Sploid: Where awesome, wild, and breathtaking tech moments burst into view.
After watching through all three seasons of HBO’s Silicon Valley, you probably feel like a member of Erlich Bachman’s cramped incubator. But how well do you really know his Silicon Valley home? Drawbotics, a company that makes 3D real-estate visualizations, took some time to create detailed layouts of some fictional properties that only exist on…
A few weeks ago, the internet was wowed by a video of a magic marker stick figure doodle that appeared to magically come to life with a little water. Many assumed there were some unseen shenanigans that made the stick figure leap off the table, but as Steve Mould explains, it’s all due to the…
It’s obvious, right? In movies, the camera points us toward what we should look at. We follow the action by following the camera that’s following the action of the scene. But camera movements in films can also make us feel something, too. If the camera pushes in, we’re supposed to look closer. If it pulls…
Jerry McNamara’s Day By Day is a short documentary that focuses its lens on artist George Rocha of Iris Skateboards in San Francisco. Rocha takes stacks of old, unrideable skateboard decks, glues them together, grinds ‘em up, and then transforms them into functional objects like furniture, tables, tap handles, and, yes, even “new” skateboards. It’s…
Take a deep breath before you watch this collection of every Academy Award winner for Best Cinematography. There are so many wonderful shots and beautiful movies from 1927 to today that you might get lost in them and forget how to live. Burger Fiction put together this clip, which is essentially a trailer for the…
To some, February 2nd is a time to trust the wisdom of a shadow-spotting rodent who makes vague predictions about the severity of winter. To others, it’s an annual excuse to watch Bill Murray’s Groundhog Day, again. But if you’re short on time this year, Neil Fennell has made a shorter half-hour version of the…
A month ago, a lava tube on the Hawaiian island of Kilauea was exposed after a large chunk of hardened magma broke off and fell into the ocean. Since then, molten lava has been pouring into the sea like delicious tropical punch from some magical never-ending juice box. The US Geological Survey’s Hawaiian Volcano Observatory…
Don’t interrupt an octopus while it’s eating and don’t you dare point your camera at it because the octopus ain’t having it. In fact, the super villain creature of the ocean will try to intimidate you when you do that because it’ll charge at you, stare you down, and then inflate itself like a giant…
This particular engine we’re looking at has four strokes: the intake, the compression, the combustion (or power), and the exhaust. Smarter Every Day visited the guys of 805 Road King and their see through engine to show us exactly what’s going on in an engine when we fire it up and it’s pretty fascinating stuff.…
I’m not going to call these guys total idiots because if I had access to big fireworks, an empty street, and a camera, there’s a non-zero chance that I too would light those fireworks up, blast my friend in an awesomely stupid fireworks fight, and record the whole damn thing so that other people could…
You have to strike while the iron is hot. You can’t have too many irons in the fire. It has a nice ring to it. Go at something hammer and tongs. These are all idioms that have origins in blacksmithing, so Scott Wadsworth of Essential Craftsman decided to literally show us what all those idioms…
The folks at YouTube’s Warped Perception channel promise that this video simply shows a mouse trap slicing through a plain old hot dog. But when filmed at a mind-boggling 147,000 frames per second, it’s hard not to imagine the same thing happening to a finger accidentally getting caught in there—or something, uh, a little more…
I’m not 100% sure the skier in the video didn’t clip his head on the boots of the people sitting on the ski lift but even if he did, he’s still bad ass enough to complete a casual double backflip off a wild jump. I’ve watched the video multiple times and it’s totally nuts because…
To my eye, the clouds that airplane wings make on takeoff and landing look like some cool ass force field—like, a stealth shroud that envelopes the airplane as its flying around. Reality is less fun though, because the clouds that are rolling over the wings of the airplane are caused by the lift forces that…
Mounting a GoPro onto a sword and then watching it chop the hell out of things is awesome, but it isn’t as easy as I thought. You can’t just tape a camera down on one end of the blade and hope for the best, because the shot will look all wacky. The sword moves too…
If you’re finding it hard to wait until Sunday for the big game, The Slow Mo Guys have something that should tide you over: They used a Phantom V2511 high-speed camera to film a severely overinflated football at 28,000 frames per second. As you might expect, it results in some explosively wonderful slo-mo footage when…
In an effort to celebrate Australia Day—a holiday in which the nation apparently likes to risk life and limb for a little fun—a bunch of Aussies realized that the ride on a Slip ‘N Slide is always way too short. So they built an infinite version where you can keep hurtling around for as long as…
Real Life Lore asks a question that I’ve never actually considered before: what if everybody in the entire world lived in just one building? How big would the building have to be to be able to fit all 7.4 billion of us? Surprisingly, not that big. That red cube up above would do the trick…
Sara Preciado made a lovely video that places scenes from La La Land right next to other scenes from musicals and movies that La La Land was obviously referencing. It’s fun to watch (and I say that as a person who doesn’t really get into musicals) because it reminds you of all the peppiness and…
There are actually 5 different Hill Valleys in the Back to the Future series. 1985 gets two versions, the one where they start off and the alternate Biff-ruled version, there’s the throwback 1995 one, the awesomely futuristic 2015 version, and the old western 1885. Which one is your favorite? Trick question, it better be 2015.…
