There's some question that this first video is somehow faked, but it seems reasonably convincing to me. I guess the key is that you need to just use the plastic protector part of a CD, it can't have any of the middle stuff left in it:


This second video is one that I mentioned to Gregg last week and meant to share. Apparently Adam Savage and Jamie Jamie Hyneman were part of a trade show presentation for NVIDIA, in which they were trying to give a visual representation of serial (CPU) or parallel (GPU) graphics processing. Long story short, it involves 1100 paintball guns firing all at once to paint a simplified version of the Mona Lisa. It's pretty awesome, and as always with the Mythbusters people, the slow-motion shot is amazing:


I've got all sorts of plans to make lots of fruit smoothies. I put grapes in the freezer earlier, and I just had a sudden thought that maybe that wasn't the best idea. I hope they don't explode or anything.

current weather: Partly Cloudy, 67, Wind: SW 1

Tags: science, videos
Current Location: 41.144N 81.501W
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I mentioned previously that I've been watching the documentary The World at War over the last week, and I have just one episode left to watch.

The series aired in Britain in 1974. There are 26 episodes, an hour long each. It took over four years of research to produce.

When I was looking around for good documentaries/non-fiction miniseries to watch earlier this year, it was consistently appearing in the top 5 of any lists.

It's very good. I think the two things that really stand out for me is the breadth of material that's covered, and the personal interviews. The interviews are pretty amazing, many of them with people who died before I was even born, some of whom were major players in the Axis and Allies, like Curtis LeMay or Albert Speer, but some of them are much more ordinary people that experienced incredible things - like Hitler's personal secretary, Traudl Junge, and Nazi concentration camp survivors.

I particularly like the format of the episodes. Although they move in a general chronological order, each episode focuses in on a particular topic, for example, the Occupation of the Netherlands, the rise of militarism in Japan, or the Holocaust.

What the series has really done for me is made everything much more emotional, and much more real. It also just drives home the level of respect that should be reserved for the people that actually lived through it. To me, World War II seems to be both the beginning of the world we live in today, and the end of the world that came before. There's not really a point at which you can draw a line between the two, but the world was a very different place between 1938 and 1946.

Multiple episodes have brought me to tears - but in particular episode 20, Genocide, which deals specifically with Nazi policies towards Jews and the "final solution," is extremely painful to watch.

I think the series brings a very open-ended view to the war and all of the events that surrounded it. I spent a lot of time pausing and reading Wikipedia articles while watching it, which was made even easier because the article for The World at War lists many of the interviewees and links to their own respective pages.

I highly recommend the series. It's easy to find, too, it looks like all of the series is actually up on YouTube, in chunks.

Here's the beginning of episode 18, Occupation:


The one comfort I take, in watching this, is that it's really somewhat surprising how many lessons humanity as a whole seems to have actually learned from the Second World War.

I think I'm probably going to watch Cosmos next. After that I'm considering The Ascent of Man, Civilisation, and The Civil War.

Tags: documentaries, miniseries, the world at war, wwii
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