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As we've all heard, Andy Rooney has retired. But his body of work is vast, including 1,097 of his iconic 60 Minutes commentaries. I have a love-hate relationship with those commentary pieces -- I've actually watched 60 Minutes for many years, and while
Tune in live tonight (Wednesday, October 5) at 10pm ET/PT for Penn & Teller's new series: Penn & Teller Tell a Lie on Discovery. In this slightly shaky video from Comic Con, you can see Teller talk (!) about the upcoming series: There's a longer prev
Aaron Cohen over at Kottke.org pointed to another awesome How It's Made clip, this time about toilet paper -- a.k.a. "bathroom tissue" (how quaint) or "therapeutic paper" (ahem). Here at the _floss blog, we have a proud tradition of writing about toilet
Yesterday’s post about YouTube elicited some interesting comments and e-mails in my inbox... people wondering how one can make money by uploading videos to YouTube. As I wrote yesterday, more than 48 hours of video are uploaded to YouTube every minute. So
"Well, the time has come for us to enter the realm of pure human reason. So come along with me as we travel through The Door...." so Jack Kevorkian invites us into his TV show The Door, before he goes into an explanation of a series of optical illusions
The set in "The Shining" appears to be intentionally designed to confuse and freak out viewers, through subtle "impossible and illusionary designs used by Kubrick to disorientate the viewer, and to communicate the illusionary nature of the Overlook Hotel.
In this 1975 AT&T film, five female AT&T engineers are profiled. The film starts with male attitudes towards women working as engineers. There are no surprises there -- the men seem completely opposed to the notion of a woman being an engineer, and many
In this instructional AT&T film from 1954, host Susann Shaw explains how to dial your own telephone. This was, of course, to ease the transition from operator-assisted calls to dial service. It's bizarre to hear someone explain what a dial tone is, what
In the most recent installment of the Symphony of Science series, composer John Boswell uses clips from various BBC shows, Quest for Fire (!), and the words of: Jacob Bronowski, Alice Roberts, Carolyn Porco, Jane Goodall, Robert Sapolsky, Neil deGrasse T
BlöödHag is a death metal band from Seattle who perform, among other places, in libraries. Their songs are "Edu-Core," and focus on science fiction authors and literacy -- check out some lyrics here. In fact, what the heck, I'll just quote their classic
The labels for the Y axis run from G (Good Fortune) to I (Ill Fortune).
You may know "Six-Forty by Four-Eighty" as the pixels dimensions of a VGA monitor. But designers Zigelbaum + Coelho have created an art installation by the same name in which gigantic "pixels" can change colors, animate, interact with fingers (including
So I'll go ahead and assume you're aware of King of Kong, the videogame documentary that chronicles an epic struggle to dominate the game of Donkey Kong. Kong was a surprising movie mainly because it was supremely interesting to non-nerds, even though it
Today in 1893, the US Supreme Court ruled that the tomato was a vegetable, not a fruit. The relevant case (Nix v. Hedden) involved tariffs -- the US had an import tariff on vegetables, but not fruit. So when a tomato importer (the Nix family) claimed th
Want to impress your friends with science? Okay, not so much "science" as cleverly constructed bar bets relying mostly on physics, human perception, and some chemistry? Okay, then I've got a video for you! In this quick YouTube video, Richard Wiseman s
1996 was a heady time for popular music. We were learning the "Macarena," trying to shake the bizarrely infectious "I Love You Always Forever" from our brains, and cringing at Alanis Morissette's misuse of the word "Ironic." Okay, maybe it was less "hea
NOTE: My interview with Mike Rowe appears below a bunch of discussion of the documentary Human Planet. Jump to the "Interview" heading if that's what you're here for. Human Planet premieres Sunday, April 10 in the US on Discovery. Two episodes air e
Tonight on NOVA, an in-depth scientific examination of Japan's recent earthquake, the subsequent tsunami, and the continuing nuclear incident. Entitled (perhaps indelicately) Japan's Killer Quake, the program shows plenty of footage that was new to me --
"The brain is a very big place, in a very small space" -Carl Sagan, in the latest Symphony of Science song. More geeky scientific awe, communicated via music and imagery, from composer John Boswell. "Here is this mass of jelly you can hold in the palm o
Werner Herzog's latest documentary is about the Chauvet Cave, which is remarkable primarily for its cave paintings -- dating from the ice age, the paintings are surprisingly detailed, and some show a sort of "painterly" quality. In some cases, this effec
Desert Bus is a horrible, horrible driving game -- and it was meant to be. In the game, you're tasked with driving a bus from Tucson to Las Vegas. The trick is, you have to drive the bus in realtime, at a maximum speed of 45mph -- which means that the t
Today, a short science video from NPR contributor Robert Krulwich (of RadioLab fame), animated by Benjamin Arthur. Krulwich describes a series of experiments in which blindfolded people are asked to walk (or drive) in a straight line -- and then maps are
Tonight, welcome to my world: Portlandia. I've lived in the real-life analogue of Portlandia for eleven years, and it's a place of dreams -- dreams of sleeping late, of opening a yarn store, of becoming a freegan, of getting rid of your car and becoming
In December, I asked whether y'all could handle more Carl Sagan remixes. The overwhelming answer was YES, so today I bring you "NASA - The Frontier is Everywhere," a promotional social media video created for NASA, but not by NASA, featuring Carl Sagan's