and they asked me what I thought about that. What were my very first words?

“Well, I’m a firm believer in a transparent society.”

Yessir, meeting David Brin at ICCS 2006 sure ruined my ability to talk like a normal human being. Oh, wait, I lost that a long time ago — never mind.

I said that the whole thing was a tragedy, but the best thing we can do is prevent future tragedies and in order to do that we have to understand what happened this time. If there’s something that dark in human nature, we have to know about it, I told them. They thanked me and we started walking our separate ways. As I strode off, I heard one say to the other, “Okay, we got it.” Maybe I’ll be on the local CBS affiliate talking about preventing disaster through understanding, but I sort of doubt it.

They should have asked me for my Bill Hicks impression. Now that would be worth putting on TV.

UPDATE: See what Joel Achenbach has to say about this. His thinking seems to match up with mine.

UPDATE THE SECOND: I’m on TV!

“Well I’m a firm believer in a transparent society and if there is something that disgusting in human nature we mind [sic] as well be aware of it,” said one person WBZ’s Joe Shortsleeve spoke to.

Interestingly, when I saw myself appear on the screen, I called out, “I’m on TV!” just as anybody would in that circumstance. A friend of mine then walked past the computer just as the female news anchor asked, “How does the public benefit from seeing someone on TV who is clearly mentally ill?” He burst out gut-laughing. I’m not sure what that means, but probably nothing good. So it goes.

UPDATE THE THIRD: WBZ-TV makes it slightly tricky to link directly to the video you want, but try this.