This is a week of returns, a return to TED and the return of Marco Tempest. This time Marco is telling the story of Nikola Tesla:
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What could be more fun – water and a balloon. Add in a slow motion camera and you have it all.
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Some crazy skills with some old-school vinyl, far too cool:
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This is one for those of you who had a slinky as a child and managed to get it to go from the top of the stairs to the bottom.
This video is surprisingly hypnotic:
Have you ever looked at pictures of the Alps and wondered what sights you might see if you had the time and the energy to go walking there. Well now you can get a great view of the what you might see thanks to a site offered by WebWandern.ch which apparently means Web Hike.
There are 10 stages and 130km for you to explore, recorded in HD by hikers travelling from Thusis (Switzerland) to Tirano (Italy). With an interactive map to show you were you are and links to places of interest it’s really well done.
The soundtrack is pretty amazing too, because the hikers have managed to stay silent throughout so all you experience are the crunch of boots and the ambient noises of the area.
By the time you get to see this I will be preparing to journey home from a week in Copenhagen, Denmark. So sit back and enjoy this lovely flash-mob from earlier this year, notice how many people step outside the isolation of their own headphones and join in the experience:
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The availability of small, lightweight, water-proof, resilient HD video cameras like the GoPro HD Hero have meant an explosion in first-person videos that take you to places some of us wouldn’t choose to go to:
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This one has become a family favourite, the real meaning of a cliff-hanger:
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Or perhaps you could load a camera onto a remote-control car and run it around Wal-Mart:
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If you are a skier you don’t really want to watch this one though:
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Pi has been a number that have intrigued people down the centuries.
How would you visualise Pi to 4 million decimal places?
How about giving each digit a different colour and then allowing people to search for the numbers, that’s what the people at TWO-N have done. It’s surprisingly good fun searching for significant number combinations and realising that because Pi is so random it’s almost inevitable that they are there somewhere (even if it’s not in the first 4 million). The screen shot below shows part of my mobile phone number which appears at the 808,068th decimal place, my birthday doesn’t appear until the 263,000’s:
For this week’s Because it’s Friday we return to TED for a video presented by Frank Warren (not the boxing promoter as I first thought) who runs PostSecret.com. It’s an incredibly simple idea and a hugely popular one too. People send him postcards on which they share a secret, and he posts them on the site, he’s ben sent over half a million postcards and the site gets over half a billion visitors.
I’ll let Frank explain:
A couple of videos today both showing the public at large being surprised and giving surprises.
The first one is an advert which has been huge on YouTube this week, so if you haven’t seen it, you’re rapidly becoming one of the few. I won’t spoil it by describing the surprise::
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The second video shows what can happen when a few people decide to get a few more people involved in what turns out to be a wonderful surprise for a small boy. It’s 11 minutes long, but might just be the best 11 minutes you spend today:
Caine’s Arcade from Nirvan Mullick on Vimeo.
Some photos from our Easter break in the North West of Scotland, a beautiful place and a lovely time with the family.
Something beautiful for a Friday:
You think this is just another day in your life?
It’s not just another day it’s…
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Graham Chastney 