Life, Nematodes, and Zero Effect

I agree with anyone who says Zero Effect is one of the greatest existential movies ever made, if only because of a single line…

Changing without changing

Many of us make great sacrifice to avoid it. Laws are written and put into place to stymy it. Large, expensive buildings are built to protect against it. Minds are made up against it and reject ideas that even hint at it. Blockades of all sorts are built against potential outcomes that may lead to…

All in the telling

The latest technologies, including cloud, social, anything mobile, Internet of Things (IoT), Big Data, analytics and Artificial Intelligence (AI) have and will continue to transform business, especially the customer experience, which still revolves around the story. Storytelling is still the centerpiece. Nothing new there. Storytelling has been the centerpiece since before anyone could even write….

Telling stories

We can’t throw a rock across the Web without hitting one of the many articles, posts, books, podcasts or interviews focused on the use of storytelling in business. Arguably kicking the magic out of the hat, most of them address the way stories are used in marketing goods and services (yawn). We need to think…

MacAskill

We tip our hats to @kdragon87 for the tip on this one:

Dropped is in

This 10-minute short film is made up of clips found on YouTube by Chris Beckman, who collected clips of people dropping their video cameras and edited them together into this artful masterpiece:

Tabula Rasa

From Wikipedia: Tabula rasa is the epistemological thesis that individuals are born without built-in mental content and that their knowledge comes from experience and perception. Generally proponents of the tabula rasa thesis favour the “nurture” side of the nature versus nurture debate, when it comes to aspects of one’s personality, social and emotional behaviour, and…

Behind the Scenes: WIND

Behind the scenes with the Exploratorium, A Curious Summer and Tinkering Unlimited as they prepare to work with young learners to harness wind’s invisible power through discovering where it comes from and how to predict its behavior while studying aerodynamics and lift. Through tinkering with wind-powered machines and vehicles, such as a paragliding wing, turbines…

Flight

Since forever, I’ve been hooked on flight. In planes big or small, balloons, anything that flies, goes fast and is otherwise in direct opposition to the side of me that believes strongly in being safe by observing best practices at all times. I once lived in Juneau, Alaska and used to watch paragliders from my…

Tinkering School: Day 8

Go cart design, assembly and testing by the inimitable Team Tinker with snippets of boat model design and other moments of singular, whimsical tinkering mastery. Thanks to Moby for his song, Porcelain.

Geometry of Life

thanks to @kurt_vega for reminding us of this beautiful film by Cristóbal Vila:

Today’s Solar Wind Forecast

While living in Alaska, I had a heavy habit of checking this every day: a groovily-nerdy resource provided by the University of Alaska’s Geophysical Institute:

Goodbye Solo

Every now and then a film moves me, lifts and tosses about my sense of the world, of knowing myself and my own culture, let alone the cultures of others and where mine fits in. Then, it sets me down gently, back in the place I was to begin with. Only then, the place looks…

Ken Burns on filmmaking

If you wanted to be a doctor or a lawyer or a feature film I could tell you the steps to take to do that, but every working documentary filmmaker I know has gotten there through their own unique path. There is no career path.

Asleep

This is just the fat trimmed off a project I’m working on: a multimedia installation about people asleep in public spaces called, appropriately, “Asleep”: