President Eisenhower's farewell address (1961)

YouTube link.

Wikipedia summary.

Best known for his precient comments on the military-industrial complex, the speech also cautions against mortgaging the future of our grandchildren for immediate gains:

Another factor in maintaining balance involves the element of time. As we peer into society's future, we -- you and I, and our government -- must avoid the impulse to live only for today, plundering for our own ease and convenience the precious resources of tomorrow. We cannot mortgage the material assets of our grandchildren without risking the loss also of their political and spiritual heritage. We want democracy to survive for all generations to come, not to become the insolvent phantom of tomorrow.

Fulltext here.

Related:  His Republican administration imposed a 91% marginal tax rate on millionaires, and in 1963 he opined that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was unnecessary.

Reposted from 2019 because today I found a video in the National Archives discussing Eisenhower's role and intention in crafting the speech.  

Impressive dismount

An update on the status of Monarchs

I'm impressed by the projects being undertaken in Mexico by scientists and indigenous people to extend the vertical range of Monarch overwintering habitat in an effort of counteract the deleterious effects of climate change.

Simone Biles - updated

The one below is a trailer for a Netflix program scheduled to air July 17.  Looks awesome, because she is a very well-spoken young woman.

 

Reposted from six months ago to add the trailer for the second part of the documentary, which I watched last night.  The 4x45 minute parts are now available on Netflix.  This is an absolutely superb presentation of a truly remarkable young woman and her outlook on life; it's not just for "sports people."

"Put on some damn sunscreen already"

YouTube link.

"We showed people what they looked like in ultraviolet, & wondered aloud if they wanted to put on some damn sunscreen already."

Discussed and explained at Slate.

Reposted from 2014 to accompany my new post on "sunscreen absolutism."

An outstanding "Rube Goldberg" apparatus

"This outdoor Rube Goldberg Machine goes around my entire yard, and swishes a basketball shot after 70 steps. This video was filmed in one take, meaning there are absolutely no hidden cuts or edits. The machine took a month to build and another month to successfully work, so please share this with anyone who needs some entertainment during these strange times!  Filmed entirely with the GoPro MAX. The GoPro MAX is a 360 camera, and I used it for this video so I did not have to stress about missing anything during the filming process. With the GoPro MAX, you can reframe your video after you film it, so it was impossible to miss any part of the machine when filming. If there are any strange spots in this video you might think looks like a cut or edit, that is just the stitching of the 360 video."

The Wikipedia explanation of Rube Goldberg machines. 

See also Unconventional dinner - updated (2020)

Lifelike talking faces

Explained at a Microsoft website:

We introduce VASA, a framework for generating lifelike talking faces of virtual characters with appealing visual affective skills (VAS), given a single static image and a speech audio clip. Our premiere model, VASA-1, is capable of not only producing lip movements that are exquisitely synchronized with the audio, but also capturing a large spectrum of facial nuances and natural head motions that contribute to the perception of authenticity and liveliness. The core innovations include a holistic facial dynamics and head movement generation model that works in a face latent space, and the development of such an expressive and disentangled face latent space using videos. Through extensive experiments including evaluation on a set of new metrics, we show that our method significantly outperforms previous methods along various dimensions comprehensively. Our method not only delivers high video quality with realistic facial and head dynamics but also supports the online generation of 512x512 videos at up to 40 FPS with negligible starting latency. It paves the way for real-time engagements with lifelike avatars that emulate human conversational behaviors.

Lots of video explanations at the site, followed by this disclaimer:

Our research focuses on generating visual affective skills for virtual AI avatars, aiming for positive applications. It is not intended to create content that is used to mislead or deceive. However, like other related content generation techniques, it could still potentially be misused for impersonating humans. We are opposed to any behavior to create misleading or harmful contents of real persons, and are interested in applying our technique for advancing forgery detection. Currently, the videos generated by this method still contain identifiable artifacts, and the numerical analysis shows that there's still a gap to achieve the authenticity of real videos.

Ascending Mount Everest with a drone

YouTube videos have "fullscreen" icons for a reason; click it.  I also switched to a slower playback speed (0.5) for the final summit push.

Mastermind

I would bet that most readers of TYWKIWDBI would enjoy viewing episodes of the BBC program Mastermind.  I've embedded a random example of a program above.  Contestants are quizzed with in-depth questions on a single subject, then have to answer "general knowledge" questions.  For ultimate success, it is not sufficient to have expertise on just one subject, because winners have to come back for additional (3? 4?) rounds to reach the finals. 

For this particular episode, the specialty subjects were the geography of Switzerland, the family of Tsar Nicholas II of Russia, Sir Roger Moore and Bruce Springsteen.

Lots of episodes are available on YouTube.  I don't know if they are available streaming somewhere or not.

Mastermind

When I was on sabbatical in London many, many years ago, Mastermind was my favorite program to watch on the telly in my rented room in Turnham Green.

The original quizmaster was Magnus Magnusson (quizzing a contestant on Sherlock Holmes here)

Originally posted by some guy over at Neatorama.  Reposted from 2017.

University Challenge

 

I had no clue on some of these questions.

Reposted from 2017.

GE College Bowl epic battle (Princeton vs. Agnes Scott)

 

I've just spent an enjoyable half hour walking down memory lane, watching an episode of General Electric's College Bowl. This quiz bowl series ran on U.S. television from 1959 to 1970.

The most dominant team was the University of Minnesota, which had teams appear in 23 of the 68 broadcast matches. The 1953-55 series had a powerful appeal because it used remote broadcasts; each team was located at their own college where they were cheered on by their wildly enthusiastic classmates. The effect was akin to listening to a football game, but this type of excitement evaporated in later versions, in which both teams competed in the same room.

One of the most memorable upsets in the history of the show occurred in 1966, when an all-woman team from tiny Agnes Scott College [Atlanta], took on the defending champions from Princeton University.

Agnes Scott fell behind 185-130 with less than two minutes remaining. You can see the final segment of the show in the embedded video above. (Although if this subject matter interests you, it's more fun to watch the first ten minutes here, and the second ten minutes here. The videos also incorporate the original advertising that ran in 1966.)

One particularly poignant aspect of the contest was pointed out recently by Robert Earle, who was moderator of the program. The last bonus question was answered by Karen Gearreald with about one second left in the game. "That young lady, by the way, was the only person in the theater who could not see the clock," Mr. Earle wrote. "She is blind."

And here's the final question: "For twenty points, what were Balmung and Durandal?"

For the answer, watch the video. It's more fun than Googling the answer.

(via Metafilter)

Reposted from 2017 to accompany other posts.

Two doggy day care bus videos

I forgot to post this on Tau Day (June 28)

More about Tau Day.

Questioning corrective glasses for color blindness

A tip of the hat to this fellow for taking the time and effort to do this: "In this two-part investigative documentary series, I delve into the color corrective glasses industry, focusing on major brands like EnChroma, PileStone, and Carelust. The investigation exposes a landscape rife with scams and misleading marketing tactics, challenging claims that these products enable people with color vision deficiencies to see new colors."

I will personally admit to having been taken in by videos about EnChroma glasses, to the extent that I posted one or two of them here on TYWKIWDBI.  After seeing this video I took them down, and I hereby apologize to any readers who were misled by my old posts.  

No time for the video?  Just look at this screencap of a scene in which a "colorblind" boy identifies colored balloons incorrectly -

- and note the the producers of the video labeled the balloons with the wrong names for him to recite.  

The embedded video is excellent in terms of quality research and presentation.

Mother-of-the-Year candidate

"The whole world is watching"

YouTube link

In August of 1968 the Democratic National Convention was held in Chicago, where a large group of young (mostly white) people gathered to protest the ongoing Vietnam War.  The Presidential nomination was as yet undecided, because Robert Kennedy had been assassinated and his delegates were thus uncommitted re the choice between Hubert Humphrey (forboding a continuation of the Johnson policies) and the anti-war Senator Eugene McCarthy.

The protest chant of "Peace Now" elicited a Chicago police response which changed the chant to "The whole world is watching." The world did watch via live network television coverage, and many of us remember it vividly.

In 1968 I had just finished college and had the opportunity to drive down from Minneapolis to Chicago, but opted not to go.

Reposted from 2020 because there are two national political conventions coming up this year, student protests are spreading around the country, and once again the whole world will be watching...

Optical illusions for those in a hurry

Forty of them in eight minutes (many of which I've previously covered in TYWKIWDBI in the optical illusions subcategory).  Via Neatorama.

YouTube 10th anniversary video compilation

YouTube link.

I'm not officially "back" at the blogging desk, but I wanted to post this brief compilation of excerpts from approximately 200 videos to keep you busy until I do come back.

The best feature is this playlist, which not only lists the videos, but supplements them with thumbnails.  And... if you play one of the videos in the playlist, it will automatically segue to the next video in the compilation - probably about 500 minutes of watching if you start at the first one and cycle all the way through.

It's almost scary how many of these are instantly recognizable from just a 1-second clip.  Use the playlist link to watch any of the videos in toto.

Reposted from nine years ago.

A two-hour compilation of "fail videos"

The YouTube title says "try not to laugh," but that's actually not hard, because many of them are trivial and others cringeworthy because people get hurt.