Just outside the Aruba Ostrich Farm. We learned that the males have dark feathers, and the females have gray ones. Part of the tour involved an opportunity to walk up and feed the ostriches (using a bowl). We were warned that the ostriches liked shiny objects, and advised to remove jewelery and such.
One of the first things that Robbins ever explained to me was his observation that the eye will follow an object moving in an arc without looking back to its point of origin, but that when an object is moving in a straight line the eye tends to return to the point of origin, the viewer’s attention snapping back as if it were a rubber band.
YouTube user jcltay has a nice video clip, showcasing the NYE fireworks display at Docklands, Melbourne in reverse. It’s got a slow, mesmerizing quality to it, that’s surprisingly satisfying to watch. A bit like watching the sky clean up after itself.
I found this video by C. G. P. Grey on the difference between Holland and the Netherlands pretty darn fantastic. It’s a very non-stop, face-paced kind of video (and reminded me a bit of Jay Smooth in its pace and humor), but does a great job of untangling the common mistakes people make about the Netherlands (the country) and its Provinces (North Holland and South Holland, in particular).
Looking at this again, after nearly 6 years… it’s a shame the quality is so terrible. I doubt this video means all that much to anyone else, but it’s a lot of fun for me to watch it in one go… seeing all the various events and things I experienced. Surprising to me how many things are actually documented somewhere, on the blog.
This is a lovely time-lapse video of a boat carrying a ton of shipping containers, trekking from Honolulu to Long Beach over the course of 35 days.
Spotted this on BoingBoing at it absolutely blew me away. Watching and listening to this thing move leaves me in awe, to say nothing of the machine’s age.
What must it be like, I wonder, to make these types of machines for a living? Seems like it would be tedious and exhilarating, in equal measure. Although, now that I write that out – maybe make it 97% tedious, and 3% exhilarating.
After watching the video the first time, I thought I had the whole thing figured out. But now I’m not so sure. There are some shenanigans that are happening around the 0:17 mark.
A few days ago, Liz and I were sitting in the living room watching Netflix. We had just seen the Dumb Ways to Die video earlier in the day, but still had the song stuck in our head. So we fired up YouTube on the PS3 to watch it… and this is what I happened to see:
Similar to Valparaiso Cerro Abajo, there are a lot of twists and turns. But in the Taxco race, it’s really difficult to see where the “course” is supposed to be. In a few instances, it looked like the rider was going to run into bystanders, only to suddenly swerve and go down an impossibly narrow corridor.
Overall, the “marketing” at the event wasn’t oppressive. There were a few banners posted up around the movie theaters, and a few small signs, and the bags… but beyond that, it was fairly low key. A woman greeted the audience at the start of the movie, and though I expected her to go into some shpiel about the car… she didn’t. We watched a brief 2-3 minute commercial, and the movie began pretty much immediately.
Photographer Gary Yost hauled 120 pounds of photographic gear to the Gardner Lookout, on the East Paek of Mt. Tamalpais. His video documents the life of a fire lookout, keeping watch over the San Francisco Bay area over the course of two days.
I’m sad that I won’t be dressing up this Halloween (due to travelling and being out of town). I didn’t think I’d miss it all that much, but seeing this great costume/prank by magician Rich Ferguson really makes me wish I had another themed/interactive costume to wear this year.
I found this video of stacked image sequences from the International Space Station to be pretty mesmerizing. Definitely something best viewed full screen, if you can.
Last week, I spotted a guy zipping down the sidewalk on what looked to be a unicycle. But the thing about it was that he wasn’t pedalling or moving his feet. It looked as though he was simply in a seated position, balanced above a black disc… gliding. It was weird.