Gothic, Capitalism, Fractal, Bar, Bubble

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I Bought The Rights To A Weird Jack Nicholson Movie

Austin McConnell | Youtube | 26th February 2021

El Terror (1963) is maybe the strangest Hollywood film production ever. Five successive directors (including a young, no-name Francis Ford Coppola!), shot for dirt cheap on a leftover set from another movie, starring icons of the past (Boris Karloff) and of the future (Jack Nicholson) in a totally incoherent plot, now relegated to grainy showings on Spanish TV (9m 49s)

Redefining American Capitalism: Libertarianism

Knowing Better | YouTube | 28th February 2021

On Ayn Rand and the history of American libertarianism. You might be surprised to learn that "Ayn Rand never liked libertarians, dismissing them as right-wing hippies"; in her words, "capitalism is the one system that requires absolute objective law, yet libertarians combine capitalism and anarchism. That's worse than anything the New Left has proposed" (49m 07s)

Sounds Of The Mandelbrot Set

CodeParade | YouTube | 28th February 2021

What music is conjured up when you convert the coordinates of fractals, like the Mandelbrot set, to sound waves? Answer: incredibly disconcerting music. The "burning ship" fractal (pictured below) produces a harrowing scream that, as one commenter points out, echoes the wails of the passengers who died aboard the ship... (9m 31s)

Why Progress Bars Don't Move Smoothly

Tom Scott | YouTube | 1st March 2021

There are countless possibilities: "maybe a desktop user switched to another window because they were bored, and now the computer's got to deal with playing a game as well as rendering video." Actually, a perfectly smooth progress bar implies "trickery going on behind the scenes," e.g. "scammy websites that make you artificially wait ten seconds for something to load" (5m 10s)

Beautiful Video Of The Week

Hand-drawn psychedelic visions plucked from another world

Browser Video Of The Week: Not Matt Yglesias on The Personality Of The State

Conversation with an ersatz Matt Yglesias about his book One Billion Americans. "You're thinking that there's some kind of analogy here to Schumpter's creative destruction, where you can force some new, regenerated personality onto the State?" (2m 23s)

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Editor: Abe Callard
Publisher: Jacob Silkstone [jacob@theviewer.is]