Canonical OK Go Videos

You know OK Go; they're the band that does the creative and adventurous music videos. I've linked to their videos in the past and I will do so again but this time in a much more rigorous manner. Which is to say I intend to provide a chronological and canonical list of their videos. Note that this list will not include all of the music videos attributed to them, just the real ones, if you know what I mean.

A Million Ways

Here it Goes Again

This Too Shall Pass (Marching Band)

This Too Shall Pass (Rube Goldberg)

End Love

White Knuckles

Last Leaf

All is Not Lost

Needing/Getting

The Writing's on the Wall

I Won't Let You Down

Upside Down & Inside Out

PDX Wonder

Of all the airports I have visited, I enjoy the Portland, Oregon (PDX) airport the most.  I like the skylights,  the central listing of flights right after security, the floor map of the rivers, the MAX terminal, the glass canopy, the sky-walks and the free wireless internet. (I don't care for the carpet which has not changed style for as long as I can remember.  It may not have been changed period, even when the airport was redesigned.)

This, though, this is my absolute favorite part of the entire airport.  It serves no purpose but to whimsically amaze and it works on me every time.

I'll leave it to you to figure out the magic.

(The fixtures are on both sides of the ramp down from security at the start of Concourse C.  With the "new" connector in place once you get through security on either side you can walk over and examine the miracle for yourself.  I highly encourage this.)

Impression Planting

A friend of mine pointed me towards this video on Youtube of an impressionist doing a speech from Shakespeare in a variety of characters. The video is below but here is my challenge to you: close your eyes, listen to the audio, and see how many of the famous characters you can identify. Once your done, go back and watch the video (where the names of each character are given) and see how you did.

Here's my theory: the impressionist, though highly skilled, is relying on your existing knowledge of the characters to fill out his impression and make it seem more realistic. When you don't know who you're supposed to be thinking of, the impression is not as strong and it is harder to know who he is impersonating. This is not to detract from his incredible performance, just wondering how much of the impression we as audience members are providing ourselves.

Anyway, take the test and let me know which ones you got before looking at the answer key. My wife got three on her own.

Dogs and the Frog

A frog happened to wander its way into our backyard. Our dogs found it. The poor frog will remember this day for a while (assuming he makes it out alive).

UPDATE: NPR has a great little story about one dog and her dealings with the frogs (or rather, toads) in her life.

Short

Below is a fantastic little short movie that I'm watching on a regular basis now because it reminds me so much of where I grew up and what I love about it.

Growing is Forever from Jesse Rosten on Vimeo.

First snow of the season

Its not accumulating here in Wichita but it is snowing. See for yourself

Basil's new trick

We've been working with Basil to train him to go and get the paper in the morning; we anticipate this trick being very handy for the coming winter months. Here's a demonstration from this morning:

Everyday Amazing

That's how I'd describe this video; its an example of everyday amazing. There are cooler videos out there, I'm sure and other people have done similar things but here is a pretty normal looking guy who wants to do something at least slightly extraordinary: make a spacecraft. And he does. And captures some footage that can best be described as awesome in the traditional sense of the word.

Watch it full screen in a dark room. Prepare to be amazed.

Homemade Spacecraft from Luke Geissbuhler on Vimeo.

Windows

Two days out of the week I have long days at school, about twelve hours on campus. While I was waiting for my last class of the day I noticed the following. I've speeded up the video to make the effect the wind was having on these windows more obvious.

The last part of the clip is slowed down to normal speed so that I could provide some context to the problem. The windows are probably five feet tall and each pane is probably three or four feet wide. The hallway is a hundred feet or so. This is a lot of glass that doesn't seem to be solidly attached to the rest of the building. I have the distinct impression that the plate screwed into the window frame shown in this clip was added after installation.

Water Dogs

Both our dogs are English Springer Spaniels, a breed whose original purpose was to help in hunting water fowl. Its not surprising then, that they love water and the only things that make baths unpleasant is all that soap and shampoo. Last year we purchased a large inflatable pool for them to play in and that lasted a week or two until they popped it. It also took much more water to fill than I expected.

This year we went with the cheaper, smaller pool and bring it out on hot summer days to help cool them off when outside. Our dogs are very different in temperament and I think the following two movie clips will make this clear.

Anise:

Basil:

OK Go III

I found out about OK Go's third video from a podcast I listen to which I would safely describe as not being on the pulse of pop culture (much like myself); the odds are good you've already seen this somewhere else. For the rest of you like me, enjoy this greatness:

For a lab in college I was on a team that had to make a Rube Goldberg machine, one with only a dozen or so mechanisms. The demonstration of these contraptions is a school event and I had been watching them for two years before I got a crack at my own as a junior. I was highly committed to making sure that ours worked perfectly and insisted that it run without error ten times in a row the night before the demonstration. It did by midnight and we were confident it would work fine the next day.

It didn't. Two new failures popped up that we had never seen before and we joined the almost universal ranks of those who weren't able to demonstrate a working machine in that classes history.

I bring this up because, even though it took 85 filmed takes to get it right (according to their website), a Rube Goldberg this size that works at all is a miracle.

Day-Night Map

This is what nerds like me do when they need to take a break from reading and homework. I've been wanting to put together this animation for a while but didn't know how to get the images I needed. Until today, that is. Thanks to timeanddate.com, I was able to "create" the images and then stitch them together into a movie.

The animation below shows where the sun is and is not shining on the Earth at noon Greenwich time over the course of one calendar year. The yellow dot in the middle is the sun and the white dot that quickly passes by is the moon. And, just to be clear, the light areas are where the sun is shining at that time of day and the dark areas are where it is not.

My wife and I spent several minutes watching the animation in a loop, mesmerized by it. I hope you enjoy it as well.

This makes me want to quit my job and become a full-time nerd

I stumbled across some video demonstrations yesterday that, as they say, captured my imagination.  The videos show some high-level nerdery using the Wiimote to control a non-Wii computer interface.  If you have a moment and a high-speed connection, click on over to see what I'm talking about.  The video at the bottom is by far the most impressive to my eyes.

All of this stuff is possible because the Wiimote has some serious hardware inside.  First off, the connection to the Wii proper is done through a Bluetooth connection, which makes eavesdropping in on the messages being sent back and forth much easier.  For those of you who don't know, Bluetooth is a wireless communication standard that is most commonly seen in the cell phone market.  If you've seen people walking around wearing just a headset talking on their phones, you've seen Bluetooth in action.  The user's phone is squirreled away in a backpack, pocket, or briefcase, and the headset is connected to it, acting as a remote microphone and speaker.  The Wii uses the same techonology but instead of sending a phone conversation between a headset and a cell phone, it is used to send information between the Wiimote and the Wii.

The information that it is sending is where the real magic is, though.  There are two things the Wii system uses to keep track of where the Wiimote is and how it is moving.  The first is an integrated three-dimensional accelerometer.  This is a little chip that can measure how much acceleration the Wiimote is experiencing in all three dimensions (up/down, left/right, away/toward the TV screen). Using a bit of math, it is theoretically possible to know exactly where the Wiimote is in space at any time and how it is moving.

It appears, though, that some kind of practical limitation kept this sensing from being precise enough in the real world and so a second system was put in place: the IR camera.  In the very front of the Wiimote is a fairly high-resolution IR camera that watches the position of two IR LED lights tucked away in the sensor bar you place on your TV. By watching the size, position, and orientation of theses lights,  a second independent method of 3-D location is made possible. If the lights are bigger, the Wiimote is closer to the TV.  If the lights are in the upper-left of the screen and tilted, then the Wiimote is in the lower-left of the screen and also tilted.

All of this (and more) has been packed into one remote-control sized device that is actually affordable to normal people (that is, people not doing research in academia).  In my mind, this is probably the most incredible part of the whole system.  Because of this integration, the Wii is the most accessible, most-popular video game platform today.

What these videos show, though, is how much more potential there is.  Adventure-some hackers have taken the time to largely decode and understand the information being sent between the Wiimote and the Wii.  Using this information, software hase been written that allows a Bluetooth-equipped computer to connect to the Wiimote and use this information for other purposes.  This device-level software (called a "driver") is then used by other programmers who build on it and create more general software like what is demonstrated in the videos.

The incredible potential of this system truly captures my imagination.  The opportunities to do new things in new ways seems wide open right now and it makes me want to quit my job and explore these opportunities.  If I was more of a computer nerd, I might just do something like that under the guise of a graduate program.  For now, though, I'm going to sit back and continue to be amazed at how these "toys" are going to be put to use.

OK Go

Months after they were hot, I wanted to pass along two fun music videos self-produced by the band "OK Go". (I heard about them on NPR if that's any clue how out of the loop I am when if comes to these things.) The first video is fun but the second one gets the award for "Best Use of Treadmills In a Music Video".

Seriously, whoever choreographed this deserves a medal.

Enjoy!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_fe196bnpmY

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jWCSGGrU9MA