Must-see hilarious nerdy movie clips

I'd like to share with you a few of those movie clips all nerds just should have seen. It's funny, because even though my entire class of course will have seen them, they may be entirely ignored by later or earlier nerd generations. Do you have any favorites I missed?

First out is Look around you, which you just have to see to believe. A hint - it was made in 2002 (youtube playlist and torrent downloads: series 1 and series 2) :

Their periodic table of elements is pretty amazing:


Next, "Sorting out sorting" is an excruciating review of all the basic sorting algorithms. Very educational, very old.

I'll finish off for this time with "Erlang: The Movie", documenting the ground-breaking features of this Ericsson functional programming language. It may not seem much to you, but in the nerd world, these things matter. For artistic reasons best enjoyed muted with Falco "Der Kommissar" playing over it:

See other of my nerdy posts.

Five ways to make your own live web tv!

Back at the turn of the century things were so messy - some friends were playing around with Icecast and similar contraptions to do streaming live web radio but someone was always lagging in the streaming, there was never enough upstream bandwidth to host any large audiences (read: three is a crowd already) and since it was tricky to announce a show hosts were speaking to empty halls most of the time anyway. Oh, and usually the shows were not usually (certainly not automatically) archived and hosted for perusal by late-comers.

Probably it was in late 2005, I even recall the setting when I saw the first article about Youtube and thought it seemed like a stupid idea, how could they ever attempt to house, and even less broadcast all that video?! Video, even the shortest clip you had tried to play around with, VCD's, MPEG4's and DVD-R, storage of it all and crap, it was just impossible to imagine to do it for a large crowd - over the web?! Hah.

Seriously, I was so wrong. The culture and technology surrounding "Web 2.0" of the last couple years has changed all of these factors. Chris Anderson's principle of "rapidly diminishing marginal costs" enabled Youtube, there is always a service there to host and process your data as well as willingly expose it to other sites, the same sites in which you broadcast your message to rapidly gather your friends as an audience as well as to spread the word when you have just found something great looking for an audience. Somehow... it just happened, and for those who don't touch twitter, facebook, google reader, ping.fm etc., it must be very hard to grasp. But it has changed things, for sure.


Today, a large part of the radio or TV I enjoy is provided as podcasts or other live streaming online. Sometimes I measure widespread acceptance of technologies by how much my family are spontaneously using it - and judging from the appreciation when I send them a bambuser link to some debate they are interested in, or they go online for the replay of the show they missed, the gap between common mass media (sw. "gammelmedia") and user-generated content is closing. You can have a pretty successful radio or TV show nowadays without ever touching an ether wave except whatever is necessary for transmitting the IP protocol. My friend Björn Falkevik is using Bambuser (it is a common mistake to identify him with this Swedish/Finnish web startup) to prove this with their excellent reoccurring show "Sweet Sunday Web Crunch", and indeed it has become so easy, and so good, the sky and your imagination is the limit for what you can achieve with web video! Not with such high ambitions, but just to prove how easy it was to do it, I recorded a small clip:

The cool thing distinguishing Bambuser from Youtube is that it is live. When it's live, and you have an event with a reasonable audience, it opens up for the opportunity of a backchannel - a chat or similar way for the audience to comment and participate in the content. This can create extremely interesting dynamics - certainly one reason for why CNN chose to broadcast the Obama inauguration in collaboration with facebook.

Doing live streaming video well is a bit tricky to do well, but there are several options available for you to play around with, here are some:

• Bambuser (Swedish / Finnish)
  
  
  
  
• USTREAM (US)
  
  


• Justin.tv (US)
  
  
  
  
• Livestream (formerly Mogulus - US)
  
  
  
  
• Qbrick (Swedish)
  
  
  
  

Using slightly different methods but the same principles, Christian Rudolf of disruptive.nu shows that with a whiteboard and a videocamera you can baffle the world:

Regardless if you choose to bite the bullet and contribute something of your own or stand in the audience, I think you will agree with me that this is exciting opportunities indeed.

Since quite some time I have been experimenting with transcoding and ripping online content (all with the justification of your liberty to enjoy content in the format you choose… and that post really ought to be updated) and recently I have been doing some transcoding actually using the Videolan VLM server for work. It's really cool! But it's also tricky - we're doing flash video to the web browser (to be played by a flash based video player like flowplayer) but VLC supports only HTTP pseudo-streaming it seems, and we're dreading moving to Red5 or similar for proper RTMP streaming. Not to mention if we want to start replaying and managing archived streams… Phew, seems I always end up at the bleeding edge of technologies!

( PS. Yes, five ways :-) )

The amazing hacks of an amazing researcher

Maybe you remember from way back sometime in 2005 this crazy nerd running around with his "poor man's steadycam", a concoction of some metal pipes, weight, bolt and nuts, as featured on Hak5? (Wow, I just realized I had accidentally unsubscribed to Hak5, now I've got some ten great episodes to watch, yay!)


You don't? Well, turns out this same nutty nerd has really made it big with his Wii remote hacks on TED.com among other places.

So, of course I spent all last night checking out his amazing projects, the projector-based tracking is not bad either. Johnny Chung Lee is now a researcher of interface design and stuff at Carnegie Mellon Universityfor Microsoft Applied Sciences, and a productive one to add. Much more productive than the researchers I remember from Chalmers University, maybe they could inherit some these people's urgency to create amazing prototypes? I dunno. Anyway, not all that many of the "small people" have the opportunity to turn up several times in the limelight and I will continue to be amazed by and admire this guy - go Johnny Lee!

(Update: I am so gonna make these whiteboards myself)

Slo-mo goodness, Discovery Time Warp

New digital cameras can really do wonders, as shown in this extremely smooth beautiful skate-video shot with the 120 fps RED camera:

Björn Falkevik alerted me to that there's a new program on Discovery Channel - Time Warp (download it here):

Also, Renee told me there's another cool show - Prototype This (download it here) which recently started airing. Enjoy!

Piracy Monday!

I got remarks on yesterday's creative commons post that I didn't include some also very significant films / clips, so to better myself here's another bunch of clips, this time focused more on actual piracy and filesharing, not so much enabling creativity. What I consider the so far most groundbreaking work in this category is probably Piratbyrån Walpurgis 2007: Four Shreddings and a Funeral (also available in Swedish). There's a video for it too, but it's not as good by far, the text is really thoughtworthy.

The videos can by their very nature be downloaded for free, but I chose to link to youtube below. Enjoy! :

Good Copy, Bad Copy:

(part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5, part 6)

Steal this film I:

(part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4)

Steal this film II:

(part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, part 5)

Creative Commons Sunday!

As friends of me may have noticed, I'm a big fan of Joichi Ito since I met him in Tallinn and lately also his Creative Commons friend and collegue Lawrence Lessig. So here goes, a dense series of videos related to CC. Thanks to Hax here and here. Note that I know CC-licensing is not the abolishing of copyright, nor necessarily requiring share-alike to produce a special family of components like the GPL-fanatics like Richard Stallman argue for.

PS. Does anyone know rules regarding performance royalties and amateur recording of a live concert like I encouraged in one of my recent blog posts from the R.E.M. concert? I would like to think that the artist can at least explicitly allow recording and redistribution of a concert, but in Estonia, that seems to be mandatory to go through also the royalty collecting agency and the idea of a song may anyway be tied to the original song writor and composer. I have no idea...

Cursing, catfights and god warriors

You could argue that I watch too much bad reality TV but I really don't follow anything, there's just a bunch of programs I watch if I catch them when the TV's on, really! This is a summary beside the obviously good programs like MythBusters, Top Gear and The Daily Show:

Trinny & Susannah Undres... is really cute, I love it how they shape up lives and relationships with simple advice and gentle nudges. How to Look Good Naked is a bit obsessed with well... nudity, but that also means I can't stop watching it. And it's cool. ANTM is mostly a lot of silliness and fighting but I watch it anyway, compared to American Chopper where I really enjoy watching the fighting (and the handicraft) since there no-one is so much treated as a scapegoat, it's just a highly conflictual work place.

The other day, I saw something amazing on Wife Swap. Everyone who knows me will have noticed how I can not avoid fighting ignorance or habitual dogma, it just boils over inside of me... and how I feel that is over-represented among religious people. Few share my obseission though, so I'm pretty often taken for a crusader... against something. Though what I saw on TV was both hilarious and scary, it was about how the tattooed and shaved wife of Steve Caddel swapped homes with a fundamentalist big mama. Neither felt like particularly balanced people, but judge for yourselves:

When I mentioned it to some friends though, they assumed I was talking about Trading Spouses and the episode with Marguerite "the God Warrior" Perrin. No I didn't, then I would have been rolling around on the floor laughing, or in fear. Here it's more clear who's the unhealthy person I think:

My opinion is that she seems to be battling guilt and fear in herself, like her obesity, relationship to her family or that her daughter became pregnant as a teenager. It is not healthy to project fear and defensiveness around you like she does, the world is not actually such a dangerous place. No-one was out to hurt her and the family she traded with was being extremely friendly and open including saying grace with her and visiting a church. Sure they had a particular house with gargoyle statues and rich influence from other cultures, but the solstice party was not very mystic at all, it was just reminding of the human unity and celebrating a bit with nice people.

This Christian does not make me believe more in the existance of God or the Devil, she just reminds me how easy it is for nutcases to create their own worlds and become engulfed in their own emotions. Really easy, so you beware too. She's seriously scary.

Seems that Perrin later both has achieved obvious meme fame, but both actually went back onto another season of Trading Spouses, as well as appeared on the Jay Leno show. She also has a myspace page. Plus her daughter (the dance-academy one) died in a car accident...

(Update: I sometimes read the Chick comics for comical value, they make criticizing evangelism so much easier - and fun!)

An anthropological introduction to YouTube

My friend Henrik at Alfa Bravo brought me this piece of youtube video by Michael Wesch, which is one of those "wow... WOW... WOOOOOOOOW... this is really huge, everyone has to see it" things. So please see it, even though it's long. It's so cool.

One of the greatest parts of the video is at 45:25, by Lawrence Lessig (the quote is from this speech):

"We need to recognize you can't kill the instinct that technology produces, only criminalize it. We can't stop our kids from using it, we can only drive it underground. We can't make our kids passive again, we can only make them, quote "pirates" and is that good? We life in this weird time, this kind of age of prohibition where in many areas of our lives, we live life constantly against the law, ordinary people live life against the law. And that's what we're doing against our kids, they live life knowing they live it against the law."

Solar eclipse on Friday Aug. 1st, visible from both Estonia and Sweden

On this Friday, the 1st of August 2008 (NASA page here, DN article here) there will be another total solar eclipse. This time the maximum will travel roughly over the north polar cap from Canada through Russia and down in China (narrow blue path in the illustration). The partial eclipse (start and end position marked in pink in the illustration) will sweep over large parts of Europe, the Middle East and Asia.

In Sweden the partial eclipse will start at 10:39, be at maximum 11:42 and end at 12:45 CEST (local time). Estonia is some six to ten minutes later and will be reached at 11:45, maximum at 12:50 and end two hours after the first contact at 13:45 EEST (local time).

Remember, never look straight into the sun without protection, but do enjoy this marvel of the universe!

Pink Floyd - Set the Controls for the Heart of the Sun:

Little by little the night turns around
Counting the leaves which tremble at dawn
Lotuses lean on each other in yearning
Under the eaves the swallow is resting
Set the controls for the heart of the sun

Over the mountain watching the watcher
Breaking the darkness
Waking the grapevine
knowledge of love is knowledge of shadow
Love is the shadow that ripens the wine
Set the controls for the heart of the sun

Witness the man who raves at the wall
Making the shape of his question to Heaven
Whether the sun will fall in the evening
Will he remember the lesson of giving
Set the controls for the heart of the sun

(Update: We've decided to host an eclipse-watching brunch at Liisa's parents' place outside of Tartu - all friends in the area who don't have to go to work are very welcome. We're not yet sure of how to view the eclipse or if to be ambitious about the brunch, but get in touch and we're open to ideas! Also the regular road is closed, we can give you directions)

(Update 2: Sorry, I got the DST wrong, it should actually be CEST and EEST, not CET and EET, so now that's fixed)

(Update 3: Did you see the eclipse? We did at least, even if we missed the opportunity to project it or take good pictures of it. My brother took this picture through a blank compact disk:


See, we were not kidding, there really was an eclipse!)

Dead poets rising against surveillance (brilliant video)

As I've been writing before, finally the Swedish media are being awakened (largely by the "blogosphere" or whatever you wish to call the social internet) about the abyss of surveillance society suddenly appearing right in front of us. It's not every day I am touched to tears by a youtube video, unfortunately it's only understandable in Swedish. Again from Erik at Framtidstanken:

Another notable participant in the debate is Patrik Fältström, our own IETF guru sharing his expert opinion and linking further to other good articles on the topic.

By the way, I am convinced that we're focusing too much on how Big Brother may watch us, and are forgetting about... our other siblings. I've got to write something about sousveillance and the clowd soon.

Ett litet steg för mig, ett stort steg för unga forskare?

Så, nu fick jag äntligen tummen ur och skrev inlägget åt FUF's nyhetssida (deras RSS funkar inte, skärpning!).

Det är ju egentligen ingen stor sak, jag uppmuntrar alla att läsa mitt inlägg om FUF-chaten (testa den direkt i webläsaren!) och sen inbillar jag mig att jag kan åstadkomma en förbättring om jag passar på att länka till alla saker intressanta för Unga Forskare, möjliggör en bättre kommunikation och fler möten, så får vi se vad det blir med det. Här vet jag att FUF finns på nätet:

• Scientium och det nya FUF-forumet som verkar ersatt det gamla medlemsforumet (som i.o.f.s. verkar ha en del pärlor läsbara fortfarande). Även om det går bra för vem som helst att registrera sig tycker jag fortfarande det känns lite för "closed" och "internt", och skulle vilja se något mer öppet och länkandes till andra ställen, som t.ex. suprbay.org eller Freaky Flicks är. Det är jätteviktigt att det går att prenumerera på något som pockar lite varsamt och lockar dig tillbaks om du varit inaktiv ett tag.
  
• Projektbanken och dess blogg - Anders Lundberg, Melike Erdogan och Jens Roat Kultima om till synes outtröttligt och intensivt driver ett projekt för att samla grymma gymnasie-projektarbeten (lite som disruptive.nu's gratis affärsidéer - här med). Fast varför finns det en sån djungel av "projektbanker" på google, och varför hittar jag ingen länk från bloggen till den faktiska projektbanken? :-)
  
• FUF's fotogalleri - precis vad det låter som. Där tycker jag rent anarkistiskt att man självklart väljer en "fuf.org"-tagg, som man använder på flickr och liknande, som jag gjort med min brorssons fotbollsmatch senast! Fler bilder från fler människor, som flickr+last.fm events!
  
• FUF:s ordförandeblogg - mycket prat om FUF-ordförandeskapet
  
• Unga Forskare-bloggen - Aktiva i Förbundet Unga Forskare skriver om sitt arbete, sina tankar och idéer
  
• Sommarforskarskolan 2007 - ett tröst-omnämnande, förstås händer det inget där just nu, men det ser ju jätteroligt ut!

Och så då förstås "mina" bidrag:

• IRC-kanalen #fuf.org på chat.freenode.net eller tinyurl.com/fufchat för att hälsa på med bara två klick i webläsaren
  
• Skype-gruppen
  
• taggen "ufsnack" på del.icio.us - dela med dig av länktips till andra FUF'are!
  
• Fabbo' CJs blogg - snart Sveriges mest nerd-inspirerande blogg! :-)

Åh ja, en annan kul grej! Jag skulle föreslå att dela med sig av riktigt intressanta länkar genom att på del.icio.us (en kort, tuff video om hur det funkar här) tagga dem med "ufsnack" (efter namnet på den gamla mailinglistan). Så ska jag ordna en feed och sånt för den snart också...



Känner du till något mer FUF'igt som borde vara med på listan? Kommentera!