Caitlin Burke

More about this spot, including a video about making this ad at Ken Tucker’s Entertainment Weekly blog – 20 wonderful minutes about the production.

Marc Pachter, long of the Smithsonian Institution, on the art – and arm-wrestling – of the interview in a wonderfully engaging way.

Planetarium-polishing Pluto-fetishists sound off about the astronomer they love to hate. Update (Feb 21 2010): Neil deGrasse Tyson talks for a few minutes about the background to this outrage, wherein he doesn’t fix the problem but he does fix the blame.

Dennis Crowley and Christian Bovine (an utterly nondescriptive name!) compare their performances in different events to those of Olympic athletes. It may seem obvious that just because they can do that doesn’t mean that you can, but, hey, it’s nice to have data!

Note the Olympic broad jump record is something like 27 feet. Definitely hang in there to watch them being schooled in how the set the hurdles for “Girls Intermediate” versus “Olympic.” (They do surprisingly well!)

Crowley on the rings: “Chris and I had this master plan to do this routine that had all these fancy moves that we stole from YouTube, but we got here and figured out that … all of them are kind of impossible.”

Ben Goldacre discusses results of different placebo studies and ways that the placebo effect can be harnessed – ethically – to improve healthcare.

Kitten play is centered around predatory-like behavior. Kittens learn the specifics how to be cats mostly by imitation of their mother and other cats (and will, for example, prefer the prey their mother trained them on or start stalking a new prey animal after seeing another cat catch one—although they don’t actually need to be trained in order to become good predators). A cat will not usually attack prey while on its back, with its prey object on its tummy, but this kitten is improving its paw-eye coordination, and ‘hugging’ its target, and, apparently, imitating its … you know … next best thing to mom.

Oh, and did I mention it’s also the cutest thing in the universe?

Can you imagine Kellogg’s running the Special K “Pinch an Inch” campaign today? What kind of response would it get?

Oh, and happy American Stuff-Yourself Holiday!

7 tonnes 2 by Nicolas Deveaux (Cube)

This is just a tiny part of this enchanting animation. See the whole thing at Cube Creative.