Video Stew

Here's a compilation of a few videos I've come across recently that I enjoyed and thought you might, too.

A tour of Pixar Studios, courtesy of the New York Times. This'd be a lot of people's dream job (though not necessarily mine . . . Oh, I wouldn't turn it down, but I'm more of a "better to reign in Hell than serve in Heaven" kinda guy). A lot of animation is drudgery, but what a nice place to drudge.



An old educational film mashed up with "Star Trek." The audio is authentic, from an actual film shown to captive school children; the video is what it is. Courtesy of the talented Mike Lynch.



I thought the piece below was a nice companion to the Kepler mission that recently found evidence for 1200 (!) planets orbiting other stars. Extrapolating from those discoveries suggests that our galaxy might have a million Earth-scale planets in "Goldilocks" orbits neither too hot nor too cold for life as we know it. That doesn't mean a million Earths--for example, Venus and Mars are "Earth-scale" planets that are lifeless as far as we know. But take any fraction of a million you want and it's still a big number. And I miss Carl Sagan.



Oh, and FYI, the red giant star Betelgeuse isn't ready to supernova at any moment and even if it did it's too far away to hurt us or look like anything more than a really bright star in the sky (not a "second sun"); and the odds of asteroid Apophis hitting Earth in 2036 are about 200,000 to 1 and continue to grow longer as astronomers nail down its orbit. So stop forwarding me those e-mails.

I shave tomorrow. It's the right thing to do.