Monday, March 10, 2008

Whoah! That's Deep

Awhile ago, the NYTimes online had a piece about all the crazy critters we're discovering in the middle and deep ocean. It prompted me to get The Deep by Claire Nouvian which is a total mindbender of a coffee table book full of pictures you'd swear were aliens.

I just watched this TED talk with some cool video footage of octopus camouflage. If you watch nothing else, check out the final 30 seconds...

This has all got me wondering how much the web has come to approximate the known ocean. There's a ton of churn in the surface web. Things are always turning over and getting kicked/digged to the surface. But there's so much more that exists well below in the far and unknown reaches of the land.


WebScout
of LA Times points out that nobody can possibly be watching all the shit getting posted on YouTube. It's fun as hell to watch the videos nobody else has seen.

For example, as an amateur Jacques Cousteau, I choose a character at random in an alphabet I don't know, for example: を Then I sort the resulting videos by date and I get to see something nobody else has seen. In this case, I was the very first person to view a video of a guy flying a parachute with a snowblower engine...



I just feel so special for being the first person to see something, ya know? It's like the solitary and special feeling of seeing a weird and wonderful creature in The Deep. You don't know at all what to expect and you're kind of prepared for anything... that appears as a streaming video in a 3"x5" box.

1 comment:

April said...

Exactly---we don't really know what's in the ocean and the things that live near the bottom are going to be the most interesting since they'll be surviving in the harshest environment... So it makes me mad to hear that they're putting turbines in the ocean for power-generating. Sad to be a human sometimes.