Category: Because it’s Friday

I haven’t done this for a while, but this is something rather special from Grasmere School and Nursery:

There’s an adage that says “seeing is believing”, but sometimes “seeing is inspiring” would be more appropriate, and that’s the case with the Envisioning Chemistry website videos.

My memories of chemistry at school are of diagrams, reference books and a few relatively dull, and somewhat safe, experiments. The most memorable experiment was the result of an accident. The teacher added rather too much potassium to water and the violent reaction that resulted had us all diving under our desks.

The Envisioning Chemistry website brings to life many more experiments in gloriously filmed time-lapse, macro and slow-motion videos.

Here are a few of them, but there are many more on the web site and on the Vimeo channel:

I find storms absolutely fascinating, but I still regard storm chasers as a bit mad.

This film that is a combination of slow-lotion and time-lapse sequences by Dustin Farrell (@duston_farrell) shows the power that storms contain.

Here is my second rendition of storm chasing with a Phantom Flex 4K. The best shots from two years of storm chasing jammed into 3.5 minutes.

Stats: 35K miles traveled, 30 terabytes of hard drive space, 300 hours editing/coloring, 3 speeding tickets

Via PetaPixel.

A change of perspective on the star time-lapse videos that are so popular. This is what it looks like when we focus on the earth rotation.

If star time-lapse is your thing, Aryeh Nirenberg has many more on YouTube and Instagram.

I’m regularly intrigued by how much energy people will expend on an enterprise.

How many different ways can you pop a balloon? However hard you’ve tried, you’ve probably never tried this many.

What would a map look like if the places were named after the “famous” people from that locality. That’s kind of what this interactive map is:

A People Map of the UK, where city names are replaced by their most Wikipedia’ed resident: people born in, lived in, or connected to a place.

A People Map of the UK, The Pudding

I have to admit that I hadn’t heard of most of the people attached to the towns and cities near where I live. Perhaps that’s part of the fun of this site, seeing that these people clearly mean something to someone around here. I can’t say that I’v ever heard of the footballer Steven Walsh, I have heard of Les Dawson though:

Via @Yorkie71 and @robingissing

This is a truly amazing time-lapse film, with amazing detail.

Watch as, over 6 minutes, a single cell zygote transforms into a complete hatched larva of an alpine newt. I remember being fascinated by cell division as a child in biology classes, but always struggled to comprehend how that became a living organism, that’s precisely what this film shows.

There are a few more details about the film here, but it’s definitely one to sit back and watch:

Outdoor swimming videos have become a bit of a theme on a Friday, here’s another one.

This time we follow the ‘swim twins’ Kate Rew and Kari Furre who are originators of The Outdoor Swimming Society:

Backward Picnic spends his life in a parallel universe where strange things happen:

The reality is, Lithuanian filmmaker and musician Saulius Jegelevičius, has created this fabulous Youtube channel where strange things happen by learning to speak backwards.

A beautiful short documentary film about three brothers from the north of England who have made their name as wild swimming adventurers.

One of the themes of this film is the impact of wild swimming on mental health which is one of the reasons that I love to be in the open water.

3 brothers, who have come to be known as The Wild Swimming Brothers, have felt the pressures that many people experience while living and working in a city. Feeling the toll that urban living was taking on them, they decided to begin an aquatic journey that has propelled them extremely far from city walls.

The Wild Swimming Brothers

What was the 80s equivalent of that app you use every day?  

Tom Le French has put together a wonderful set of re-imagined legacy technologies with modern day apps.

When a beautiful place becomes geotagged it can go through a dramatic change from secret place to overwhelmed place.