August 22, 2009 @ 7:10 pm
I think this is my new favorite music video. It’s directed by Michel Gondry and it was made for the song “Star Guitar” by The Chemical Brothers. The video is made to look like it was continuously shot from the window of a speeding train but Gondry somehow made the objects outside the window sync up with the beats in the song which no doubt makes for an awesome visual trick.
I wish everything that passed before my eyes went along to a dance beat.
Thanks Clarence for showing me this weeks ago!
July 17, 2009 @ 7:09 am
Hellmann’s – It’s Time for Real from CRUSH on Vimeo.
Canadians are the focus of a new food campaign by Hellmann’s and Crush to encourage buying local foods and produce rather than buying imported foods. [via]
The campaign, entitled Eat Real, Eat Local, comes with a nifty short video that does an excellent job of explaining the negative effects of consuming imported foods in Canada when equally or better foods can be had locally. The video takes place over a table top as various statistics and CG elements pop up at the sound of the narrator’s voice.
July 12, 2009 @ 9:30 am
If the bus system in New York City was like Bogota’s, I’d gladly ride the bus everywhere.
February 8, 2008 @ 10:57 am
The global effort to reduce the impact of plastic bags on the environment is getting a big push this coming year with many countries and cities implemented either a tax on plastic bags at grocery stores or simply doing away with them altogether.
In 2002, Ireland instituted a 15-cent tax on plastic bags to end the “litter menace,” and Bangladesh banned them outright. This year, China and Australia will outlaw them. Here at home, San Francisco has begun requiring shops to use only bags made of at least 40 percent recycled paper. And on Jan. 22, trendsetter Whole Foods announced that as of Earth Day (April 22) it no longer will offer plastic bags to customers at the checkout counters. The move, the company estimates, will take 100 million new bags out of circulation by the end of 2008. [...]
But this latest shift might not be as painless. While subbing tap water for bottled water is effortless, giving up plastic bags is an inconvenience. We must either take our own bag to the store or use paper bags, which environmentalists argue aren’t much better than the plastic ones; after all, we need those trees to soak up the carbon dioxide spewed by our SUVs.
So the question remains: Which is better, paper or plastic? The answer, is not as clear as you’d think. And in the end, it’s just better to re-use whatever you can get your hands on.
Previously on Doobybrain.com: Vortex of trash in the Pacific Ocean
February 8, 2008 @ 1:22 am
Click the image for a larger version
If one were to travel far enough in the Pacific Ocean, one might eventually end up in what is commonly referred to as the “Great Pacific Garbage Patch“. Scientifically, the area is known as the North Pacific Gyre, a swirling vortex of under-ocean currents that come together and keep the ocean water from going anywhere but there.
Because of the vortex created by the ocean currents, the area has accumulated an astonishing amount of trash (garbage, rubbish…whatever you want to call it). So powerful is this phenomenon that oceanographers are saying that the area is nearly twice as large as the continental United States.
A dead sea bird with plastics in its stomach
Most of the trash in this floating island of debris is plastic-based, which means that it is not biodegradable. Instead, it simply breaks into pieces and creates smaller plastic pieces which then wreak havoc on the environment and the animals in the area. The plastics are incredibly hazardous to the marine life, most of the time so dangerous that ingesting it means death (either as a direct result or as an indirect result via the natural food chain).
Plastic in the ocean can lead to deformities in marine life.
Here’s the low-down on the island of trash in the sea, from SFGate:
The enormous stew of trash – which consists of 80 percent plastics and weighs some 3.5 million tons, say oceanographers – floats where few people ever travel, in a no-man’s land between San Francisco and Hawaii.
Ocean current patterns may keep the flotsam stashed in a part of the world few will ever see, but the majority of its content is generated onshore, according to a report from Greenpeace last year titled “Plastic Debris in the World’s Oceans.”
The report found that 80 percent of the oceans’ litter originated on land. While ships drop the occasional load of shoes or hockey gloves into the waters (sometimes on purpose and illegally), the vast majority of sea garbage begins its journey as onshore trash.
The Independent continues:
Marcus Eriksen, a research director of the US-based Algalita Marine Research Foundation, which Mr Moore founded, said yesterday: “The original idea that people had was that it was an island of plastic garbage that you could almost walk on. It is not quite like that. It is almost like a plastic soup. It is endless for an area that is maybe twice the size as continental United States.”
The “soup” is actually two linked areas, either side of the islands of Hawaii, known as the Western and Eastern Pacific Garbage Patches. About one-fifth of the junk – which includes everything from footballs and kayaks to Lego blocks and carrier bags – is thrown off ships or oil platforms. The rest comes from land.
In addition to posing an environmental risk, the area is also a big concern because of health risks that it poses for humans living on land. Chemicals from the plastics can get into our water, our food, and into our systems.
Here’s a report from the Today show about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.
