It's not so much the costume that makes this, it's the awesomely done actions that perfectly mimic those horrific flailing creatures.

Absolutely brilliant. I love the way it mimics the game, especially the "I'm walking right behind you but that's okay".

*promote and shamelessly self-plug a related video: http://videosift.com/video/Ellen-DeGeneres-reads-slash-mimics-50-Shades-of-Grey

That was good, the end made me laugh, that's exactly what today was for me, EXACTLY. I mean the whole thing just mimics my sentiments.

3 more comments have been lost in the ether at this killed duplicate.

>> ^conan:

incredibly stupid tabloid science. i'm amazed that there're still people who can differentiate between cause and correlation. fat parents are having fat kids, is it genetics? no, it's because whatever the reason for your bad eating habits, you pass them down to your kids. what to you expect from your kids when you only eat junk? they'll eat it too. either because they mimic you or because you're the one who feeds them! congratulations, now you have perfect excuses: what once were "heavy bones" now are "hunger hormones" and genetics. this "documentation" didn't provide any hard facts, just hormones with names in quotation marks and similar snake oil stuff.
Step 1: stop doing sports, eat more junk and surprise! you'll become overweight. Step 2: catch up on exercising and change your diet and surprise again! your weight will drop. it's common sense. and this comes from someone who's still perfecting step 1... ;-)


I think you're misunderstanding the point of it. Everything you say is correct to a degree. I didn't hear them say that the sole cause of obesity is hormonal, not once. I'd be surprised if you watched it all the way through. The way you feed your children and the habits you give them is absolutely the root cause, at least I would say so. Then society/culture, marketing, advertising fast food. The cheapest foods are junk, that also plays a part.

But what they're saying here, is that the reason some people end up getting wildy overweight and not just a bit chunky is because there isn't the same hormone to tell them they're full. The amount some fat people eat would make a regular sized person sick, in just one meal.

I don't believe obesity is genetic either, I am one of those people who inherited my mothers shitty eating habits, was overweight as a child and now have to suffer the consequences of that. However my sister was fed the same way, offered the same things, but was always skinny because she ate like a bird (one years she would only eat bread rolls, haha). My children are two very different types, too. My daughter can eat more than the average adult, you know that old saying, hollow legs? But she puts weight on if I let her eat the wrong things or every time she feels hungry, so over the years I've had to very much restrict her. Now she tends to make the right choices so hopefully that will go through to adult life with her and I've not passed down the same bad habits, however she would eat every half hour if she listened to her belly. My son is just the opposite. If he's not hungry I could offer him his favourite anything and he'd turn it down. Lucky bugger!

Then there's the thing where my sister all of a sudden in her late teens became overweight. That didn't make much sense. But her eating habits had very much changed. The bit in this doc where they were testing identical twins where one was overweight and one wasn't was fascinating and tied things up much neater.


>> ^snoozedoctor:

Getting fat is like filling a bathtub with water. If you run the spigot faster than the drain, it fills up. Now THAT is heavy science. Burn more calories than you eat = weight loss.


You're talking about how to lose weight, a science we all understand This is talking about the reasons some of us gain. It's always pissed me off when bigger people rather than just admit they stuff their faces, try and pass it off as big bones (eh?) or genetics. I'm even rather cynical of people who say they love their weight and being big is beautiful and they want to be like that. I think rather they know how bloody difficult dieting is, not just the losing weight but keeping it off, also I think those people, and bless them for it, accept that they don't want to go through the endless bullshit of dieting and gaining and embrace it. Or they've got some chubby chasers paying them top dollar to watch them eat and balloon to 400 lbs. Food is very very addictive once you've learnt the pleasures of it, just like a drug. It's very hard for anyone who doesn't have a weight issue to understand it, especially since you've been listening to people make endless excuses for it over the years. I think that's what is putting the blinkers on you now when you watch anything with alternative reasons for obesity, you just see it as an excuse.

This is exciting, because what they're saying is if they can recreate these hormones they will be able to find a way of replacing them, which will make the whole dieting process much much easier.

incredibly stupid tabloid science. i'm amazed that there're still people who can differentiate between cause and correlation. fat parents are having fat kids, is it genetics? no, it's because whatever the reason for your bad eating habits, you pass them down to your kids. what to you expect from your kids when you only eat junk? they'll eat it too. either because they mimic you or because you're the one who feeds them! congratulations, now you have perfect excuses: what once were "heavy bones" now are "hunger hormones" and genetics. this "documentation" didn't provide any hard facts, just hormones with names in quotation marks and similar snake oil stuff.

Step 1: stop doing sports, eat more junk and surprise! you'll become overweight. Step 2: catch up on exercising and change your diet and surprise again! your weight will drop. it's common sense. and this comes from someone who's still perfecting step 1... ;-)

That's a cool law. Laws are fun. Lets all make laws!!

By Executive Order in New Jersey:

The Order, announced today bans ten entire classes of synthetic compounds that imitate the effects of marijuana, and all known or unknown variants of the drug that would fall within each class. The Order also expressly includes “any other synthetic chemical compound that is a cannabinoid receptor agonist and mimics the pharmacological effect of naturally occurring cannabinoids” – in other words, any synthetic chemical that mimics the effects on the brain of marijuana’s active ingredient

—–

Citizens SHALL NOT stimulate their Cannibinoid Receptors with ANY SUBSTANCE
They SHALL NOT protest this either.

I'm pretty wigged out by spiders, but I like snakes. So for me, I tried to mentally convert this video into a snake expert "handling" a cobra or something. The way I see it, sure, you can have an expertise level and skill level that would allow you to handle either sort of animal relatively safely. But even in that case, there aren't a whole lot of particularly practical reasons to put that into practice.

My hometown in Kansas has lots of bullsnakes. In my experience, large older bullsnakes are often pretty docile but the young juvenile ones are usually very defensive and will rear up, strike, and mimic rattlesnake sounds and actions. However, they are non-venomous and don't have "fangs", although they do have short teeth that can provide small, shallow puncture wounds if they get a good nip on you.

I like catching bullsnakes when I see them and handling them a bit before releasing them back into the wild. The docile ones are particularly fun, but even the juveniles that show some aggression can be fun to handle with some caution. I have never been bit myself, but I have seen people that have been. No lasting harm comes from that, and in most instances it wouldn't even draw blood -- the surprise of it is probably worse than the damage.

In spite of that, I have no interest whatsoever in handling something like a rattlesnake or other venomous snake. Looking at them, sure. But I don't see much practicality in handling them. In all likelihood, I could safely handle rattlers in the same way that I handle bullsnakes and avoid being bit. But the cost of failure would be higher (lots of pain and small possibility of death).

So at least for me personally, I don't think I'd be interested in handling black widows even if I was a spider person instead of a snake person. I'm not against the author of this video handling them, but I would stop short of the "you should try this at home" tag!

I understand that with some fairly minor surgery to their tounges, crows can be taught to mimic. They are also one of the only other animals than man who seem use tools. Such as using a stick to get at something in a hole.
>> ^csnel3:

>> ^ant:
wings
http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/odnoa/damn_theyre_smart_and_love_fun/ says these are not crows. <IMG class=smiley src="http://cdn.videosift.com/cdm/emoticon/oops.gif">

Wow, That link has a lot of other links, alot of info and comments. I saw somebody thought these birds looked like a cousin to the crow.
Most people seemed to think it was definatley a Corvus, to me, These look like the same russian crows that were in the epic "Your text to link...http://videosift.com/video/Black-Cat-Vs-White-Cat" vid (great music).
I have a family of about 12 crows that live in my neighborhood, they have been here for years. They wait for me to come out because I often give them treats (peanuts, food scraps, they will eat anything).
This time of year (winter) they hangout with other local crow families. Right before dusk there are about 70 of them outside, just socializing with each other and watching everything , looking for food , or fun, they do like to fuck with the squirells.
They all have learned to crack peanuts, I gave the local family some peanuts and they loved them, now all the crows know how to crack'em open. They clearly can teach each other .
Throw a peanut to a pigeon or a seagull and they won't know what to do with it. Crack it for them and they will eat it. Crows will just figure things out on their own if you give them time.

>> ^ghark:

had to watch it twice to find the fish lol, with a name like jawfish I was looking for something larger


It took me a few seconds to find it on my first view.

@ponceleon, yes this is a real effect that you see with real lenses. The tilt shift lenses made by Nikon and Canon like the one above mimic the motions possible using a large format view camera. By allowing both the film and lens plane to be manipulated by the photographer, it is possible to do some really interesting things like having an apparent infinite focus and perfect parallels.

I had to use a 4x5 camera (like this one) for an assignment back when I was doing my photography program. I can tell you that the image quality you get with a big sheet of film is unparalleled among digital cameras. Plus big 4x5 view cameras are a lot of fun to use.

@sixshot, yes, PC (perspective control) lenses that allow tilt/shift movements are incredibly expensive, buy not really much more than any other high-end 35mm lenses these days. (The last lens I bought for my system retails for about $2400.) It's true that photoshop can imitate some of what is possible with these leses, but digital imitation is never as good as the real thing.

It might be interesting to note that it's possible to pick up 4x5 view camera system (on ebay) capable of these motions AND a professional film scanner (new) to digitize your images for less money than the PC lens shown in this infomercial.

oh this is horrible. and here i was thinking "Chop Kick Panda" was a pathetic mimic. i love the shit out of blizzard but this here is a swing and a miss

Now let's get this tasty little guy and some of his buddies to mimic me a sandwich.

Let's start over because you're just going all over the place

This is the point: Your entire example is irrelevent. Yeah, you can generate all sorts of stuff when a system is already in place, when you have a preprogrammed design that itself generates designs. If you already have wheels and a chassis, you can build a boxcar pretty easily. Boxcars are inevitable at this point. All these things are possible because the information is already present. You can invent new words because you already have a language. Likewise, if you already have DNA, you can certainly expect a cell to form. What you're still dealing with is the chicken and the egg problem. You have to have proteins to create DNA and you have to have DNA to create proteins. Science has attempted to solve this problem by saying that RNA molecules evolved from the soup, yet there is no logical pathway for this to happen, because natural selection and mutation cannot account for it. The problems are far too vast to overcome, and experiment has yieled no conclusive results. So, my point stands, that intelligent design is a better explanation for the complex coded information in DNA, which naturalistic processes cannot account for.

>> ^dgandhi:
>> ^shinyblurry:
I haven't conflated anything. You've simply misconstrued everything I've said because of your belief that RNA is simple, or could spontaneously evolve.

Really? You thought that putting those two words together like that would convince me that you are taking anybody else seriously?
>> ^shinyblurry:
You think your simulation demonstrates the creation of information which could lead to a system that creates cellular life.

No, Please re-read your claim, and my response. You claimed that Information comes Only from minds, I provide counter evidence, you assert that I was claiming something else. I claim that you are not listening, you provide evidence.
>> ^shinyblurry:
such a system could never generate RNA of cellular life.

We have such a system, it's called the universe, and in it we find RNA. The universe does generate RNA, you and I are not in dispute on this point, only on the mechanism of that generation.
>> ^shinyblurry:
Even if it could generate RNA, to evolve the correct sequences of RNA nucleotides to form even one protein would be impossible to achieve even over billions of years, let alone enough proteins to create a cell. Even if it could generate RNA, to evolve the correct sequences of RNA nucleotides to form even one protein would be impossible to achieve even over billions of years, let alone enough proteins to create a cell.

That claim makes no sense.
To assert that something takes a particular amount of time requires a context of how wide spread the attempt is.
As an example I can not build a rocket to put people on the moon, this is impossible, I will not live long enough... None the less a large number of people, working in concert, with worse technology that we have access to did accomplish this task, it's possibility is a matter of scale.
In order to make an anthropic argument, I only need life to have happened once in all the space and time of the entire universe. Now I realize that you are just talking out your ass, that you have no numbers to back up your claims of probability, that your are simply making an argument from incredulity, but if you decide to try and cover your ass with some numbers realize we have about 100B years and 10⁸⁰ atoms to work with.
>> ^shinyblurry:
There is no experiment which has demonstrated that RNA can spontaneously evolve and be capable of creating life, now or ever. There is also no experiment which shows life evolving from non-living matter.

There again with the nonsense phrase, trying to really hit it home that you really have no clue what you are arguing against?
RNA is a molecule, it's not magic, it does nothing but what chemistry would expect of it, and still, it generates information through mutation/selection. This is, again, evidence against your absurd initial position which your argument from incredulity can not address. Even if you question the source of the molecule, the mechanism is the same, RNA is not a god antenna, it's a molecule, that synthesizes information through a simple, well understood, physical process.
>> ^shinyblurry:
The information is what designed and built the simulation, and its structure generates different arrangements of that information based on certain preprogrammed variables which do not change. You are not making anything truly new, rather you are just shuffling things around.

And neither has anybody, and you never have, and I never will. We are all bounded by our universe, we can not create or destroy, only move and arrange. There is, as far as we can tell, never anything new, and to say that that is true of the simulation provides no information about how it may be different from the physical universe in which we live, it is only one more way in which it is similar.
>> ^shinyblurry:
Such a simulation could never evolve on its own outside of programming.

Do you not get the concept of simulation? Nobody has claimed that the simulation is "real" only that it mimics, in a predictive way, certain aspects of the physical universe. Specifically it illustrates the compounding result of mutation/combination/selection, which is to synthesize information about the environment in a manner coded to best deal with that environment, a process, which you assert can not happen.
>> ^shinyblurry:
Just as DNA could never evolve on its own. The digital information it contains transcends its medium, just as a story transcends the paper and ink it is written on. Information only comes from minds, and that is what DNA code points to.

Your comparison is poor, paper and ink don't create words, DNA does. Understanding the information may require a "mind", whatever that means, but the information effecting and shaped by the physical world only requires mutation/selection, and we had that on this planet for billions of years before anybody realized there was any information in the system at all.