We've all experienced those slow motion moments. Shooting for the winning basket at the buzzer, the loss of steering control on black ice, the taste of Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie, et cetera. All three of which are all amazing experiences to be felt at some point in life, yet film directors go ahead and cheapen these glorious moments by recording (or post-processing) them in slow motion. It's kinda too bad!

It wasn't always like that:

Did you know (I didn't until very recently) that slow motion was an invention—patented, in fact? Who knew time could be patented? Back in 1904, an Austrian priest-turned-physicist named August Musger obtained a patent for a process by which he modified film projectors to produce slo-mo on screen. The irony was that August Musger (named after the slowest month?) was slo-pay, too. He lost his patent in 1914 because he failed to pay the fees for its renewal on time.

-Errol Morris and the Strange Power of Slo-mo, Ron Rosenbaum

At least we can be thankful that not everything is filmed in slow motion. Normal movies are filmed at 30 frames per second and that's about my brains limit for number of frames of Tom Cruise's face I can process and forget every second. But be careful! Dangerous new thousand/million fps high-speed cameras exist that use wild rotating prisms instead of shutters to capture frightening detail in even most tolerable celebrities.

Although, these "super slow motion" cameras are not always used for evil. If anything, they can help us appreciate the beauty of physics in every day life. For example, observe these youtube compilations from the latest season of Brainiac:

Weren't those cool? To help clear up my position on speeds of motion I've summarized my feelings in this graph: 

At the graph's y-intercept, we observe the finite value of coolness that represents the regular speed of life. When one records life at 30 fps it just seems less cool, even though its meant to be at the same speed. Coolness decreases linearly as as you continue into slow motion-ness. But here is where the graph gets interesting. From this point, as frames per second increase (speed of video decreases), coolness approaches infinity, a value infinitely cooler than the speed of normal life. Moving past this discontinuity, boringness surpasses coolness and we observe exponential decay as speed of time approaches a state of Walt Disney.

This singularity of coolness occurs at a very precise frame per second which may never be measured experimentally. Although, under carefully controlled laboratory conditions, this state my be experienced cognitively, possibly by making a free-throw at the NCAA finals before the buzzer from a car skidding out of control while consuming Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Fudge Brownie ice cream.

In closing, if Einstein's relativity teaches us anything, it's that we're always cool relative to someone else. Thank you.