We here in Minnesota are in the midst of a freak snowstorm. This isn’t unheard of, and in fact Rochester usually registers a few inches of snow in April. Getting an April snowstorm is, however, big news. So big that we made the national news Check out the link below to see our humble little city on msnbc.
I am a big fan of Jonathan Coulton’s folkish version of Baby Got Back (originally by Sir Mix-a-lot) it is kind of like The Gourds cover of Gin ‘n Juice. I just saw this video mashup someone did with the original Baby Got Back video and Coulton’s song. It obviously took someone a lot of time and the result is pretty cool. At the same time there are some parts of this video that just were not meant to be played in slow motion. Still worth a watch for all you children of the 80’s.
This is a very cool use of something that all of us did when we were little. It just goes to show you, if your dream as a kid was to go out there and make shadow puppets for a living, you probably could do it (at least part time).
So there I was on Monday night, watching a little Golden Globes on the TV (don’t judge me), things were going good. Then I saw something so amazingly disturbing I had to rewind it and show Amber. What could have possibly been so amazing to jar me from my obviously entranced TV watching state? This…
(I didn’t goto the site that marked this video so I can’t vouch for it)
I will give you a moment to soak that in…
First off bringing someone digitally back to life is a little iffy even if done well, but this looks horrible. His digital head is not the right size for his “actor” body and does not move naturally with it. Going by what I read in this USA Today article I can understand from their procedure why it looks so awkward. They used one actor for the base of the face and a different actor for the body, that seems like an odd choice and one that did not do them well. There was another interesting quote from the article:
Advertising psychologist Carol Moog says there’s “a certain creepiness” to reviving Redenbacher but expects it’ll sell popcorn. “There’s going to be a macabre fascination.”
It is true that it has “a certain creepiness” but it really doesn’t make me want popcorn and I will probably never look at poor Orville the same way again. However, I am posting the commercial on my blog (which means tens of people will watch it) so maybe the commercial is doing its job. I still say as a general rule, don’t let dead people sell your products on TV (keep them on the radio where they belong).
I must say that I don’t know a whole lot about Creative Commons. I know that it is an alternative licensing model for copyrighting material that is promoted by people who want more freedom of content but I never really knew the details of it. I saw a link to this video last night and it intrigued me. The man presenting is Lawrence Lessig, a law professor at Stanford Law School and more important in this context the founder of Creative Commons. Needless to say this is not an unbiased look at creative commons, but it does do a good job of explaining what creative commons is and isn’t, and relates it back to the free software movement.
The video is long (an hour and fifteen minutes) but the actual presentation only takes up about 45 minutes of that, the remainder being Q&A. Regardless of how you feel about the content, the presentation is good and surprisingly entertaining (by Geek Standards) (Worth watching the first few minutes for the Back to the Future 3 remix). The audio is a little out of sync (at least on my computer) which is annoying until you get used to it.
I am involved with a project at work where we go out to area schools with projects that are meant to show that engineering can be fun. This year I am on the team charged with developing a project to bring to Middle Schools. One idea we had was to attempt to do a Rube Goldberg Machine. For those of you not familiar with Rube Goldberg, he was a cartoonist who did most of his work in the early 1900’s. His most remembered cartoons involve very complicated machines that were built to do very simple tasks. A collection of his works can be seen at www.rube-goldberg.com.
I built this demo machine last night. The objective was to “park” a toy car, which I was able to do in five steps. The machine worked very well, however the toy cars Amber and I purchased at the dollar store last night, did not perform admirably.
On a side note, this is the first video I have posted to YouTube, when waiting for my video to pop-up on the “Recently Added” list (you know you would have done the same), I was amazed at the volume of video that gets posted (about 20-30 videos per minute by my count).
Speaking of Rube Goldberg, I also found one of my favorite Rube Goldberg Machines posted on YouTube (while I was using the “search” to find my video, again you know you would have done the same!). This machine was professionally made for a Honda commercial. It is all real, they only used parts from the car itself, and if I remember correctly they did it in one continuous shot.
P.S. A big thanks to Ernie for letting us borrow his video camera.
When I think of the Muppets, I think about good quality children’s TV. However, in the 1960’s when people saw the Muppets they thought about Wilkins Coffee and cartoon violence. Watching the commercials I clicked to on YouTube today it is hard to believe you would get away with many of them on TV today, expecially if it was the Muppets. Keep in mind these are the the early Muppets (so don’t expect to see Kermit, but one character is strangely familiar), they are however Jim Henson creations.
There are many more of these videos up at YouTube here.
Check out the link below to see our humble little city on msnbc.