A stroke as experienced by a brain researcher.

This is a wonderful talk by Jill Taylor. She is a brain researcher who had a massive stroke.

CG documentary on the water shrew.

Link: sevenload.com

Physical exercise really is good for your brain.

This dude provides lots of evidence showing exercise aides almost all functions of your brain. This also provides a potential reason for the increase in ADHD cases in the US. Be sure to check out the Q&A session at the end too.



via http://science.videosift.com

Yay 5th amendment!

Anything you say or do can only be used against you in a court of law.

Lessons on your 5th amendment rights from a law professor and a police officer who interrogates suspects and coaxes confessions.

Part 1:


Part 2:


via: http://www.hackaday.com/

Feynman Interview

Happiness = Meaning - Suffering

Great interview with Viktor Frankl!



I suppose this explains why workaholics, slackers, altruists, thieves, monks, serial killers, megalomaniacs, artists act as they do, and they all think the other ones are crazy.

My favorite part is when he explains suffering is not required to attain meaning. Hooray for that!

via science.videosift.com

Henry Miller's bathroom

I have not read a single word written by Henry Miller. I have, however, been given a guided tour of his bathroom by the man himself even though he died some 28 years ago. His bathroom tour has convinced me to add him to my reading list.

Miller is speaking naturally and there are some images of people wearing what they were born with, so if you are at some up-tight institution that frowns upon humanness, you may consider this NSFW.

Henry Miller Bathroom monologue 1:


Henry Miller Bathroom monologue 2:


Henry Miller Bathroom monologue 3:


Super awesome points to whoever adopted the moniker Kanondigi for uploading such wonderful material to you tube. http://www.youtube.com/kanondigi

kinda via boingboing.net

This blog is an evolutionary tactic of a meme.

Excellent talk by Susan Blackmore who presents a way of thinking about evolution and its application to more than simply genetics. Expanding upon Dawkins' idea of memes, she describes a new meme type that is capable of spreading itself without the aid of life as we know it. She points out how much energy we expend and the great dangers we expose ourselves to for the sake of memes. She then talks about the potential for extraterrestrial intelligence and presents a new equation similar to the Drake equation, only from the perspective that what we want to find isn't necessarily critters, but anything that can replicate and allow for the mutation of ideas. Really cool stuff!

http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/269

Informed shopping is now easier.

Jimmie pointed me to this lovely site that aims to make researching corporate products extremely easy. You can even text a bar code to their servers and they'll text back a ranking based on your ethical preferences and rankings of similar products. From the looks of it all the ranking and research is done by users. Of course companies will begin messing with this site, but hopefully the normal users will be vigilant enough to keep things clean. This could be a big step towards fixing ethical injustices. Brilliant!

http://thoughtandmemory.org/

Sleep and repetitive face punching.

Once again science shows that common sense and our parents were right. Sleep deprevation is no good.
http://www.vfxhack.com/2008/06/02/this-just-in-all-nighters-crap-visual-effects/



So, some dudes who had rented a super fancy Panasonic HD phantom camera had some free time to spend with the camera. The result? Cool videos of people being punched in the face at super slow speeds. Cool how you can see their skulls moving before the rest of their face. Good reference for jiggle maps, now that I think about it.
http://www.vimeo.com/1047887

via vfxhack.com

CG short - Blind Spot

a rather dark, but extremely well done CG short-

“Blind Spot” by Johanna Bessiere, Nicolas Chauvelot, Olivier Clert, Cecile Dubois Herry, Yvon Jardel and Simon Rouby.



via http://motionographer.com/