Carlo Zapponi, a data visualization designer at Nokia, has created a pretty splendid visualization of the 1,042 meteorites that humans have witnessed hitting our planet since 861 AD. If you click the image above, you will see the visualization in full screen mode. And if you then click on various points along the timeline, you’ll get essential data (produced by The Meteoritical Society) about each observed meteor strike. Most are clustered in the 19th and 20th centuries. The last is the terrifying rock that blasted through Siberia earlier this year.
Note: A total of 34,513 meteorites have hit our planet since 2500 BC. But the vast majority were never observed. They were only later found.
Great talents seem to embody their craft. It’s as if they invented the form and then broke the mold when they were finished with it.
One of the best modern examples of this virtuosity is Mel Blanc, voice of Bugs Bunny and nearly all of the Looney Tunes cartoon gang. Blanc, who voiced more than 1,000 characters, was famously hard-working. At one point in his career, he scrambled from studio to studio around Los Angeles to work on 18 radio shows in one week.
As Malcolm Gladwell likes to say, that kind of practice leads to mastery. And, in Mel Blanc’s case, it may have saved his life.
Radio Lab, broadcast over WNYC, recently aired a piece about Blanc (listen below) featuring an interview with his son Noel Blanc, who is also a voice actor. Noel Blanc tells the story of a terrible car accident that badly injured his father in 1961 as he was driving home along Sunset Boulevard from a job in San Francisco. Mel Blanc, driving an Aston Martin, collided with another car on Dead Man’s Curve. Blanc was almost killed and slipped into a coma. Blanc’s son and wife spent two weeks at his bedside trying to revive him, but got no response.
One day, about 14 days after the accident, one of Blanc’s neurologists walked into the room and tried something completely new. He went to Mel’s bed and asked, “Bugs Bunny, how are you doing today?”
There was a pause while people in the room just shook their heads. Then, in a weak voice, came the response anyone would recognize.
“Myeeeeh. What’s up doc?”
The doctor then asked Tweety if he was there too.
“I tot I taw a puddy tat,” was the reply.
It took seven more months in a body cast for Blanc to recover. He even voiced Barney Rubble in the first episodes of The Flintstones whilelying in bed with a microphone dangling from above.
The Radio Lab piece includes excerpts from an episode of This is Your Life when Blanc’s doctor tried to explain how he revived his patient. “It seemed like Bugs Bunny was trying to save his life,” was all he could say.
Radio Lab features another neurologist’s opinion: Blanc was such a hard-working professional that his characters lived, protected from the brain injury, deep in his unconscious mind. The doctor’s question must have sounded like a director’s cue.
Essentially, “Mr. Blanc, you’re on.”
And he was, until 1989. Listen through to the end of the podcast. The end of Blanc’s life is as remarkable as his long career.
Below, we have added a related documentary, Mel Blanc: The Man of a Thousand Voices.
Kate Rix writes about education and digital media. Visit her website to see more of her work. Follow her on Twitter: @mskaterix.
Blank on Blank, the nonprofit group that uses the magic of animation to bring forgotten interviews back to life, has come out with a new episode featuring the Beastie Boys in their early days. “Beastie Boys on Being Stupid” (above) is built on excerpts from a 1985 interview with Rocci Fisch for ABC Radio. The three members of the group–Mike Diamond, Adam Horowitz and Adam Yauch–were between 19- and 21-years old at the time and had not yet released their first full-length album, Licensed to Ill. They were touring with Madonna, and just beginning to get a taste of the national spotlight. The interview is infused with the Boys’ self-deprecating wit.
Rocci Fisch: “How did you get your group name, Beastie Boys?”
Adam “MCA” Yauch: “It’s from the good old days. We were a hardcore band.”
Mike “Mike D” Diamond: “Yeah, we were like–I was like what, 14?”
Adam “MCA” Yauch: “Yeah.”
Mike “Mike D” Diamond: “I was like, 14, 15? That’s when we made our first record. We were all going to high school at the time and that’s how we met.”
Adam “MCA” Yauch: “At the time it was the stupidest name that I could possibly think of. And if you could think of a stupider name I’d probably be pretty impressed now. So lay it on me: Can you think of a stupider name name than the Beastie Boys?”
Rocci Fisch: “Not really.”
Adam “MCA” Yauch: “So then that answers your question right there.”
What you’re watching above isn’t your ordinary film. No this film — A Boy And His Atom– holds the Guinness World Record for being the World’s Smallest Stop-Motion Film. It’s literally a movie made with atoms, created by IBM nanophysicists who have “used a scanning tunneling microscope to move thousands of carbon monoxide molecules, all in the pursuit of making a movie so small it can be seen only when you magnify it 100 million times.” If you’re wondering what that means exactly, then I’d encourage you to watch the behind-the-scenes documentary below. It takes you right onto the set — or, rather into the laboratories — where IBM scientists reveal how they move 5,000 molecules around, creating a story frame by frame. As you watch the documentary, you’ll realize how far nanotechnology has come since Richard Feynman laid the conceptual foundations for the field in 1959. A Boy And His Atom will be added to our collection of 525 Free Movies Online.
The United States has only five percent of the world’s population, but somewhere between 35 and 50 percent of the world’s privately owned guns. Is it a surprise, then, that we have significantly higher rates of gun violence?
According to research published by the National Institutes of Health, homicide rates in the U.S. are 6.9 times higher than they are in other high-income nations. For 15- to 24-year-olds, the homicide rate is 42.7 times higher. Firearm suicide rates are 5.8 times higher in America than in other countries, even though the overall suicide rates are 30 percent lower.
A succession of high-profile massacres–Columbine, Virginia Tech, Sandy Hook–has taken place against a baseline of daily gun deaths that rarely make the national headlines: murders, suicides, accidental killings. Since the December 14 mass murder at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Connecticut, in which 20 children and six adults were gunned down by a heavily armed man, there have been well over 3,300 gun-related deaths in America. If current trends continue, gun deaths are projected to exceed traffic deaths for the first time by the year 2015.
So what is being done? At the federal level, nothing.
Earlier this month the Senate not only struck down legislation to ban assault weapons and high-capacity gun magazines, it also struck down–at the will of a 45-member minority–a bipartison compromise to expand background checks for gun buyers, a measure supported by 90 percent of the American people.
In response to the paralysis (some would say cowardice) on Capitol Hill, a group of 23 prominent cartoonists, including Garry Trudeau, Ruben Bolling, Art Spiegelman and Tom Tomorrow, have joined forces to fight back against the gun lobby. The cartoon (above) was organized by Mayors Against Illegal Guns, and is narrated by actors Julianne Moore and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
“Enough. Demand action,” say Moore and Hoffman. “As a dad, as a mom, as a husband, as a wife, as a family, as a friend. As an American. It’s time. We can’t back down. It’s time for our leaders to act right now. Demand action”
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You probably know Mikhail Bulgakov through one of two works: Heart of a Dog, his short novel about the forced transformation of a dog into a human being (comparisons to the grand Soviet project have, indeed, been suggested), or The Master and Margarita, his longer, later novel about a visit paid to Soviet Russia by the devil himself. Heart of a Dog, written in 1925, didn’t see official Russian publication until 1987; The Master and Margarita, written between 1928 and 1940, didn’t come out until 1967. This suggests that Bulgakov’s literary perspective may have touched a nerve with the authorities, but the artfulness with which he expressed it has since lifted him to the top of the twentieth-century Russian canon.
Other creators have paid to tribute to the enormously influential The Master and Margarita with artfulness of their own. We now have at least five films, two television series, nineteen stage productions, two ballets, four operas (though the complicated material defeated Andrew Lloyd Webber’s attempt at adaptation) and a graphic novel based in whole or in part on Bulgakov’s book. At the top of the post, you can watch Svetlana Petrova and Natalia Berezovaya’s Margarita, an animated short that, ambitious in its own way, attempts to capture The Master and Margarita in two ever-shifting minutes of imagery. (Or, as this Russian animation database puts it, “Impudent young animators dare to touch Bulgakov.” ) Though made in 1997, it comes off today as quite a tantalizing “book trailer,” though I would submit that Bulgakov’s writing needs none of our internet-age marketing innovations.
Put yourself in the mind of an artistic young woman who goes to see Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when it first opens in 1937. Captivated by the film’s groundbreaking cel-based cinematic animation, understanding that it represents the future of the art form, you feel you should pursue a career with a studio yourself. Alas, in response to the letter of inquiry you send Disney’s way, you receive the terse rejection letter above. “Women do not do any of the creative work in connection with preparing the cartoons for the screen,” it flatly states, “as that work is performed entirely by young men. For this reason girls are not considered for the training school.” Your only remaining hope? To aim lower on the totem pole and become an “Inker” or “Painter,” but “it would not be advisable to come to Hollywood with the above specifically in view, as there are really very few openings in comparison with the number of girls who apply.”
Times have changed; women now create animation. But to catch a glimpse of the industry in decidedly pre-changed times, revisit the 1939 promotional documentary short How Walt Disney Cartoons Are Made. In it, you’ll see these very young men hard at work, as well as those “pretty girls” hired to do inking and color. Prewar Disney turned out some masterpieces, no doubt, but by today’s standards their attitudes toward gender may leave something to be desired. “This letter originally belonged to my grandmother,” writes the user who discovered the note above. “After she passed away we discovered it and were surprised at how well it was preserved for being nearly 70 years old.” Young women like her, aspiring to high places in animation, found themselves forced to find alternate routes in, although after receiving that rejection letter on that stationery — emblazoned with Snow White herself, adding insult to injury — I wouldn’t blame them for looking into other fields entirely.
Long before masters of the short story like Raymond Carver and Flannery O’Connor commanded the respect of creative writing teachers everywhere, Anton Chekhov’s spare, mannered stories set the standard for the form. Known for their subtlety and keen observations of human weakness and social ills, the typical Chekhov story never boils over into melodrama but simmers, slowly pushing tensions close to the surface of routine interactions without letting them break through and explode.
The story animated above, however, is something of an exception to Chekhov’s domestic human dramas. “Kashtanka” is a about a dog, and a good bit of it is told from her perspective. First published in 1884 as “In Bad Times,” the story was allegedly inspired by Chekhov’s love of the circus. Chekhov wrote the story for children, so it’s fitting that it receive this Disney-esque treatment (the opening scene reminded me of Geppetto’s workshop).
Russian poster designer and children’s book illustrator Mikhail Tsekhanovsky made the film in 1952, when cartoons were painstakingly hand-drawn cel by cel. Another Russian animator, Natalia Orlova, takes advantage of 21st century technology in her 2004 rendering of “Kashtanka” below, but she does so in a unique way that integrates hand-painted images; the flickering stop-motion resembles children’s book illustrations come to life. Along with the excellent sound design, her captivating style makes for a very different visualization of the story.
Note: You will need to click CC at the bottom of the video to launch the subtitles.
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