In the wake of the Superbowl, we can revisit a brilliant ad from Kraft’s Huddle to Fight Hunger campaign.
Besides communicating Kraft’s message effectively, it’s also a pretty good demonstration of how the game is played.
Patrick Jean made a video depicting what would happen to New York if it were attacked by 1980s video games:
I like the bit with Tetris best, but the entire thing is wonderful.
I was unimpressed with this the first time I watched it, but after trying it again I’m finding it entirely remarkable. Todd Lappin handed his new iPad to his 2.5 year-old daughter and filmed her first few minutes using the device.
This is cheating to some extent in that she’s already used an iPhone and therefore understood not only the basic interface but also many of the applications (including her games in particular).
That aside, however, the basic idea that children born today are faced with clear, intuitive interfaces for interacting with computers — and that they can learn to use a device like an iPad before even being able to read — is truly astounding.
YouTube has quite a few videos of children using an iPad (a surprising percentage of whom are 2.5 years old) which only emphasizes the basic point that we’ve invented a device young children can perhaps universally understand.
I’ve stumbled onto perhaps the most astounding collection of videos since TEDTalks: the “University of California” channel on YouTube. Fully 3,575 videos are posted at the moment on topics ranging from psychology to science fiction to poetry and music. Bill Clinton, Noam Chomsky, Ray Bradbury, and the Dalai Lama are all featured giving talks or interviews, along with countless others I have yet to even discover.
With most videos about an hour long, this trove will take some time to explore.
I’ll recommend first a talk by Stephen Wolfram, inventor of Mathematica and Wolfram Alpha:
I’ve watched only the first 15 minutes or so of this to verify it looks like the same talk I saw Mr. Wolfram give in person about five years ago. At the time, it was the single most astonishing idea I’d ever heard.
Starting with a very simple rule for how to color in a row of boxes based on how the previous row of boxes was covered — i.e., a cellular automaton — one can obtain a “pattern” so sophisticated that it produces what, by any known measure, appears to be completely random data. It’s so random, in fact, that “Rule 30” is used as the basis for random number generation in Mathematica.
And this talk by Douglas Adams is similarly enthralling. He discusses several journeys he took to find and study endangered species, and what we humans can learn from them — and he does it in a speaking style that anyone who’s read Hitchhiker’s Guide will find oddly familiar:
