Photos
If you’ll allow me to get collegefreshmanwhojusttriedmarijuanaforthefirsttimegum.com for a moment, I am confronted on a nearly daily basis by something that reminds me that the world is so vast and filled with so many people as to be completely impossible to even imagine. That’s not a particularly complicated or impressive thought, but I can’t be alone in this experience. (Hello?) (Is anyone in this experience?) (HELLO?) For example, yesterday I was reading a blog post on a science fiction website (no nerdo) comparing the amount of oil the world uses on a daily basis to a waterfall, which pointed out that humans use 40,000 gallons of oil EVERY SECOND. Uh, what? That is a crazy number! That is just a MEANINGLESS number. You can’t even wrap your mind around that! (Discussion is getting pretty heated in this dormitory cafeteria!) The only person who can wrap his mind around that is Dr. Xavier, and even he needs a special planetarium or whatever.
Today’s reminder comes in the form of an interesting time-lapse video showing the airspace over Europe as the Great Volcano-Related Airplane Cancellation Catastrophe of 2010 came to a close:
Neat! But also jeez! I mean, I know that millions of people fly every single day, but that is another meaningless number, and just to see each of those little tracer lines representing the lives of hundreds of people, traversing the Earth to do God knows what. It really makes you wonder.
Jesus, HOW HIGH AM I RIGHT NOW? Do you ever wonder if our dream life is the actual reality and that our waking life is just OH MY GOD ARE THOSE SUN CHIPS? (Via TheDailyWhat.)
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Buh. Na. Nas.
I think the big question is: How are we not being charged by the airlines to watch this? Do they not know it exists?
Air traffic, how does it work?
I was one of those people who was impacted, and I desperately wanted for my flight NOT to be cancelled. Fly me through the volcano! The absolute worst that could happen would be that the plane crashes and I die, right? But even then, that’s a hell of a way to go. My gravestone would read “Here lies Facetaco, killed by a combination of volcano and plane crash.” That’s such an extreme death, Mountain Dew would probably sponsor it.
This is way funnier than anything else. Good job.
i was supposed to be a bridesmaid in my best friend’s wedding last saturday in london. i also would have preferred to die via volcano rather than be grounded in new york. and watching this, i actually got a little mad at all those lights starting to zoom around europe, but not to fucking london. thanks, videogum, for reminding me that i had to watch my best friend’s wedding via pixellated webcast rather than up close in a stupid dress.
brought to you by: i’mstillbittergum
Maybe you’d land on a mysterious island with smoke monsters and magic numbeOHMYGOD ARE THOSE SUN CHIPS?
Haha, your gravestone is gonna have your screenname on it? Relax, techno-something (techno- because Internet)
oh this came off so much worse than it was intended
I love you, facetaco. I upvoted your comment, and I hope my admission of wrongdoing upvotes your soul
And I upvoted your retraction, because that is what classy people do. Friends forever, ignition remix!
All of our hover tombstones will have our screennames on them because that is the future.
hover tombstones = pizza frisbees
I had this feeling the first and only time I every visited New York City. My wife and I went up for three days before Thanksgiving a few years ago and had a wonderful time (it was just like being on Seinfeld or in Ghostbusters), but the sheer number of people terrified me. No one stops at cross walks! Not even cars!
The visceral realization of the vast, knowability of people–with so many, how can we have anything in common–made me really appreciate those things that bring us together and connect us as humans–family, art, friendship, internet comments, etc.
What I got out of this: Scandinavian countries only have one airport a piece.
Actually, they have a surprising number of airports, there were planes going to places I couldn’t pronounce. But they only have one INTERNATIONAL airport a piece.
and eastern France has no airports. sucks for them.
We have airports coming out of our asses if you consider population. Also, proximity.
Also:
http://www.gifbin.com/982019
Crap, how’d that happen?
40,000 gallons of oil a second?? i guess that oil rig that’s spewing 42,000 gallons a day into the gulf really isn’t a disaster after all! hopefully we’ll get some awesome videos when they light the gulf on fire to clean up!
ugh, i was gonna respond to that with a picture of a cute animal covered in oil, but the image search depressed me waaaay too much to complete the joke. shit is sad for realsies.
But, these animals in oil look fine!
But these animals in oil look fine!
Ugh. Sorry for the double post. At the very least, that is twice as many pretty zebras.
Thanks for throwing us in the Total Perspective Vortex, again.
Is that fairy cake?
Also, what is fairy cake, anyway? I’ve never had a chance to ask that.
it’s a cupcake in england. they also call them lorries.
did anybody else see this at 0:48?
welcome to bong town indeed.
Not to be repetitive, but:
It really is applicable in so many situations.
Obvs, because it is everywhere in this bitch.
That ovary looks like Europe!
Wake and bake, bitches!
God I hope this works.
It’s fun to watch it while making “pyewn pyewn pyewn” laser sound effects.
YES!! I was thinking more like “pewww pewww pewww”…that noise is impossible to spell
Classic:
other meaningless numbers I would like (I would not like) a simple trippy illustration of:
As of April 2010, carbon dioxide in the Earth’s atmosphere is at a concentration of 391 ppm by volume. If we can’t get below 350 ppm, scientists say, the damage we’re already seeing form global warming will continue and accelerate
the kfc double down has 540 calories and my blood cholesterol is 250 mg/dL (I probably should zone out on that one)
The average sperm count today is around 60 million per milliliter in the Western world, having decreased by 1-2% per year from a substantially higher number decades ago (this one should be posted on videocum.com)
Tell that to my pregnant wife. Once you start having sex, there’s really no way to prevent pregnancy! Right, you guys?
That’s what the girls on 16 and Pregnant seem to think!
Ah like ta raw dawg it.
Nerds! I have a screenshot from 16 and Pregnant (I’m not the only one to take screenshots of reality TV for my own personal enjoyment? Right?) on my computer at home of a girl saying, with subtitles, “You can’t really prevent pregnancy.” So, use your imagination folks.
My favorite part was how baffled she looked when all of her friends were like, “Duh, you totally CAN prevent pregnancy, you dummy.” Way to go abstinence-only sex education!
Five forty is actually surprisingly low. That’s less than a lot of salads in some chain restaurants.
uh oh. so now I know that they can make a bowl of vegetables worse for you than a sandwich where the bread is made out of deep fried chicken.
this is going to be a really confusing simple trippy explanation.
I used to work at an Applebees, and these are the ingredients on the santa fe salad:
salad mix
grilled steak or chicken(finished in the microwave, because people want to eat now!)
salsa ranch dressing(so much salsa ranch dressing)
shredded cheese mix
sour cream
guacamole
tortilla strips
so that makes sense. How a steak caesar salad is in the 1,000 calorie range, I have no idea, but I’m pretty sure it’s simply the sheer volume of dressing they use.
Raymond’s mother, what is salsa ranch dressing? It sounds awful! No, Applebees!
Mexi-ranch! (I, too, once worked at Applebee’s!) A Santa Fe Chicken Salad has 1300 caloies and 94 grams of fat, 25 of those being saturated fat! YUM! (yuck.)
But it’s also probably A LIE. Because they are horrible gross liars.
Man, I thought you were talking bout the sperm count stat.
The Panera in my town just changed all their signs to list the calories of each item. I’m young and reckless, so I’ll continue to order the 900something calorie Bacon Turkey Bravo, but if I were actually calorie counting I’d have a life crisis every time I stepped in the place.
I’m not the only one who clicked on collegefreshmanwhojusttriedmarijuanagumforthefirsttime.com, right?
i wishfully did as well.
Yes, you are the only one. I didn’t click and was not disappointed.
I tried to you’re not alone in your dissapointment
…Is this real life?
The lack of jet contrails during the ‘event’ actually led to extra heating of the earth. OK, I gotta go. Drum circle in the quad.
yeah, you gotta give people time to heal from the chemtrails
I thought they only had bikes in Europe.
I saw the header and very much hoped Gabe was going to finally start reviewing and analyzing the new fashions in water pipes, as per my many requests. Let down once again.
“I am confronted on a nearly daily basis by something that reminds me that the world is so vast and filled with so many people as to be completely impossible to even imagine.” – 50 cent, on his blog
SHITS DEEP MOTHAFUCKA I GOT SHOT NINE TIMES.
That was super-neat!
I work right by O’Hare and the view out my window looks directly down one of the landing patterns. On a clear day you can see planes lined up single file, as many as eight deep, and they just keep coming…all…day…long… Ummm…what was that about some Sun Chips now?
“as many as eight deep, and they just keep coming…all…day…long… “
TWSS
I’m sure you expected this to come from someone.
Actually I didn’t see that coming at all….seems so obvious in retrospect…
“I didn’t see that coming at all” – TWSS
“I’ll get you a towel” – TWYouS
I used to work at a print-on-demand publishing company, meaning that instead of an editorial acceptance process for books to publish, we would publish any work by an author with a check for the full amount. Aside from the wack-a-doodle religious apocalypse books, a bulk of the books coming through were memoirs. It turned into a heartbreaking job as I realized that so many people have stories to tell, and they want so badly to tell them, and pay a good amount of money to have them published despite the fact that, honestly, no one is going to read the book aside from me (and I only skimmed) and whoever else they give them to as christmas gifts that year. These stories were not extraordinary, and the authors were rarely able to glean some sort of meaning out of their lives outside of “I Lived It, I Wrote It, 80 Years!” (the actual title to one of the memoirs).
Well, my rambling point is that I am, in some ways, glad to not be confronted with people’s life stories on a daily basis anymore. There are extraordinary circumstances that do demand our attention and involvement, but some personal trials and tribulations should be kept personal, and getting a glimpse into the minutia of people’s lives is truly overwhelming.
Huh. If my grandma had written a memoir, I’d be pretty thrilled to read it, and not because her life was super exceptional (since it wasn’t, in all honesty, although she did wave to the Hindenburg minutes before it blew up one town over — and that makes two Hindenburg appearances in today’s videogum). I’d have wanted my own copy of her memoir to re-read occasionally and hand down to the kids I don’t have. On the other hand, if anyone else’s normal grandmother wrote a memoir, it would be 95% boring and depressing to me (5% merely pathetic). So! Weird.
Yes, and I think I was too harsh earlier about the worth of the memoirs. It is very worthwhile for someone to sit and reflect and write about their own lives, and it is also worthwhile for family and friends to get a copy of that. And most of the people were aware that they were doing this for themselves and not for any lasting immortality via the written word. I was just in a unique position to see the lives of complete strangers played out in full on my desk everyday, and not just the crises and the triumphs, but everything.
Gabe, your musings in this post remind me of the great philosopher Ke$ha when she famously asked, “Does anyone ever stop to think: What if WE are the aliens?”
I’m sorry, I keep coming back to this video and rewatching it. Procrastinationgum!
I like the guy at 0:06 who just flew ’round in a little circle.