If you’ve never seen the classic short “Powers of Ten,” I’ve got a treat for you. Created in 1968 for IBM by Charles and Ray Eames (yes, of Eames Chair fame), the film has a very simple premise: start at a static scene, then start zooming out, at one “power of ten” per ten seconds — for example, from 10² meters to 10³ meters. As we zoom out, we see the earth, the solar system, the galaxy, and so forth. Once we reach 10²⁴ meters (the size of the observable universe), the camera then begins a faster zoom-in…and goes beyond the original scene, into the microscopic scale and beyond.

For me, “Powers of Ten” is an educational touchstone — it’s a film I was shown several times in science classrooms, and to this day, I find it captivating in its simplicity and power. All you do is zoom way out and zoom way in — the universe is just a matter of perspective.

For more, check out “Powers of Ten” on Wikipedia, and the official “Powers of Ten” website.

(Thanks to Kottke.org for pointing to this YouTube clip!)

McFerrin then says: “Now, what’s interesting to me about that is, regardless of where I am — anywhere — every audience gets that. It’s just that the pentatonic scale, for some reason….” One of the scientists on the panel raises the question: “Just to phrase the question scientifically, Larry, what the hell just happened here?” Just watch this. It’s neat and it’s short:

World Science Festival 2009: Bobby McFerrin Demonstrates the Power of the Pentatonic Scale from World Science Festival on Vimeo.

For the entire program (including “what this has to do with science”), check out the Notes & Neurons site, which has a five-part video series showing the full discussion. Note: Part Four has the bit with McFerrin’s pentatonic scale demonstration and the subsequent discussion.

So here’s the deal. There are these two young filmmakers who go by the names Rhett and Link. They love local commercials, and they make them. For free. They go on the road, crisscrossing the country, making awesome local commercials. How can they afford to do this? Through sponsorship (often visible in the web versions of the commercials, and sometimes sponsored items, like Alka Seltzer, visible in shots). Anyway, even though there is sponsorship involved, these are some awesome local commercials. Really. Just watch the first one. If you’re like me, you’ll be in tears, watching it over and over. After the jump, I give you more sweet, sweet, local commercials.

Cullman Mobile Home Liquidation

“I sell mobile homes. I’m not gonna waste your time, I’m gonna tell it just like it is. These are mobile homes, not mansions. They come in two pieces. If that’s what you’re lookin’ for, that’s what I got. They’re used. Some of them have stains. We cover that up.”

Salt Lake Community College Barbering & Cosmetology School – An Unlicensed Salon

“In this economy, who can afford an expensive haircut, or a four-year degree?” Warning: this is an unlicensed salon. I repeat, an unlicensed salon. But the haircuts are only $2. “Let me give you a haircut. I really need the practice.”

Black and White People Furniture – Red House Furniture

“Look at this sofa. It’s perfect for a black person, or a white person.” “This mattress is perfect for a white person, or a black person.”

Ray’s Midbell Music

“Band is awesome. Band is the new trend. Band is your best chance for making new friends. … You may have to go to the Prom alone, but that’s a sacrifice worth making to play the sousaphone.”

Bobby Denning Furniture, Appliance, Auction, and Realty, and Lawn Equipment and Scooters (and Auto Sales)

“I want you to understand the bigness of our store.” (70,000 square feet.) “We own approximately 80% of this facility. Everything except the Chinese restaurant and the coin laundry.”

Pat vs. Geno’s: Philly Cheesesteak War

Clearly very sponsored by Alka Seltzer, but still funny. “I like the orangeness of the restaurant. It makes me feel at home.” “Your home is orange?” “Well…yeah.”

Check out the I Love Local Commercials site to nominate a business to get a free local commercial. See also: their YouTube channel.

In the interview, Letterman asks Blanc how he develops the characters’ voices. Blanc replies, “They show me a picture of the character, and then they show me a storyboard which shows what the character is going to do in the cartoon. From this I have to create the voice. Like, Bugs they said was a ‘tough little stinker.’ So I thought, ‘Which is the toughest voice in this country? The Brooklyn or the Bronx?’ [speaking in Bugs Bunny voice] So I, uh, put the two of them together, and that’s how I got the voice of Bugs, doc!” (Blanc’s tombstone bears the motto “That’s All Folks”)

Watch as a master performs a few of his famous voices and explains his process. After the jump (below the video) is a partial list of his most notable cartoon voices, cribbed from Wikipedia.

• Porky Pig (1936-1989, assumed from Joe Dougherty)
• The Maxwell (Jack Benny’s car in “The Mouse that Jack Built”)
• Daffy Duck (1937-1989)
• Bugs Bunny’s prototype/Happy Rabbit (1938-1940)
• Bugs Bunny (1940-1989)
• Woody Woodpecker (1940-1941)
• Hiawatha (1941)
• Cecil Turtle (1941-1947)
• Tweety Bird (1942-1989)
• Private Snafu, numerous World War II related cartoons (1943)
• Yosemite Sam (1945-1987)
• Pepe Le Pew (1945-1989)
• Sylvester (1945-1989) aka Thomas (1947) in some films.
• Foghorn Leghorn (1946-1987)
• The Barnyard Dawg (1946-1989)
• Henery Hawk (1946-1989)
• Charlie Dog (1947)
• Mac (of Mac & Tosh) (1947)
• K-9 (1948) (sidekick to Marvin the Martian)
• Marvin the Martian (1948-1989)
• Sylvester J. Pussycat, Jr. Mel also plays Sylvester’s son Sylvester Junior when the young cat was introduced (1949)
• Beaky Buzzard (1950)
• Curt Martin (1950-1 episode Hillbilly Hare)
• Elmer Fudd (1950, 1958, 1970s and 1980s, replacing Arthur Q. Bryan)
• Bruno the Bear (1951)
• Wile E. Coyote (silent until 1952, first spoke in the short “Operation: Rabbit”)
• Speedy Gonzales (1953)
• The Tasmanian Devil (1954-1960) aka Taz
• Barney Rubble (1960-1989)
• Dino (1960-1989) (Fred Flintstone’s pet.)
• Cosmo G. Spacely (1962-1989)
• Hardy Har Har (1962-1964)
• Tom Cat and Jerry Mouse (1963-1967)
• Secret Squirrel (1965-1966)
• Frito Bandito (1967-1971)
• Bubba McCoy from “Where’s Huddles?”
• Chugga-Boom/Yak Yak/The Bully Brothers also from “The Perils of Penelope Pitstop”
• Speed Buggy (1973)
• Tucker the Mouse from “The Cricket in Times Square” (1973) and two sequels
• Captain Caveman (1977)
• Twiki from Buck Rogers in the 25th Century (1979)
• Heathcliff (1980, appeared in syndication from 1984-1987)
• Gideon from Pinocchio
• Bertie Mouse (of Hubie and Bertie)
• Marc Antony
• Moo the Cow in Berkeley Farms Radio Ads. “Farms in Berkeley….Moooo”
• Officer Short Shrift, several Lethargians, three out of five of the royal palace guards, The Word Speller, The Dodecahedron, and The Demon of Insincerity from The Phantom Tollbooth (1969)

You can read more about Mel Blanc at Wikipedia.

(Via Kung Fu Grippe.)

The Entire Program

You can also go here to view this “playlist” with the program in six parts. (Note: for some reason, part 5 wouldn’t play for me in the US. Oh well, it’s most of the program, anyway.)

(Via Kottke.org.)

See also: No Signal: When Movies Use Cell Phone Signal Loss to Heighten Drama, which includes links to other supercuts like this.

With the expense of the Antares Auto-Tune plugin and the relative lack of social networking sites at the time, Auto-Tune remained something of a trade secret among many record producers who simply wanted to save time in the studio.

But as social communities, user-generated content, video tutorials, and open-source software development proliferated online in recent years, so did the availabilty, usage, and experimentation of Auto-Tune.

In 2005, rapper T-Pain made his debut with the album Rappa Ternt Sanga. The album used Auto-Tune heavily, on every song; giving T-Pain his signature sound. His first single Sprung can be viewed here, although embedding has been disabled.

This fun video (featuring “Professor” Weird Al Yankovic) has further explanation:

Read the whole article here (includes a bunch of embedded videos showing the historical moments along Auto-Tune’s journey). See also: the latest “Auto-Tune The News” episode, featuring Kanye and Ballon Boy.

Previous coverage of Auto-Tune on mental_floss: The World of Auto-Tune, “Cosmos” Documentary, Auto-Tuned Vocals by Carl Sagan, ft. Stephen Hawking (Seriously), and Winston Churchill Getting Funky.

Before Borat, before Brüno, there was Ali G, a character created by Sacha Baron Cohen to satirize various political and social issues through interviews with public figures. According to Wikipedia:

Ali G is a boorish, uneducated, streetwise youth with a deeply stereotypical view of the world, who either embarrasses his interviewee by displaying a mixture of uninformed political incorrectness, or gets the interview ‘victim’ to agree to some breathtaking inaccuracy or insult.

… Examples of his bold interviewing style include getting the Bishop of Horsham to admit that God created the Universe, and then asked him, “And since then, He’s [God's] just chilled?” Ali G asked the Bishop about God’s appearance, to which the Bishop replied, “Well, he’s sort of Jesus-shaped.”

Personally, I find Ali G really refreshing, because the character himself is so thoroughly uninformed — the best bits are when interview subjects try to educate him and he just cannot be reached. It’s simultaneously frustrating (sometimes uncomfortable to watch), informative, and sort of painfully funny. I’ve assembled some of my favorite clips below for your viewing enjoyment; fair warning, though: there is a little use of profanity and TONS of crude humor in these clips.

Animal Rights

Interviewing two professors, an animal rights activist, and a woman with a hedgehog. “Even animals has rights,” Ali G says to introduce the topic. Later: “Well, hell, I like kicking hedgehogs,” says the fur industry guy.

Religion

Interviewing four people “who is all four about something called ‘religion.’” The four are a Catholic priest, an atheist, a rabbi, and a Georgetown professor. “Ain’t God just an over-hyped David Blaine?”

Religion and Rapping

Ali G gets a Baptist minister to agree that if Jesus was around today, he’d be a rapper; he gets a rabbi to rap; the Baptist minister freestyles; various people put on Ali G’s Tommy Hilfiger hat which may or may not mean they subscribe to his religious beliefs; and more.

Medical Ethics

“With transplants, when does it stop being you? When I say ‘you,’ I mean, I don’t mean…you, I mean, like…you know, if you had a transplant…I don’t know if you has one…I don’t…you know what I is saying when I say ‘you?’ All right, let’s change the subject here. Wouldn’t it be great if we had the technology to make everyone black?”

Feminism

Interviewing the Director of the Center for Gender Research. “Women, they is important, aren’t they? … Do you think there will ever be a female Prime Minister?”

Teacher/Student Relationships

“In school, me French teacher, Miss Bird, used to totally fancy me. … Why was I not allowed to date her? … Don’t you think students would study harder if there was an incentive?”

The Media

“Is books parts of the media? … What is the point of them? … Now, I ain’t done this, but has any of you actually read a book?”

“Why don’t they make a version of Sesame Street for kids?”

See also: Is Science Good or is it Whack? and a list of notable people interviewed by Ali G (it’s pretty impressive — Gore Vidal, Donald Trump, John McCain, Ralph Nader, Buzz Aldrin, Boutros Boutros-Ghali, Noam Chomsky…the list goes on).

Here’s a sample quote:

“When I suddenly discovered that I could sit down with a blank sheet of paper and two hours later I could have written something that then made people laugh — this was an extraordinary moment for me, and I thought, ‘My goodness, I am creative.’ So, because I had been brought up as a scientist — I got into Cambridge on Science — I started observing what was going on when I was creating.

“… The first thing that I noticed was that when I was trying to write a sketch at night and I got stuck or I couldn’t think of an ending, or I couldn’t see how to continue the sketch, I would go to bed. And when I woke up in the morning and made myself a cup of coffee and went back to my desk and looked at the problem, not only was the solution to this problem immediately apparent to me, but I couldn’t even remember what the problem had been the previous night. … I began to believe that this business of ’sleeping on the problem’ … was absolutely extraordinary.”

Another choice Cleese nugget after the jump.

“To know how good you are at something requires the same skills that it does to be good at that thing. Which means, if you’re absolutely hopeless at something, you lack exactly the skills that you need to know that you’re absolutely hopeless at it. And this is a profound discovery. That most people who have absolutely no idea what they’re doing, have absolutely no idea that they have no idea what they’re doing. It explains a great deal of life. It explains, particularly, Hollywood.”

(Via Kung Fu Grippe, the awesome blog of Merlin Mann; he got it from Tape Noise Diary who got it from Broadcasting Brain, update: who got it from Ewan McIntosh, who got it from Tessy, who got it from Benjamin Ellis.)