ONES + ZEROS 021711: A Very Special Video Camera

February 17, 2011, 8:09pm

Ones and Zeros is Motherboard’s daily investigation into the particle accelerator that is the internet. Ones, you’ll come to expect, represent what’s “good” and zeros, what’s “bad.” Get more through our Facebook and Twitter.

1. 2564 frames per second (thanks Martin)

Tom Guilmette is doing a gig in Vegas and stumbles across a very special camera.

Violating the laws of nature. Playing God. Capturing stuff we are not suppose to see. Potentially opening up a wormhole in the fabric of time.

Videos by VICE

These are a few of the things I think about while shooting with a Phantom High Speed Digital Cinema camera. The above video is a bunch of test footage I shot to get familiar with the new “Flex” version. I shot inside my Las Vegas Palms Casino hotel room between the hours of 2am and 6am. If you had a Phantom in your bedroom, you would stay up too!

This past weekend, I worked in Las Vegas for FOX shooting the World Championships of Ping Pong (WCPP). Yea, Ping Pong. This is a big sport in many parts of the world and I was working one of the first big televised events. In fact, this program will air all around the world to over 80 million households in the coming months. My job was to capture this fast and mentally demanding sport in a way that was never before seen. Slowing down a celluloid ball by shooting at 2,564 frames per second using a Phantom Flex. The beast can even slow a bullet at 10,000 FPS 480p!

This is the final result.

Locked in a Vegas Hotel Room with a Phantom Flex from Tom Guilmette on Vimeo.

1. Watson prevails

Humanity was no match.

0. The Cult of Steve Jobs

Mostly what we already expected. Working at an Apple Store isn’t all that great. It’s still retail.

“Sometimes it’s like working at McDonald’s, with better pay. I’ve never been treated so badly in my life.”

Apple’s priorities are also made clear.

“They have a really lenient attendance policy. You have to be late like 15 times before they’ll fire you. But if you talk to the press or speculate to a customer about the next iPad? That’s the end of you.”

After all, this is the Steve Jobs’s cult

“Sometimes the company can feel like a cult. Like, they give us all this little paper pamphlet, and it says things like—and I’m paraphrasing here—”Apple is our soul, our people are our soul.” Or “We aim to provide technological greatness.” And there was this one training session in which they started telling us how to work on our personality, and separating people into those with an external focus and an internal focus. It was just weird. “

via Popular Mechanics

Magic magnet goldfish (thanks Martin)

Animal lovers are incensed by this Chinese magician. It’s not magic, it’s magnets, they claim.

However, a separate regional broadcaster said magician Fu Yandong would perform the controversial trick again on Thursday night — and reveal its secret so as to silence his critics. Animal rights activists cried foul over the stunt, saying Fu had likely fed the fish magnets — or implanted them in the fish — so they could be dragged around their tank from underneath. They said the trick amounted to animal cruelty…

Fu has so far refused to reveal the secret. “My fish,” he wrote on his microblog, are “living happily”.