kottke.org posts about video
This is neat: Peter Mayhew as Chewbacca speaking English to Harrison Ford’s Han Solo in a scene from Empire Strikes Back:
Mayhew’s dialogue provided context for Ford to play off of. Chewbacca’s more familiar voice was dubbed over the on-set dialogue in post production — listen to Star Wars sound designer Ben Burtt describe how he created Chewie’s voice in this video at ~26:18. Mayhew passed away last week at the age of 74.
See also David Prowse’s on-set dialogue as Darth Vader, or as the other cast members called him, Darth Farmer (at 6:05 in the video). (via laughing squid)
Using geological surveys, geo-referenced road network data, and historic maps drawn the from the collections of the Library of Congress and New York Public Library, Miles Zhang made this time lapse video of the development of the street grid of NYC from 1609 (when Henry Hudson first explored the area for the Dutch) to the present day.
The resulting short film presents a series of “cartographic snapshots” of the built-up area at intervals of every 20-30 years in the city’s history. This process highlights the organic spurts of growth and movement that typify New York’s and most cities’ development through time. The result is an abstract representation of urbanism.
Zhang has written up his research methodology for the video as well as some observations and analysis of the data.
For almost the first half of Manhattan’s history, walking was the primary means of transport. This preference was manifested in the shorter distances between residential, industrial, shipping, and commercial areas — and more frequently their overlap. With street systems, the reliance on the foot is manifested in narrower streets widths not designed to accommodate greater width from carriages, trolleys, and later cars. In fact, the average width of secondary arterial streets increased from 30 feet for streets opened between 1624-1664, to 45 feet for streets opened 1664-1811, and then a uniform width of 60 feet for any cross street opened after 1811. Later widenings increased many of these smaller and pre-1811 streets to width between 100 and 130 feet. In other words, moving from the older networks in the south to newer networks in the north, the width of streets and size of blocks generally increases. These new widths might be influenced by growing population size from only 25,000 in the 1770s, to 64,000 by 1811, and 247,000 by 1834, thereby requiring wider streets for expanding population and higher buildings.
These gradual changes in planning reflected increasing reliance on carriages and horse-drawn trolleys instead of walking. Each mode of transport required a different minimum street width and was associated with different speeds.
(via @john_overholt)
Werner Herzog’s latest film is called Meeting Gorbachev, in which he sits down with former Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev for a series of interviews about his life, political career, and his role in ending the Cold War. From a review in the NY Times:
The two men appear to like each other immensely — in narration, Herzog calls Gorbachev “one of the greatest leaders of the 20th century” — but Gorbachev can be a cool customer. He sometimes seems guarded in his assessment of what he might have done differently. He says he believes the Soviet Union should have given its republics more rights instead of dissolving entirely. As for Boris Yeltsin, who became the first president of a post-Soviet Russia, he says, “I should have sent him off somewhere.”
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists interviewed Herzog about the film.1
It’s not easy to speak of what I tried to accomplish. I think as a natural concomitant you get the feeling that there should be better times between the West and Russia. The demonization of Russia is a great mistake of the Western media and Western politics, and we should try and seek a climate that was created by Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, the most improbable characters you could ever put together in one room.
Meeting Gorbachev is out in US theaters now, but just barely. Probably best to catch this streaming in a month or two.
Asif Kapadia, the director of Senna and Amy, has directed a documentary film about footballer Diego Maradona, one of the best to ever lace up the cleats.
Having never won a major tournament, ailing football giant SSC Napoli had criminally underachieved. Their fanatical support was unequalled in both passion and size. None was more feared. But how they ached for success…
On 5th July 1984, Diego Maradona arrived in Naples for a world-record fee and for seven years all hell broke loose. The world’s most celebrated football genius and the most dysfunctional city in Europe were a perfect match for each other.
Maradona was blessed on the field but cursed off it; the charismatic Argentine, quickly led Naples to their first-ever title. It was the stuff of dreams.
But there was a price… Diego could do as he pleased whilst performing miracles on the pitch, but when the magic faded he became almost a prisoner of the city.
The film will debut at Cannes and HBO just bought the TV and streaming rights. Senna is one of my all-time favorite documentaries, so I’m excited for this one.
Update: I’ve embedded the full trailer above and moved the teaser down here:
Update: According to this new teaser trailer, the film debuts on HBO on October 1.
Wyatt Knox is a former rally car driver and driving instructor at Team O’Neil Rally School and in this video, he shows us some of the tactical driving techniques that would be in the repetoire of law enforcement or special operations personnel, including running cars off the road, backing up at high speed, and doing a j-turn. (What’s a j-turn? It’s that cool thing they do in the movies where a car in reverse does a 180 and continues driving forwards in the same direction. It was a signature move of Jim Rockford on The Rockford Files.)
All that driving looked fun and this rally school happens to be only 80 miles away from where I live, so I went to their site to look at some classes. Their rally and drift schools are $1400/day (which seems totally fair because it includes car rental, tires, safety equipment, and insurance) but sadly that is not in my price range.
One of the places where Chance the Rapper got his start was at YOUmedia, a youth center at the Harold Washington Library in downtown Chicago. In this video, a 17-year-old Chance performs “Nostalgia”, a song that later appeared on his first mixtape. In this 2013 interview, Chance explained how performances like that helped him as an artist:
Another big launch pad for me was YOUmedia. YOUmedia is a sick ass spot. It’s downtown [Chicago] and it’s a youth center, but it’s a part of Harold Washington Library. The entire first floor, if you go to Harold Washington Library, there’s a sick-ass fucking student center, but it’s city funded. The majority of the dope, young artists that are in Chicago came out of that bitch. I came out of there, Vic Mensa, Nico from Kids These Days. So a lot of different people came out of there. You can learn music theory there, they have production software classes, you can take engineering classes, DJ classes.
“The big thing was the open mic. They used to have this open mic there every Wednesday that we would all go to, and it was from 5 to 7 every Wednesday. It would literally be 200 people in there and it was me performing. This was last year, when I was making #10Day. 200 people would come out to see us perform, 200 kids. The list would be super-fucking full, 30 kids trying to perform different poetry pieces, people coming up there footworking and breakdancing, doing standup, singing and rapping, just doing crazy shit.
“It was a really ill thing because it was smack in the center of downtown, so anybody from any school could come there because every train comes to the loop [downtown]. I met damn near all the producers on #10Day through this library. It was the spot. I’m too old now. I don’t go there anymore, but I used to literally go there until after I turned 18, for a minute.”
See also The Notorious B.I.G. freestyling on a corner in Bed-Stuy at 17, 17-year-old LL Cool J playing a Maine gymnasium, and the Beastie Boys rapping “Cookie Puss” in 1983 (when Ad-Rock was only 17).
For more than 50 years, students at the Nippon Sport Science University in Japan have practiced shuudan koudou, which translates as “collective action”. You can see them in action in these pair of videos:
If you want the really good stuff, skip to ~1:35 in the first video to watch two columns of quick-walking students march backwards through each other. Whoa.
In this short video essay, David Attenborough succinctly describes the main problem of the anthropocene (that modern humans are not living sustainably as they once could as hunter gatherers), explains the effect we’ve had on the planet, and then suggests how we can fix things (italics mine):
The plan for our planet is remarkably simple. Reduce our impact by making sure that everything we do, we can do forever.
Sustainability is such a buzzword these days that I have long since stopped thinking about what it actually means; Attenborough nails it with “making sure that everything we do, we can do forever”. The Earth seems infinite in scope but not with 7, 8, or 9 billion humans hungry for food, thirsty for water, and lusty for status & entertainment.
The simple plan Attenborough describes has four parts:
1. Phase out fossil fuels and replace them with renewables.
2. Upgrading to efficient food production and reducing our consumption of meat.
3. Proper worldwide ocean management.
4. Rewilding the world.
As he allows, it’s a bit more complicated than that — check out Paul Hawken’s list for a more detailed list of things we can do to fight climate change.
In this short clip from 1983, legendary computer scientist Grace Hopper uses a short length of wire to explain what a nanosecond is.
Now what I wanted when I asked for a nanosecond was: I wanted a piece of wire which would represent the maximum
distance that electricity could travel in a billionth of a second. Now of course it wouldn’t really be through wire — it’d be out in space, the velocity of light. So if we start with a velocity of light and use your friendly computer, you’ll discover that a nanosecond is 11.8 inches long, the maximum limiting distance that electricity can travel in a billionth of a second.
You can watch the entirety of a similar lecture Hopper gave at MIT in 1985, in which she “practically invents computer science at the chalkboard”. (via tmn)
To celebrate the 40th anniversary of the release of Alien, 20th Century Fox commissioned six fan-made short films that continue the story of the Alien universe. Here’s the first film, Harvest:
The rest of the films can be watched here. According to Michael Nordine at IndieWire, Alone is the pick of the litter:
However good these films are, I’ll wager that none of them are as charming as the stage production of Alien put on by students at North Bergen High School. The play garnered so much attention that Sigourney Weaver showed up to an encore performance. You can watch the whole performance here with an intro by Weaver (skip to ~3:00):
In the latest episode of Earworm, Estelle Caswell notes that the length of a pop single was rarely more than 3m30s because you couldn’t fit any more than that onto a 7-inch 45rpm single without sacrificing audio quality. But in the 70s, DJs in NYC clubs started playing longer songs for a prolonged dance floor groove and eventually the higher-capacity 12-inch single was born.
Fun fact: the bestselling 12-inch single of all time is New Order’s Blue Monday, which was released in 1983 and clocked in at 7m29s long. Take a listen.
The canals, the sewers, the buildings, the bridges and the rest of the Venice’s infrastructure has all been engineered to deal with a particularly challenging environment: not-particularly-solid ground constantly battered by salt water. In this short film, we learn how the city works and what steps have been taken over the centuries to ensure the smooth function of the city.
Whether Venice can survive the severe sea level rise coming in the next few decades is still an open question. (thx, david)
A clip from 1985 of James Burke talking about how microchips will change politics by making it possible for everyone’s opinion about the nature of the world to be heard and tallied. This slightly longer version of the same clip is worth watching:
You can also watch the entire episode from which it was taken.
Personal computing and the internet changed (and continues to change) the balance of power in the world so much and with such speed that we still can’t comprehend it. Ordinary people have more power today than they have ever had in history, but already powerful people have seen their potential reach and influence grow even more quickly. The system enabled by connected microchips can make everyone heard, but it can also make a reality TV star President of the United States. And this dynamic is still very young…we’re in for a wild ride, folks.
In 2002, Fred Rogers gave the commencement address at Dartmouth College, where he attended school as a freshman before transferring out. The video recording of the address is only 16 minutes long and worth watching in full.
A transcript is here. Some passages that felt meaningful to me:
Our world hangs like a magnificent jewel in the vastness of space. Every one of us is a part of that jewel. A facet of that jewel. And in the perspective of infinity, our differences are infinitesimal. We are intimately related. May we never even pretend that we are not.
I have a lot of framed things in my office, which people have given to me through the years. And on my walls are Greek, and Hebrew, and Russian, and Chinese. And beside my chair, is a French sentence from Saint-Exupery’s Little Prince. It reads, “L’essential est invisible pour les yeux.” What is essential is invisible to the eye. Well, what is essential about you? And who are those who have helped you become the person you are? Anyone who has ever graduated from a college, anyone who has ever been able to sustain a good work, has had at least one person, and often many, who have believed in him or her. We just don’t get to be competent human beings without a lot of different investments from others.
It’s not the honors and the prizes, and the fancy outsides of life which ultimately nourish our souls. It’s the knowing that we can be trusted. That we never have to fear the truth. That the bedrock of our lives, from which we make our choices, is very good stuff.
But holy shit Fred, “our differences are infinitesimal” is a really hard thing to keep in mind these days. How do we even do that?
As part of their show Earth From Space, the BBC Earth team shows the coordinated movements of thousands of Shaolin Kung Fu trainees. The number of participants is so large that their movements can easily be seen in a satellite view. I mean:
(via bb)
This short film by Joris Debeij features Jordan Kamnitzer talking about his experience as someone who is on the autism spectrum.
Autism affects my life in several ways. I have to, sort of, know on a repetitious level, like, how to do things accordingly. Change is very difficult in a routine.
It’s hard to interact with people. I’d like to get to know people better. I try to listen very hard and try to become interested and gradually be friends. Sometimes it does work, but sometimes I know the subject matters are sort of limited with normal individuals.
I’ve had cases where I felt turned down, but silently. I sometimes feel disappointed and hurt, then I retreat and go back into my own indifferent world.
In a related essay, Eli Gottlieb writes about the film and his brother Joshua, who is severely autistic:
As a documentary, though, “Perfectly Normal” is necessarily a partial version of the truth. When Joshua and I were filmed for a short documentary, for example, I was struck by how the film showed a higher-functioning version of the person than the one I knew. That was because, like many people with developmental disabilities, my brother had evolved a repertoire of stock responses to social situations. Glimpsed serially in a 15 minute film, these responses added up to a semblance of a socially appropriate person, and skipped the endless testing questions and self-involved rhetorical loops that make him so exhausting to spend time with. (The film, “The Inviolable Bond,” can be seen here.)
Jordan and his girlfriend, Toni, obviously have another life than the one revealed in the film.
I had similar thoughts while watching. How can we know what it’s like in Kamnitzer’s head, especially when the director and editor have so much input into how the film is constructed? At the same time, he definitely said some things about his experience that resonate with me and my experience of the world. It’s not the first time this has happened in recent years. I’ve never been identified as such by a professional, but I would not be surprised to find myself somewhere on the autism spectrum. It would certainly explain some things!
From the BBC and hosted by David Attenborough, “Climate Change: The Facts” is an hour-long program on the science of climate change and what we might be able to do about it.
Sir David’s new programme laid out the science behind climate change, the impact it is having right now and the steps that can be taken to fight it.
“In the 20 years since I first started talking about the impact of climate change on our world, conditions have changed far faster than I ever imagined,” Sir David stated in the film.
“It may sound frightening, but the scientific evidence is that if we have not taken dramatic action within the next decade, we could face irreversible damage to the natural world and the collapse of our societies.”
With each successive nature series, Attenborough has become more vocal about the effects of climate change on our planet and its plant and animal populations. In his new Netflix series Our Planet, climate change takes center stage.
Compared to its predecessors, the series also frames the value of nature in a new way. Usually Attenborough’s programs establish a place or a species as a thing of remarkable beauty-this soulful orangutan, that industrious bird of paradise-before warning that it is somehow imperilled. The value of the creature is its existence. We may never see a polar bear, but we take pleasure from knowing that they’re out there. In “Our Planet,” the value of nature is presented as something much closer to home, and more practical. Attenborough reminds viewers again and again of the connections that link these far-flung ecosystems to our own species’s survival. Protect the sea otter because it’s lovely, if you like, but also because it keeps in check the sea urchins that otherwise mow down kelp forests, which act as crucial carbon sinks. “We are part of nature. We aren’t separate from nature,” Attenborough told me.
Monocle has produced a pair of videos about what Finland’s fleet of icebreakers do and what daily life is like for the crew.
In the second video, I was most interested in how life aboard icebreakers has changed now that wifi and personal TVs & DVD players are ubiquitous. Crew members are able to speak & video chat with their families daily (instead of every few weeks or months as in the past) and as a result, they feel less isolated and closer to their loved ones. But at the same time, access to the internet and TVs in each cabin results in less on-board socialization among the crew, which perhaps makes for a less tight-knit group. Extrapolating to society at large is left as an exercise to the viewer.
See also the Relaxing Sounds of an Arctic Icebreaker. (via why is this interesting?)
According to an expert, France doesn’t have any of the large, old trees necessary to replace the burned wooden beams in the roof of the Notre Dame.
Bertrand de Feydeau, vice-president of preservation group Fondation du Patrimoine, told France Info radio that the wooden roof that went up in flames was built with beams more than 800 years ago from primal forests.
He says the cathedral’s roof cannot be rebuilt exactly as it was before the fire because “we don’t, at the moment, have trees on our territory of the size that were cut in the 13th century.”
This reminds me of one of my favorite stories about future planning (possibly apocryphal). As told by Stewart Brand in How Buildings Learn, the story goes:
New College, Oxford, is of rather late foundation, hence the name. It was founded around the late 14th century. It has, like other colleges, a great dining hall with big oak beams across the top. These might be two feet square and forty-five feet long.
A century ago, so I am told, some busy entomologist went up into the roof of the dining hall with a penknife and poked at the beams and found that they were full of beetles. This was reported to the College Council, who met in some dismay, because they had no idea where they would get beams of that calibre nowadays.
One of the Junior Fellows stuck his neck out and suggested that there might be some oak on College lands. These colleges are endowed with pieces of land scattered across the country. So they called in the College Forester, who of course had not been near the college itself for some years, and asked about oaks. And he pulled his forelock and said, “Well sirs, we was wonderin’ when you’d be askin’.”
Upon further inquiry it was discovered that when the College was founded, a grove of oaks has been planted to replace the beams in the dining hall when they became beetly, because oak beams always become beetly in the end. This plan had been passed down from one Forester to the next for five hundred years. “You don’t cut them oaks. Them’s for the College Hall.”
Hopefully the trees needed for rebuilding Notre Dame can be sourced elsewhere. Just as important, a more modern form of future planning was recently undertaken that should help greatly with the rebuild. In 2010, two men photographed and laser-scanned every inch of the Notre Dame, creating an incredibly detailed 3-D map of the building.
Now, with the building having sustained untold but very substantial damage, the data that Tallon and Blaer created could be an invaluable aid to whoever is charged with rebuilding the structure. Ochsendorf described the data as “essential for capturing [the structure] as built geometry.” (He added, however, that the cathedral, no matter what happens now, “is irreplaceable, of course.”)
Tallon and Blaer’s laser data consist of 1 billion data points, structured as “point clouds,” which software can render into images of the three-dimensional space. Stitch them together, inside and out, map the photographs onto the precise 3-D models, and you have a full digital re-creation of incredible detail and resolution.
“I saw this happening, and I had two thoughts,” Blaer told me of watching the cathedral engulfed in flames. “One thought was that I was kind of relieved that he didn’t actually have to see this happen. But on the other hand, he knew it so well and had so much information about how it’s constructed, he would have been so helpful in terms of rebuilding it.”
(thx, meg)
Update: According to this piece in Le Monde (as best as I can discern in Google Translate), French forests have both the quality and quantity of wood available to provide new beams for Notre Dame. (via @ramdyne)
Nuclear physicists hypothesize that when the cores of neutron stars are subject to enough pressure, the quarks that make up the core can turn from up and down quark varieties into strange quarks. As this Kurzgesagt video explains, this strange matter is particularly stable and if it were to escape from the core of the neutron star, it would convert any ordinary matter it came into contact with to more strange matter. If you hadn’t heard about this hypothesis before, you can read up on it in their list of sources for the video.
With a tweet at 3:20am this morning, Beyoncé announced her latest album, a 40-track live album of her acclaimed 2018 Coachella performance. You can listen to Homecoming right now on Spotify, Apple Music, Tidal, Amazon, YouTube, and Pandora.
The album is a complement to a Netflix film of the performance, also called Homecoming and also available today. Here’s the trailer for that:
After the Coachella performance last year, the NY Times’ music critic Jon Caramanica wrote:
Let’s just cut to the chase: There’s not likely to be a more meaningful, absorbing, forceful and radical performance by an American musician this year, or any year soon, than Beyoncé’s headlining set at the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival on Saturday night.
It was rich with history, potently political and visually grand. By turns uproarious, rowdy, and lush. A gobsmacking marvel of choreography and musical direction.
In the first episode of season two of Earworm, Estelle Caswell explains where the “Explicit Lyrics” sticker found on many of your favorite music albums came from. The story involves heavy metal, Prince, the rise of the religious right, the Satanic panic, Tipper Gore, and lots of amazing hair.
The very public discussion around the advisory label involved the Parents Music Resource Center (PMRC), a group led by the wives of Washington politicians, and a few musicians including Frank Zappa, Dee Snider, and John Denver.
While the PMRC’s involvement was allegedly sparked by some raunchy lyrics from Prince’s 1984 album Purple Rain, the debate over rock lyrics had been infiltrating American culture and politics for a decade. The driving force behind that debate was the rise of heavy metal, a genre that saw explosive popularity with the launch of MTV in 1981, and the growing influence of the religious right, who saw rock music as a powerful threat to Christianity.
One of the main sources for the video is Eric Nuzum’s book, Parental Advisory: Music Censorship in America.
Monotype has introduced a new version of the Helvetica typeface called Helvetica Now.
Helvetica Now is a new chapter in the story of perhaps the best-known typeface of all time. Available in three optical sizes-Micro, Text, and Display-every character in Helvetica Now has been redrawn and refit; with a variety of useful alternates added. It has everything we love about Helvetica and everything we need for typography today. This is not a revival. This is not a restoration.
This is a statement.
Typographer Erik Spiekermann says:
This is the typeface Max Miedinger and Eduard Hoffmann would have designed back in 1957 if they had known about offset printing, small screens, browsers, digital design tools and UI designers.
If you had access to the last ripe avocado in the world, what would you do with it?
Brix System is a collection of scaled-up Lego versions of computers, phones, and music machines made out of wood. This is super nerdy and I am here for it.
See also A Full-Scale Lego Supercar that Actually Drives.
Have you ever wondered how mapmakers made bird’s-eye-view maps before the invention of satellites or even hot air balloons? I have and was glad to find Phil Edwards’ video on the subject:
Leonardo da Vinci is justly famous for a lot of different things, but we’ve heard somewhat less about his mapmaking prowess than his painting or mechanical designs. His 1502 map of the Italian town of Imola is the oldest surviving example of an ichnographic (i.e. bird’s-eye-view) map of a place, a type of map that is ubiquitous today in the form of satellite imagery.
Most Renaissance maps are known for their fanciful inclusion of dragons, castles, and undulating mountainsides, and most of them show buildings in elevation, or the “oblique perspective.” But da Vinci’s sought to capture the proportions and relationships between land features more accurately, and he developed new technologies to do so. To make this map of Imola, he may have used the special hodometer and magnetic compass he’d already invented (he’d been fascinated by maps and optics for years). With careful measurements in hand, he drew every “street, plot of land, church, colonnade, gate and square, the whole encompassed by the moat,” writes the Renaissance historian Paul Strathern.
Here is Leonardo’s Imola map (cropped) compared with a contemporary satellite image:
As Edwards notes in the video, Leonardo’s map is not strictly an illustration or drawing of a place but more of an infographic. We take this type of map for granted now, but 500 years ago, that shift was a genuine innovation.
Game of Thrones made its return to HBO last night and, surprise, someone died! According to this compilation video, over 174,000 people have died on the show in seven seasons. The sheer numbers and the fact that some of the deaths have been, shall we say, a little creative (even for a fantasy show) sometimes interfered with my ability to fully suspend my disbelief when watching. Take Khal Drogo killing Viserys Targaryen by pouring molten gold on his head in the first season:
That’s a pretty outlandish death, an over-the-top display of sadism for the benefit of a TV audience. Right? Well, I’ve been reading Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads: A New History of the World and I’ve discovered that Game of Thrones hews close to historical precedent when it comes to inventive murder.
According to some sources, after the Roman Emperor Valerian was captured in battle in the 3rd century, he was subjected to something much worse than a simple death at the hands of the Persian Emperor, Shapur I:
The Emperor Valerian was humiliated after being taken prisoner and held in “the abject form of slavery”: used as a human footstool for the Persian ruler “by bending his back to raise the king as he was about to mount his horse,” his body was eventually flayed “and his skin, stripped from the flesh, was dyed with vermilion, and placed in the temple of the gods of the barbarians, that the remembrance of a victory so signal might be perpetuated and that this spectacle might always be exhibited for our ambassadors.” He was stuffed so all could see the folly and shame of Rome.
Around the end of the 10th century, a leader of the Rus’ was ritually executed by Pecheneg steppe nomads:
The capture of the prince was gleefully celebrated, and his skull was lined with gold and kept as a victory trophy, to be used to celebrate ceremonial toasts.
In 1182, rising tension between the Byzantine Empire and the rising Italian city-states like Venice resulted in attacks against citizens of the city-states who were living in Constantinople:
Many were killed, including the representative of the Latin church, whose head was dragged through the city’s streets behind a dog.
The Mongols, under Genghis Khan and subsequent rulers, used brutality as a tool to shock and awe local populations into peaceful submission, making examples of those who resisted their advances:
Nīshāpūr was one of the locations that suffered total devastation. Every living being — from women, children and the elderly to livestock and domestic animals — was butchered as the order was given that not even dogs or cats should be left alive. All the corpses were piled up in a series of enormous pyramids as gruesome warnings of the consequences of standing up to the Mongols.
It was a very effective technique:
In 1241, the Mongols struck into the heart of Europe, splitting their forces into two, with one spur attacking Poland and the other heading for the plains of Hungary. Panic spread through the entire continent, especially after a large army led by the King of Poland and the Duke of Silesia was destroyed, and the head of the latter paraded on the end of a lance, together with nine sacks filled with “the ears of the dead.”
When the Mongols conquered Baghdad in 1258, they moved through the city “like hungry falcons attacking a flight of doves, or like raging wolves attacking sheep,”
The city’s inhabitants were dragged through the streets and alleys, like toys, “each of them becoming a plaything.” The Caliph al-Mustaʿṣim was captured, rolled up in fabric and trampled to death by horses. It was a highly symbolic moment that showed who held real power in the world.
And finally, if there was any remaining doubt that George R.R. Martin modelled the Dothraki on the Mongols and Khal Drogo on Genghis Khan, consider the death of Inalchuq, a 13th-century Persian governor:
Stories such as that of a high-ranking official who was ordered into the presence of a newly arrived Mongol warlord and had molten gold poured into his eyes and ears became widely known — as was the fact that this murder was accompanied by the announcement that this was fitting punishment for a man “whose disgraceful behaviour, barbarous acts and previous cruelties deserved the condemnation of all.”
Perhaps Game of Thrones doesn’t seem so fantastical after all…
Eggs are an extremely versatile food. They taste great alone, make super sauces (including the much maligned mayonnaise, which I love), and can dress up leftovers into a whole other meal — just put an egg on it.
In this video, Bon Appétit editor Amiel Stanek explores almost 60 different ways to cook an egg, from over easy to coddled to grilled to something called “blowtorched egg” (not great). Be sure to catch the Rollie egg cooker in action at ~20:50…yucko. In general, the classic cooking methods beat newer techniques in terms of taste, texture, and convenience.
See also Every Way to Cook a Chicken Breast, Kenji’s guide on making perfect hard-boiled eggs, and How to Make Perfect Soft-Scrambled Eggs.
Ok, this is pretty cool. We have the first photo of a supermassive black hole, from imagery taken two years ago of the elliptical galaxy M87 (in the constellation Virgo) by the Event Horizon Telescope project. The EHT team is a group of 200 scientist that has been working on this project for two decades. The image was created using data captured from radio telescopes from Hawaii to the South Pole and beyond using very long baseline interferometry.
The image, of a lopsided ring of light surrounding a dark circle deep in the heart of the galaxy known as Messier 87, some 55 million light-years away from here, resembled the Eye of Sauron, a reminder yet again of the power and malevolence of nature. It is a smoke ring framing a one-way portal to eternity.
Now is a good time to (re)read Jonathan Lethem’s early novel, the absurdist physics love story As She Climbed Across the Table.
Update: Vox’s Joss Fong has a good 6-minute video that explains how the photo was taken:
And this video by Veritasium is even more meaty (and this one too):
Ben Burtt was the sound designer for the original Star Wars trilogy and was responsible for coming up with many of the movies’ iconic sounds, including the lightsaber and Darth Vader’s breathing.1 In this video, Burtt talks at length about how two dozens sounds from Star Wars were developed.
The base sound for the blaster shots came from a piece of metal hitting the guy-wire of a radio tower — I have always loved the noise that high-tension cables make. And I never noticed that Vader’s use of the force was accompanied by a rumbling sound. Anyway, this is a 45-minute masterclass in scrappy sound design.
See also: how the Millennium Falcon hyperdrive malfunction noise was made, exploring the sound design of Star Wars, and This Happy Dog Sounds Like a TIE Fighter.
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