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Desert Bunds

Any video that’s about somebody seeing something weird on Google Maps and digging into it fascinates me. Christophe Haubursin’s show Tunnel Vision investigates the purpose behind some odd patterns in the Iranian desert.

Something about the style of the video felt strangely familiar to me, so I looked over the other videos Haubursin—a senior producer for #Vox’s video team—created for Vox. Sure enough, he did What’s inside this crater in Madagascar?, which is also highly worth watching.

I think the satellite and street-view imagery provided by Google Maps is one of the most under-appreciated resources on the internet. Similar to #Wikipedia, most of us probably use it primarily when we need to look up something specific, but you really could—and I do—spend hours just browsing it. It’s a view of the world—the entire planet!—that even just forty years ago would have seemed near-godlike in scope and power.

Your favorite movie is vertical now

A friend recently shared this video from Kendra Gaylord, describing how your favorite movie is vertical now, courtesy of #AI —and what is lost in the process:

In movies, every time something is filmed, it’s memorializing a lot: the actors, the location, the way we talk and write and joke. Even though it’s fiction, it’s still a document, and if you mess with that document too much, it doesn’t represent all of those things anymore.

One of the most perverse revelations here is that the AI-generated version felt more realistic to people simply by virtue of being vertical; the same aspect ratio in which we experience social media videos. Our window to reality is portrait-shaped.

Into Eternity

Michael Madsen’s #documentary Into Eternity takes a look at the Onkalo long-term nuclear waste facility, located on the west coast of Finland. Onkalo—“hiding place”—is designed to last for at least 100,000 years; an ambitious proposition, considering that the oldest man-made structures on Earth are less than 10,000 old.

Ensuring structural integrity for tens of thousands of years—or, as one official points out, just the next hundred—is no small requirement, but the designers also have to consider one of the most challenging #design problems in the world: how to communicate with unknown civilizations with whom we may have very little in common. What if, thousands of years from now, someone stumbles on Onkalo and doesn’t realize the danger? Imagine a 19th-century archaeological expedition encountering nuclear waste buried by ancient Egyptians.

A bit on the artsy side, but still, a fascinating—and often beautiful—look at where some of the worst stuff on earth is kept away.

Balance