NOAA (The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration) has released an animated video showing the tsunami originating off the coast of Japan, and then spreading across the Pacific. Dramatic, to say the least.
Last year, NOAA also produced an animation that visualized the tremors from the big Chilean quake as they worked their way across the globe. Catch it here.
A quick news bulletin: Japan was struck by a massive 8.9 earthquake today, followed by some devastating tsunamis (see clip below). Al Jazeera is providing live coverage (in English) on the web. Start watching here. Or find another live stream from NHK in Japan. What’s more, The Wall Street Journal has a live blog dedicated to the earthquake, and Google has set up a people finder for those living in the country. Our best wishes to the people of Japan…
Tsunami:
Couldn’t let this one pass by…
Andersen M, a London design studio, crafted a rather amazing stop motion video to accompany an excerpt from Maurice Gee’s novel, Going West. The short film was produced on behalf of the New Zealand Book Council, and you can only imagine, as one of our readers points out, the craftsmanship, patience, and effort that went into the making this.
Thanks Dalel for sending this our way, and please don’t miss another one of our favorites: Books Savored in Stop Motion Film…
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The Smithsonian Institution has launched Smithsonian WILD, a new web site that lets you search through its collection of over 202,000 images culled from seven ongoing wildlife studies. Researchers in remote locations across the globe have set up “camera traps” – automated cameras triggered by motion sensors – and left them to record whatever wildlife passes by. The resulting images, be they of giant pandas in China, barking deer in Thailand, or roughed grouse on the Appalachian Trail, aren’t nearly as pretty or clear as those we’ve grown accustomed to seeing in nature magazines and HD primetime specials. But their rawness is part of their appeal: Clicking through these galleries imparts a sense of real-time excitement, as if we too have been crouched in the jungle for hours, waiting to catch a glimpse of something wild.
via Boingboing
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Variety, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
Taking a page from the RSA playbook, the New York Public Library has uploaded to its YouTube Channel a series of illustrated talks. John Waters, Jay‑Z, Werner Herzog – they’re all there. And so too is Mark Twain “reading” from his own work – work that was first published in 2009 within a volume called Who is Mark Twain?. Flash Rosenberg provides the art (see her work on Vimeo); John Lithgow does the voice.…
In this hilarious conversation, originally published in the short-lived ECHO Magazine in 1960, Salvador Dalí tries to teach Irish-born actor Edward Mulhare how to articulate English words in a more Dalían way. When this clip was recorded, Mulhare had already spent three years playing the role of Professor Higgins in the Broadway version of My Fair Lady. And as you’ll recall, it was Higgins’ job to teach Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl, to speak as a proper English lady. How successfully does Dali manage to put some surrealist cool into this rather conservative Englishman? You can listen here to find out. And don’t forget to catch Salvador Dalí’s classic appearance on What’s my line?
MP3 via UbuWeb Sound.
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
In case you missed it, this New York Times Sunday Magazine story offers a great example of How We Live/Dance/Film/Self-Finance these days.
What we have here is a seven minute collaboration between director Jacob Krupnick and classically-trained ballet refugee Anne Marsen. Shot guerilla-style on the Staten Island Ferry, the video features Marsen’s giddy pastiche of hip hop, ballet, modern and jazz dance. The soundtrack is also a pastiche of sorts, an excerpt from mashup DJ Girl Talk’s new album, “All Day.”
Grupnick posted the clip above as a teaser on the crowdfunding site Kickstarter in January, hoping to raise enough money to make it into a full-length dance film. He met his fundraising goal within 6 days, and the team starts shooting in April.
A note: It takes about two minutes for the action to really kick in, and if you’re listening to it from an office, be sure to turn the volume down first.
Sheerly Avni is a San Francisco-based arts and culture writer. Her work has appeared in Salon, LA Weekly, Variety, Mother Jones, and many other publications. You can follow her on twitter at @sheerly.
We take you back to another era when funding for public broadcasting was in doubt – to 1969, when Richard Nixon planned to cut PBS’ funding from $20 million to $10 million. Here Fred Rogers, the gentle creator of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood, gets six short minutes before Senator John Pastore, the chairman of the Subcommittee on Communications, and makes his pitch for publicly-funded educational television. In those 360 seconds, Rogers gets the gruff senator to do a complete 180 – to end up saying “It looks like you just earned the 20 million dollars.” And, indeed, it turned out just that way. Those were the days…
via @webacion
Robert Sapolsky, Professor of Biology at Stanford University, famously focuses his research on stress above all else. (Don’t miss his book, Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers.) The video above features Sapolsky presenting the Pritzker Lecture at the California Academy of Sciences on February 15, 2011. The full lecture can be seen here. In this excerpt, Sapolsky amusingly tells the audience how monkeys and humans commonly generate the highest levels of dopamine when pleasure is anticipated, not when pleasure is actually experienced. But humans, as opposed to monkeys, can “keep those dopamine levels up for decades and decades waiting for the reward.” And for some, Sapolsky adds, that perceived reward lies beyond this life – in the afterlife. (Sapolsky was raised in an orthodox Jewish family, but is an atheist now.) The Stanford professor talks about similar issues (what separates us from primates) in another captivating talk, “What makes us human?”
By profession, Matthias Rascher teaches English and History at a High School in northern Bavaria, Germany. In his free time he scours the web for good links and posts the best finds on Twitter.
We Are Equals produced this 2‑minute video for the 100th anniversary of International Women’s Day. Daniel Craig and the great Dame Judi Dench reprise their roles from the last two James Bond films — with a twist. We’d say more, but the video speaks for itself. Enjoy!
Sunday marked 25 years since the death of Georgia O’Keeffe, one of America’s foremost artists. The anniversary of her death coincides with the beginning of Women’s History Month. So we figured why not offer a little piece on her.
Born in 1887 in Sun Prairie, Wisconsin, O’Keeffe grew up knowing she wanted to be an artist. Though she received training in academic art and won prizes for still life paintings, she left painting for a while to teach. But when a friend sent her experiments in charcoal to Alfred Stieglitz in New York (the two later married), he offered her her own show in his popular and avant garde Studio 291. This all happened in 1916, and she would not stop painting until her death in 1986, when she was 98 years old.
Known for her large scale and bold paintings of flowers and cityscapes, O’Keeffe found a permanent home in New Mexico where she painted the shapes of the desert from bones to adobe churches. She maintained a unique and independent spirit, as illustrated in this clip from a biography filmed when she was 92 years old. (See above.) The curator of the Georgia O’Keeffe Museum in Santa Fe sums up O’Keeffe’s lasting influence, stating “in 1970, when the Whitney Museum of American Art opened a retrospective exhibition of her work, she became the heroine of the feminist movement, thus positioning her in the limelight, which she had first enjoyed in the 1920s. Whether or not artists working since then have liked or disliked her work, they acknowledge the fact that she established a place for women in an arena from which women had traditionally been excluded”…
For a quick introduction to O’Keeffe’s work, watch Smarthistory’s video intro to the 1929 painting, “The Lawrence Tree.” It gets that name because it was painted on D.H. Lawrence’s ranch.
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