Jeff Desom made this incredible time lapse video created from clips of Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 film Rear Window. In the video, the whole story unfolds in order, but the only thing you see is the panoramic view from the window. The movement of the small figures in the distance let you know where to direct your attention. The video is set to a great soundtrack, Brahms’ Hungarian Dance No. 5. Desom shared how he made the video on his website.
Bad Opinion Generator
Hindsight is 20/20.
A random sampling of history’s most clueless predictions — from faulty scientific forecasts to sweeping political statements
Some gems:
“Remote shopping, while entirely feasible, will flop — because women like to get out of the house, like to handle merchandise, like to be able to change their minds.” —TIME, offering predictions for the year 2000, 1966
“Splitting the atom is like trying to shoot a gnat in the Albert Hall at night and using ten million rounds of ammunition on the off chance of getting it.” —British physicist Lord Ernest Rutherford, date unknown
“I believe that the motion picture is destined to revolutionize our educational system and that in a few years it will supplant largely, if not entirely, the use of textbooks.” —Thomas Edison, 1922
“These Google guys, they want to be billionaires and rock stars and go to conferences and all that. Let’s see if they still want to run the business in two or three years.” —Bill Gates, on Google magnates Sergey Brin and Larry Page, 2003
“Tchaikovsky’s First Piano Concerto, like the first pancake, is a flop.”—Russian music critic and composer Nicolai Soloviev, 1875
Give people time to act honestly
Give people time to act honestly
The Economist explores the psychology of morality by reporting on a dice rolling experiment:
The researchers had no way of knowing what numbers participants actually rolled, of course. But they knew, statistically, that the average roll, if people reported honestly, should have been 3.5. This gave them a baseline from which to calculate participants’ honesty. Those forced to enter their results within 20 seconds, the researchers found, reported a mean roll of 4.6. Those who were not under any time pressure reported a mean roll of 3.9. Both groups lied, then. But those who had had more time for reflection lied less.
The experiment suggests that people who are rushed and don’t take the time to think are more likely to lie and cheat than those who have time to think about their actions rationally.
The Girl Who Loves to Levitate
For the rest of these see Part 1 and Part 2.
Japanese photographer Natsumi Hayashi glides through Tokyo without ever really touching her feet to the ground. At least that’s what it seems in her Levitation photographs where Hayashi floats along in otherwise ordinary scenes.
Getting the right shot involves many attempts, and Hayashi says she either works with a friend or by herself through this following process: “First, I get a composition and a focus manually. Then I press the shutter release, run to the right position for a levitation as I check the camera’s blinking red LED counting down 10 seconds and jump by my intuition. In this manner, I need to jump over and over to get the right shot.”
(Pro tip: Part 2 is better since Hayashi had about a year more of practice with her unusual photo technique.)
Seeing the world through “The Collective Snapshot”
Seeing the world through “The Collective Snapshot”
Spanish photographer Pep Ventosa‘s layered snapshots are shizophrenic, to say the least. The photographs, part of a series entitled “The Collective Snapshot”, are comprised of multiple images of several landmarks, ranging from the Eiffel Tower and the Golden Gate Bridge to Stonehenge and the Taj Mahal, layered on top of the other and rendered with varying degrees of opacities that constitute a spectral play of shifting horizons, half-structures, and fluctuating streams of pedestrians.
Sydney Opera House
The Palace of Westminster
The Birth Of Silicon Valley
NPR published an interesting interactive timeline of the development of Silicon Valley. It is as much history of the conditions that made venture capital possible as it is about the development of technology.
(It’s in Flash, FYI.)
Could Wikipedia write itself?
Rebecca J. Rosen reports in The Atlantic on an effort to automate more of the updates in Wikipedia through the new project called Wikidata.
The current plans are for the project to roll out in three phases over the next year. The first phase, set to be completed by this August, is the centralization of all the different points of data in Wikipedia across languages whose updates could be coordinated. The second phase allows for people to begin collaboratively building the database’s datasets. They hope to finish that by the end of this year. The final phase “will allow for the automatic creation of lists and charts based on the data in Wikidata.” By March of next year Wikimedia Deutschland hopes to turn the database over to the Wikimedia Foundation.
There’s more information about Wikidata on Wikimedia.org.
What does it take to come up with a really great idea? This drawing from Christoph Niemann’s latest book called Abstract City tries to answer that question.
(via swissmiss)