Doritos, as they have in years past, invited ordinary citizens to make Doritos commercials, with the most popular commercial chosen by voters to air during the 2012 Super Bowl.
I’ll save you a little time: the five finalists are all mediocre. But this submission from David Ward (“Make Your Own“) is just great:
He also submitted an entry for the same contest in 2010 titled Forget Everything Else, which is also funny.
Like most Americans, I sat glued to the television screen in the aftermath of the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001. The most vivid clip I remember showed a group of pedestrians fleeing down a Manhattan street as a cloud of dust closed in behind them.
My immediate thought was: “Those special effects are so fake!”
Having never seen a building actually collapse upon a city full of people before, the only way my mind knew how to judge the event was against special effects from fiction depicting alien attacks and super-earthquakes. Against that yardstick, they looked at once both unreal and more terrifying.
Michal Kosakowski created a short film called Just Like the Movies that depicts the September 11 attacks using scenes from films. Some of the clips feature alien ships and other obvious anachronisms, but the timeline of events and the overall visual recall dramatically what really happened that day.
This little wooden box has a switch. And it really doesn’t want you to turn on the switch.
(via Kottke)
I’m delighted to discover that Sarah Kay spoke at TED2011, reciting two poems already featured here but then speaking so eloquently on her experiences learning and teaching spoken word poetry as to render her entire presentation poetic.
During the final launch of the space shuttle Discovery a passenger on a passing commercial airliner recorded video of what the launch looked like from the air. Even after watching the launch live in spectacularly high definition video from NASA, this is somehow even more amazing.
Probably the best part is the pilot’s announcement near the beginning:
Folks, the space shuttle’s going off the right side of the aircraft right now. Those of you on the right side of the aircraft can see the space shuttle. Those of you on the left side of the aircraft can probably see the people on the right side of the aircraft looking at the space shuttle.
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: