Andrew Einspruch's Blog, page 6

1911 – A Trip Through New York City

This week’s video is old footage shot in New York City in 1911. The editor has fiddled with the footage slow it down and smooth it out so it looks natural, and not jumpy like you usually see in film from that era. Also, they added a soundscape, which makes it much more realistic. Interesting work.

Recommended by John August on the Scriptnotes podcast.

Oasis’ Wonderwall Recreated in LEGO

I find the effort that’s gone into this Lego recreation of Oasis’ Wonderwall pretty incredible. It amazes what people will do. I’ve popped the original version of the video below, and you should probably watch it first to appreciate just how closely and cleverly this has been done. Below that is the “Behind the Scenes” in the LEGO version.

Here’s to the obsessives.

(Via laughingsquid)

Some “I agree,” some “What’s the big deal?”

Well, my piece last week on the Book of Face generated more comment than anything I’ve sent out since I started these weekly(ish) emails. Thanks everyone who took the time to write. Lots of thoughtful comment. It came in at about 2/3 “I agree” and 1/3 “What’s the big deal?” Believe me, I respect both positions.

To be clear, it’s not just Facebook I’m concerned with. Google concerns me as well (I use DuckDuckGofor most of my searches, as they don’t track). The thing is, we’re turning over our data to private corporations. If we’re going to do so, we need to do it with eyes open, and be really conscious and aware of the trade-offs, the upsides and the downsides. I’ll admit, Apple concerns me less (some would say naïvely so), because they make their money selling me shiny stuff (and I have a lot of Apple shininess), where-as FB and the G are advertising companies, and their customers are advertisers, which means their incentives do not necessarily align with their users/consumers. And Amazon? They’re eating retail, and on one hand I say, “Rock on!” and on the other, there’s concern for monopolistic market power.

For those who want another couple of data points:

Why Zuckerberg’s 14-Year Apology Tour Hasn’t Fixed Facebook  (Wired)
Are you ready? Here is all the data Facebook and Google have on you (The Guardian)

And if you’re in the “What’s the big deal?” camp, more power to you. This isn’t a digital, all-or-nothing thing. There’s a lot of complexity that’s worth us wrapping our heads around.

Enough on that. Here’s a palette cleanser that’s completely unrelated: a literacy test given to WWI recruits at Fort Devens where the Yes/No questions form an interesting kind of found poetry. You should have a look, and contemplate the poetic value of the questions.

Super Slo-Mo Kittens

Kittens. Shot in 4k. Super slow-mo.

I mean, this is what the Internet is for, right?

30 Days of Spiritual Wildness

Are you interested in a spiritual challenge? Over on our not-for-profit’s site, we’ve just opened up my wife Billie’s course 30 Days of Spiritual Wildness(a fundraiser for the Deep Peace Trust). 30 days of bite-sized wisdom to help you be the best you can be.

Here’s what Anne-Maree emailed me yesterday and said: “Absolutely loving the program. So heartfelt. Thanks to Billie for pulling this all together. It’s brilliant. Every bit of it’s resonating with me, and it’s reminding me of exactly who I am and why I am here.”

People from around the globe have joined in and found it transformational. Please check it out. I think you’ll be glad you did.

Second Thoughts on Facebook

April 2, 2018

I’ve written about Facebook before (see here). Since the Cambridge Analytica stuffcame out, I think I’ve reached a turning point, where I’m curbing my engagement significantly. I don’t think I’ll go so far as to #DeleteFacebook, but I do think that for all the good that the Book of Face may provide, I think they’ve been extraordinarily cavalier about everyone’s privacy for *years*. I don’t think they deserve the attention we give them, so I’m cutting mine back. Sure, I’ll post some, and I’ll maintain my author page (please Like it!) (see the irony there?), but my personal use will continue its downward trajectory.

Let me be clear, I really don’t trust the company or it’s platform, while I recognise that there is value there to be had, and that for some people, it’s the only way to find out what’s going on at soccer club or your kid’s school. As such, one of the things I’ve done is isolate my desktop use of Facebook to it’s own browser (Firefox), and further isolated it by using Firefox’s Facebook Container Extension.

If you’ve had second thoughts about Facebook, or want to know more about what’s going on with this whole disaster (and I use the term deliberately), here are some articles for you (in no particular order, although the first one is the funniest, and has the great line, “If only Mark Zuckerberg cared about the privacy of the rest of the world as much as he did his own.”) Happy reading.

It’s Weirdly Hard to Steal Mark Zuckerberg’s Trash.
Mark Zuckerberg Thinks We’re Idiots.
Facebook never earned your trust and now we’re all paying the price “There was no Facebook data breach. You gave them the data, and they gave it away — all according to plan.”
Facebook, Cambridge Analytica and our personal data(this one’s a pretty good explainer).
Delete Your Facebook: The only way to win the social game is not to play. (Also a good explainer.)
How to Lie to Facebook.
12 Things Everyone Should Understand About Tech. Note: not specifically Facebook, but you really should understand all this.

As they said on Hill Street Blues, let’s be careful out there.

Behind the Scenes Look at Spike Jonze’s Apple Ad

April 2, 2018

My video for you this week actually requires you to click through to this AdWeek article called This Look Inside Spike Jonze’s Apple Ad Is as Fascinating as the Film Itself. (I’d embed the video, but the original doesn’t appear to be on YouTube or Vimeo). This gives you a behind-the-scenes look at the making-of an Apple HomePod ad (the ad is what I’ve embedded below). To see Jonze working with the various artists (the dancer, the set designers, the choreographers, etc.), and to see how they put the ad together (it uses practical effects, not CGI) is fascinating.

So, watch the ad below, then click the link above and see how it was done.

3000 Years of Art

March 19, 2018

In 1968, the film 3000 Years of Art appeared on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour. It was (and is) an incredible short, showing three millennia of art over three minutes at subliminal speeds, set to Mason William’s song Classical Gas.

I was eight when it first aired, and I can remember seeing it on the show. All that art, and that incredible music. It was years before I saw it again, because it took a while for YouTube to roll around. In my head, this film and this music are forever, inextricably linked.

You might also enjoy Jason Kotke’s piece on it.

Hats Off to a Spectacular Mea Culpa

March 19, 2018

A spectacular mea culpa came out this past week, and I wanted to make sure you saw it. National Geographic wanted to do an issue on race, and thought they’d best look inward before they looked outward. What historian John Edwin Mason saw in his deep dive into the publication’s history painted a pretty unflattering portrait. From the magazine’s editorial entitled, For Decades, Our Coverage Was Racist. To Rise Above Our Past, We Must Acknowledge It:

What Mason found in short was that until the 1970s National Geographic all but ignored people of color who lived in the United States, rarely acknowledging them beyond laborers or domestic workers. Meanwhile it pictured “natives” elsewhere as exotics, famously and frequently unclothed, happy hunters, noble savages—every type of cliché.

Unlike magazines such as Life, Mason said, National Geographic did little to push its readers beyond the stereotypes ingrained in white American culture.

And:

Some of what you find in our archives leaves you speechless, like a 1916 story about Australia. Underneath photos of two Aboriginal people, the caption reads: ‘South Australian Blackfellows: These savages rank lowest in intelligence of all human beings.’

Questions arise not just from what’s in the magazine, but what isn’t. Mason compared two stories we did about South Africa, one in 1962, the other in 1977. The 1962 story was printed two and a half years after the massacre of 69 black South Africans by police in Sharpeville, many shot in the back as they fled. The brutality of the killings shocked the world.

Whether or not it is fair to judge a 1916 story by 2018 standards (actually, I think it is), this is a particularly brave act by National Geographic. It’s hard to stand up and say, “Hey, we got it wrong, and we got it wrong for a long time.” People go to great lengths to avoid admitting wrong-doing (witness some rather spectacular contorting being displayed by those (allegedly) complicit in the Russian interference with the US 2016 election).

I like to hope that the world is getting better over time. Sometimes it feels hard to find evidence for that, but I put this mea culpa in that “getting better” category. Like the swift shift in attitudes toward marriage equality, and the increased embracing of veganism, there are trends you can see all around that things are getting better. It was only 100 years ago that Nat Geo thought it was just fine to point to Australia’s indigenous people as savages. It makes me wonder when we’re all looking back 100 years from now at today, what the equivalent in today’s society will be. (I have a guess: the treatment of animals will be one of things we look back on in shame.)

So hats off to National Geographic. With so much yuck going on in the world, it is nice to see folks taking responsibility for a mess they helped contribute to.

“Zombie” by the Cranberries

12.Mar.2018

The Cranberries doing “Zombie” for the NPR’s Tiny Desk Concert in 2012. So stripped back and up close. The singer, Dolores O’Riordan, passed away mid-January this year. RIP.

I’ve jumped to “Zombie,” but if you’re a Cranberries fan, you might like to listen to the others they also sing.