log.nikhil.io

eighteen things tagged “amazing

AirTap

by Erik Mongrain

Heard this at John’s place in Ames. Simply astounding. He’s got a dolor amet as well.

Bumblebee

Not really. Reminded me of that Transformer when I saw this macrophotograph of a Longhorn Beetle. Just amazing. Via and TD.…

The Valeriepieris Circle

This is from a while ago but I didn’t get the memo. It’s a little crazy: It’s named after Reddit user /u/vaieriepieris, an ESL teacher from Texas, who made it for a map subreddit in 2013. There are more Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, and Communists inside the circle than outside it. It “pulls all of…

Today I Learned that the World Record for Walking A Mile is 5:31:08

It belongs to Tom Bosworth. I thought “I cannot even run that fast” and decided to look at the video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EOYdS5QZasMÏ While it certainly does look like they’re running, there are some severe restrictions on their movement, of course, else it’d be an event called ‘Trottin…

The Blanket Octopus

This is just indescribably beautiful. /misc/b/blanket-octopus.mp4…

Clapping Music

My favorite visualization of “Clapping Music” by Steve Reich. Here’s a video of him performing it with one other musician. /misc/c/Clapping-Music.mp4…

How to Make a Dorodango

Hikaru Dorodango means “Shining Mudcake”. Start with a lump of mud and end with a highly polished sphere. Absolutely amazing. Here’s a short NatGeo video about Bruce Gardner, an artist who makes a lot of these. He says it took him 30 tries to make his first perfect one. https://www.youtube.com/watch…

A Most Horrifying Description of Rabies

by ZeriMasterpeace

Rabies. It’s exceptionally common, but people just don’t run into the animals that carry it often. Skunks especially, and bats. Let me paint you a picture. You go camping, and at midday you decide to take a nap in a nice little hammock. While sleeping, a tiny brown bat, in the “rage” stages of in…

Two Owls

Don’t know if these are shopped but this is amazing.…

Scientists Film Salt Crystal Formation in Real-Time.

Nakamuro and his team looked at the videos Sakakibara had captured and were the first people ever to see tiny cuboid crystals made of tens of molecules of NaCl emerging from the chaotic mixture of separate sodium and chloride ions. Straight away, they noticed a statistical pattern in the frequency…

The Most Perfectly Timed Shot in the History of Television

Fat claim, but I cannot imagine anything more badass than this. /misc/p/perfect-timing.mp4 Here’s the full video. The presenter’s James Burke. From the YouTube comments: I remember seeing an interview with him and the person asking him the question asked him “How was that shot perfectly timed?” He…

Robot Party

I cannot imagine the decades of engineering that went into realizing this. “Spot” the Robot Dog doing her ballet was 💯 Bravo, Boston Dynamics for taking us that much closer to (what, for now, looks like a fun) Singularity. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fn3KWM1kuAw…

Fungi Are Horrifying

Every person I’ve sent this to has seen it. Not sure why my own internet excursions didn’t yield this manifestly horrifying video. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XuKjBIBBAL8 The last few seconds reminded me of scenes from Annihilation. Like this one: Edit: It’s been used in Eastern Medicine for a…

Stop Motion Laundry

Absolutely amazing stop motion by Daniel Cloud Campos & Co. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AUCTnmWT5Lk Here’s the making of. They did it over 17 days. I wonder when they got any sleep. At one point he says “we got 2 seconds after 4 hours.” ~3 minutes of video = 360 hours, or 15 days 😬 And it r…

CSS Still Life

A pure CSS still life by Ben Evans who appears to be working on an online story with pure CSS illustrations as well. Via Deepu.…

Lutz Ebersdorf

As if I needed another reason to fall in love with Tilda Swinton Swinton penned a phony IMDb biography to keep the secret, and wore fake genitalia, created by makeup artist Mark Coulier, while in character. (“She did have us make a penis and balls,” Coulier told the paper. “She had this nice, weigh…