Welcome to Dr. Tobias Fünke’s Internet Video Audition Reel! I hope you enjoy the deep range of thespian urges that come out in each of my characters. “Blue Man Group Understudy” was just the tip of my talent. Feel free to insert me into any available openings — my bits are sure to startle you!
Sometimes you just want to read something funny. Which is what this piece “I Tried Gwyneth Paltrow’s Diet” by Rebecca Harrington over at New York Magazine is. It’s not another run-of-the-mill making-fun-of-Gwyneth’s-expensive-savior-complex piece because, while Harrington has a sense of humor, she also has a genuine appreciation for the recipes and food and for the fact that Gwyneth is sharing them. Heidi and I both want to hang out with Harrington:
While making the meatballs, however, I can tell something is up. No. 1: They are green (they are made of arugula and turkey). No. 2: I can’t put them in tomato sauce because I have eliminated tomatoes from my diet. Instead, I am serving them with a broccoli soup that tastes mostly like water. What is going on? Yesterday was so amazing! When my guests arrive and I feed them the meatballs, I can tell that they hate them. One of them pulls out a huge bag of chips and starts eating them in front of me. Another one leaves to “actually eat dinner.” I am about to have a panic attack when I suddenly remember when Gwyneth went to a dinner party in America and someone asked her what kind of jeans she was wearing and she thought to herself, “I have to get back to Europe.” America is the worst. I say nothing about anyone’s jeans, even though I was literally just going to ask everyone about their jeans.
Image via Neurotic New Yorker
“Is the money in the banana stand?”
Canada’s great.
(Source: youtube.com, via meth-lab-rats)
Last week’s kerfuffle between Donald Trump and The Daily Show has received the Taiwanese animated news treatment, and it’s everything you would imagine and more.
(via brooklynmutt)
For the Seinfeld fans out there. And we are legion.
The woman in this portrait doesn’t actually exist. The face is actually the average of 57 different women — 57 girlfriends that appeared in episodes of the popular TV sitcom Seinfeld.
The image is actually the latest appropriation artwork by photographer Richard Prince, who says he found photographs of 57 of the girlfriends on Google.A Fresh Air interview with Jerry is always worth your time, right?
via On the Media
A Boy and His Atom
IBM researchers have created the world’s smallest movie, a 90-second stop motion animation made by moving a few dozen carbon atoms with a scanning tunneling microscope.
The video is viewable once you magnify it 100 million times, and would take 1,000 frames laid side by side to equal the width of a human hair.
Via the BBC:
The new movie, titled A Boy and His Atom, instead uses the STM, an IBM invention which garnered the scientists behind it the 1986 Nobel prize in physics.
The device works by passing an electrically charged, phenomenally sharp metal needle across the surface of a sample. As the tip nears features on the surface, the charge can “jump the gap” in a quantum physics effect called tunnelling.
The 242 frames of the 90-second movie are essentially maps of this “tunnelling current” with a given arrangement of atoms. It depicts a boy playing with a “ball” made of a single atom, dancing, and jumping on a trampoline…
…The effort, detailed in a number of YouTube videos, took four scientists two weeks of 18-hour days to pull off.
It underlines the growing ability of scientists to manipulate matter on the atomic level, which IBM scientists hope to use to create future data storage solutions.
IBM reports that while it currently takes about a million atoms to store a bit of data on computer devices, they have successfully reduced that number down to 12 with what they call atomic-scale magnetic memory. Meaning, the future of computing devices is about to get very, very small.
For example, “Being able to increase the data density of devices means more storage in a smaller space: specifically, storage that is 100 times denser than today’s hard disk drives, 150 times more dense than solid-state memory. An entire music and movie collection could fit on a charm-sized pendant around your neck.”
The court ruled a white teen who stabbed a classmate to death will face the jury as a 300-pound black man. Onion News Network, Fridays at 10/9c on IFC.
(Source: wecouldbeinparadise)
David Foster Wallace on Ambition
…and perfectionism… and the semicolon.
My fellow students, I agree with Mr. Lanbo Zhang: we’re kidding ourselves. For all of the defensiveness and attacks, for all of the controversy and contention— Columbia and Barnard are one school, and we should make that the case not just in theory, but also in practice.
I think it’s time…
