Man & His Machines (Part 1)

My argumentum ad YouTube essay for today is about man and his machines, which is arguably not surprising, given that I am an amystical phenomenological mechanist. I must say, though, that one of the things I like most about this here intarweb thingy is its self-directed nature. Watching TV is like being on a tour bus. That can have some value, if the route is good and the guide is knowledgeable. But the intarweb is more like jumping into a two-seater sports car with stiff suspension and just heading out in some direction with only a compass, not even a map. Again, I suppose, that I enjoy the latter should probably be no surprise, given that I was a Queen's Venturer. (As always, if your computer has the horsepower to pull it off, I recommend maximizing the video window using the icon to the lower right of the page-embedded video, and then moving a few feet away from your monitor.) Anyway, to set the stage with a classic machine, here are four major pipe organ pieces with a twist: they've placed cameras inside the organs. You no doubt know that a large organ has thousands to tens of thousands of pipes and tens to hundreds of thousands of linkages running behind the scenes. Of interest to anyone with any sense of the machinist in them, here you get to see behind the scenes in these machines: BWV 548 Prelude E minor - Bach Allein gott in der hoh sei ehr bwv 664 Wedge Fugue in E minor - Bach Fugue from Concertato Prelude and Fugue in D BWV 532 Everyone's aware of the value of telescopes and microscopes in terms of assisting us in perceiving beyond our uninstrumented abilities, yet often we forget about the value of temporo-scopes such as speeded-up and slowed-down visual imaging. Here are some great High Frame-per-Second Slow Motion Clips, including proof that a dog laps its tongue inward when drinking. Ok, now that we're warmed up, let's test this other machine out: Boeing 777 Brakes Test Boeing 777 Wing Load Test Pratt & Whitney Engine Tests Pratt & Whitney Blade Out Test Boeing 777 &c High Cross Wind Landings Perfect. Why all this trouble you may ask? For this: KLM Cockpit - Angels Speaking of talking to angels, here's some great video on the ATLAS Detector in the Large Hadron Collider we're about to fire up this summer: Part 1, Part 2(a), & Part 2(b). Moving from the ultra-small to the ultra-large, here we have the results from the Hubble Deep Field telescope. And now, for something completely different made on machines, here's a delightful little computer-generated animation that warms my heart: Eskimo Disco.