Documentaries often live and die by their characters. Fortunately for this short, Needle Exchange, director Colm Quinn has captured some truly fantastic people on screen. Both former heroin addicts, Glenn and Spencer are best friends who—in a delightful twist of fate—have swapped one needle for another: smack for tattoos.

The film is honest and hilarious, with a sense of candor that short documentaries often lack. As Glenn and Spencer joke, chat, and playfully pick on one another, mumbling through their thick accents, it’s almost as if you’re watching the characters from an Irish version of Trainspotting 10 years later, the wild days long behind them. Quinn was connected to both Spencer and Glenn through his mother, who teaches an art class at a drug rehabilitation program in Dublin City Centre. Considering their mutual passion for the art of tattooing, they proved to be excellent pupils.

But, this isn’t just your standard inspirational tale of two guys who’ve managed to rebuild their lives back from the bottom up (though that thread is certainly there). As it’s revealed that Spencer is beginning to drift away from Glenn via a newfound romance, it quickly transitions into a portrait of the nature of friendship itself. After all, here are self-proclaimed best friends—two guys who have seen each other at their worst and most vulnerable—yet they are still unable to talk about their romantic feelings, about their personal lives outside of their needlework. It’s a fascinating examination of how strange and oddly complicated relationships can be. Quinn captures all of those nuanced, conflicting emotions in a brisk nine minutes.

The film has played at a series of venues on the festival circuit, snagging best short documentary honors from the Galway Film Fest. Quinn is both a documentary and narrative filmmaker, excelling at both. He relates, “I hope to keep working in drama and documentary. Strangely I find that working in one form can strengthen your ability in the other. Ultimately it's about creating the circumstances to capture something honest.”

He has just finished writing a narrative feature film called Man O’War, a dramedy about two teenage cousins who embark on an art project that shocks their local community. He hopes to shoot it in the coming year. On the documentary side, he’s currently working on a project called Elemenopy with Dublin-based poet Colm Keegan, who conducts poetry workshops for teenagers in schools hit by economic hardship.

For more work by Colm Quinn, follow him on Vimeo or Twitter.

Via Vimeo Staff Picks.

"It’s a little-known fact, but you don’t actually need a still to call yourself a distiller," Wayne Curtis writes in this month's issue of The Atlantic. "Craft" and "local" are often more marketing spin than accurate descriptions of what's in the bottle. Many start-up businesses don't have the resources to make booze from scratch so they buy generic neutral grain spirits from big suppliers and call the final blend a local product. Curtis describes the growing rift in the industry:

The hard-core, “grain to glass” distillers grow their own grain and do their own distilling, blending, aging, and bottling. That’s an expensive way to make a bottle of liquor, and the product is priced accordingly. So, understandably, they get a bit grumpy when competitors buy alcohol by the railcar and then repackage it as a “vodka handcrafted in Brooklyn” or a “Texas blended whiskey.”

To find out what it really takes to make craft liquor, we reached out to New Columbia Distillers, a bona fide grain-to-glass operation in northeast Washington, D.C. They bottled their first batch of Green Hat Gin last fall and have a hit on their hands, thanks to D.C.'s thriving restaurant and bar scene. John Uselton, who runs the distillery with his father-in-law Michael Lowe, spent an afternoon showing us the labor-intensive process behind their signature product. 

Matt Ficke, the head bartender at The Passenger's Columbia Room, came along for the tour and capped it off by mixing us a drink with Green Hat's new summer blend (its ingredients include cherry blossoms!). Fittingly Ficke made the official cocktail of D.C. -- a gin Rickey -- also known as "air conditioning in a glass."

Read "When That 'Local,' 'Craft' Liquor You Pay Big Bucks for Is Neither" in the June 2013 Atlantic. 

It's prom season -- for the planets.

Every couple of years, give or take, planets get together in the night sky in such a way that they seem to be aligned with each other. They seem to be, really -- from Earth's perspective -- shyly approaching each other, asking each other to dance. This planetary mixing-and-mingling is scientifically known as "planetary conjunction" ... but it's colloquially known, probably because of the corsages and the limos and the awkward dancing, the "Dance of the Planets."

We're about to have an especially rare and wonderful version of that dance. The night skies this week, provided they're clear, will reveal, yep, a triple conjunction -- a planetary crossover featuring the three brightest planets as seen from Earth: Mercury, Venus, and Jupiter. Between May 24 and May 29, the celestial trio will fit within a circle whose diameter is less than 5 degrees wide on the sky's dome. They'll dance around each other (as, ostensibly, "Feel This Moment" plays in the background).

Here's more on the planets' big night out:

The planets will be at their closest, with Jupiter and Venus just 1 degree apart, on 28 and 29 May. All three planets will form a straight line on 31 May as they gradually move apart from each other.

For US observers, the best time to look is also toward the western sky at twilight, with the three planets appearing close to the horizon. From 23 May, the three planets will be close enough together to be viewed through a pair of binoculars, forming a triangle on 24 May before drawing close and orbiting apart.

So, everyone, take your awkward photos of the planets' prom night now. This week's dance will be, Earth Sky notes, "the closest grouping of three planets until January 2021."

Via NASA.

The May 2013 issue of The Atlantic features Liza Mundy's cover story, "The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss," a profile of California governor Jerry Brown, the medical mystery of a rare bone disease, notes on the evolution of hand gestures, and much more. 

"What if same-sex marriage does change marriage, but primarily for the better?" Liza Mundy asks in her June 2013 Atlantic cover story, "The Gay Guide to Wedded Bliss." In a conversation with national correspondent Hanna Rosin above, Mundy describes the growing body of research that supports this. 

Read the story here. 

"Today, we may be more likely to move our fingers across a tablet than turn the pages of a book; to swipe a card, press a button, or enter numbers onto a keypad than turn a key," Jen Doll writes in this month's issue of The Atlantic. "Yet when it comes to gesturing, certain outdated motions endure." Some hand gestures are ancient -- the thumbs up dates back to the Roman coliseum  -- and pretty much universal. Others mean different things in different cultures, as we discover in this video from NowThis News. A sign of agreement in one country can mean something unprintable in another. 
 

Read "Survival of the Finger: The Evolution of Hand Gestures" here. 

With the decline of brick-and-mortal retail, it's time to remember the pop culture heyday of the shopping mall. NowThis News, the social and mobile video news network, highlights those iconic mall moments from Hollywood movies in the video above: Clueless, Superbad, and of course, Mallrats. 

The trend is serious too, however. "Circuit City is dead; Best Buy is dying. Borders is gone; Barnes & Noble is shuttering storefronts. Kmart has closed 40 percent of its stores in the past decade," Derek Thompson writes in "Death of the Salesmen: Technology's Threat to Retail Jobs:" 

Twenty years ago, the shoppers went to the stores. Today, the stores go to the shoppers. From the floor salespeople replaced by informative Web sites to the cashiers nudged aside by automatic checkout machines, the daily tasks once performed by store employees are either being taken over by machines or outsourced to customers.

Read more in this month's issue of The Atlantic. 

In his 87 years, Jacques Cousteau worked as an explorer, naval officer, conservationist, scientist, author, and filmmaker. He shot dozens of films about the Earth's oceans and their dazzling wildlife, and as it turns out, the footage makes for an awesome music video too.

Digging through the edit bins at Emerson College, Caitlin and Josh Drake rescued scraps of Cousteau films and transformed them into this video for "The Ceiling" by the New York-based group Yellowbirds. The Drakes added hand-painted effects and analog animation before blending everything together digitally. The result is a surreal underwater adventure that echoes The Life Aquatic or even the hand-colored restoration of Méliès's 1902 sci-fi film, Voyage dans la lune. Be sure to watch it full screen and turn up the volume. 

Yellowbirds is Sam Cohen, Brian Kantor, Annie Nero, and Josh Kaufman. Get their second album, Songs from the Vanished Frontier, including "The Ceiling," here.

For more work by Caitlin and Josh Drake, visit their Vimeo page. 

Tornadoes are complex and tough to predict but this short documentary from NASA is a good introduction to how they work. Researcher Tim Samaras explains how different weather systems collide across the central U.S. to create tornadoes. Satellite imagery and a "turtle probe" that Samaras designed help researchers identify where storms might occur. 

Alexis Madrigal's "Tornadoes in America: The Oklahoma Disaster in Context" has more on the science of the storm that hit Moore, Oklahoma.  

For more videos from NASA, visit http://www.nasa.gov/.

Grizzly bears: powerful. Proud. Majestic. And, whoa, in desperate need of a trip to the dentist.

Discovery and the BBC are currently airing Great Bear Stakeout, a documentary that tracks "the life of the great grizzly." Shot in Alaska, the show follows a group of grizzlies over a five-month stretch, filming the bears as they hunt and eat and rest and play and otherwise do their grizzly thing.

During one moment of filming, a bear came across one of its human filmers' cameras. And it did what grizzlies are wont to do: It tried to eat the thing. The bear put the camera lens into its mouth, leading to an up-close-and-personal shot of the beast's mouth. Its gunky, slimy, undoubtedly stinky mouth.

The bear then lost interest in the camera, leaving the device to keep capturing shots for the video above. And leading me to a good life lesson: If you are ever unfortunate enough to find yourself near the mouth of a bear, by all means keep your eyes closed.

Via WIRED.

Frenchie is the heart and soul of his gym in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. The 72-year-old bodybuilder has been running the place for 36 years, with loads of weathered snapshots on the wall to prove it -- Speedos, oily muscles, the whole deal. "Wow! This place is old!" is a typical comment for a new visitor, Frenchie says. "Some people today, they want to go to [a] fancy place. There's plenty of places around, but -- people like the way it is. It got character!" Frenchie's Gym isn't 24 Hour Fitness, that's for sure. "The neighborhood keeps changing," the filmmakers write on Vimeo, "but Frenchie's not going anywhere." 

This Must Be the Place is a documentary series about home, belonging, and loving what you do. Combining intimate interviews with lovely cinematography, David Usui and Ben Wu of Lost & Found Films craft unique portraits of individuals and the places that mean the most to them. The directors talk about the project in an interview with the Atlantic Video channel here, and don't miss the rest of the series here. 

For more from Lost & Found Films, visit http://www.lostfoundfilms.com/.

Since 2005, a team at NASA has been monitoring meteoroid explosions on the surface of the moon. In March, they announced yesterday, they observed an explosion so bright it would have been visible from Earth without a telescope. "For about one second," NASA said in a statement, "the impact site was glowing like a 4th magnitude star." It was nearly ten times as bright as any other previously recorded impact.

Unlike our safely cocooned planet, the moon has no atmosphere to protect it, and meteoroids do not burn up as they approach the surface. Over the past eight years, NASA scientists have observed more than 300 impacts, some of which are mapped below, with the March strike denoted by the red square.

What does it mean for something to "explode" in an environment with no oxygen? What are you actually seeing in the video above? NASA explains:

Lunar meteors don't require oxygen or combustion to make themselves visible. They hit the ground with so much kinetic energy that even a pebble can make a crater several feet wide. The flash of light comes not from combustion but rather from the thermal glow of molten rock and hot vapors at the impact site.

In the case of this major explosion -- which occurred on March 17th, during a period of increased meteor activity in Earth's atmosphere as well -- the rock struck the lunar surface at a speed of 56,000 miles per hour. The next time NASA's Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter is in the vicinity, it will have its sights set on the Mare Imbrium region where the explosion occurred, searching for a new crater that could be as many as 20 meters wide.

A false-color, frame-by-frame breakdown of the explosion (NASA)

It's not exactly The Cat Who Wished to Be a Man territory, but this extraordinarily determined and observant feline from Skopje, Macedonia, appears to have some unusual human-world savvy. "Leon the cat," according to YouTube uploader Marjan Kirovski, performs the trick of opening five doors in a row by jumping up on their handles and pulling them down with his paws until the catches release. Then he bats at each cracked door until it swings open, allowing him his next few steps of freedom. It helps that all the doors in the house appear to have the same kind of lever handle, which is non-standard in the United States. Doing this trick with slippery rounded doorknobs would be impossible for any cat less sticky than a gecko. It makes you wonder what other types of technology cats can figure out but lack the right anatomy to do anything with.

Based on the book Marriage for Moderns by Henry A. Bowman comes Jealousy, a dramatization of the origin and nature of a wife’s distrust in 1954, courtesy of the Prelinger Archive. Similar to a (poorly directed) episode of Mad Men, the film features a woman, Sally, waiting at home for her husband, Don, to return from work. When he finally arrives, Sally berates him for lying and cheating on her with a woman named Lorraine Casey, the local beauty shop owner. Don patiently denies the accusations, but when Sally becomes increasingly agitated, he storms out. She subsequently follows him to a diner, where, lo and behold, he is with Lorraine Casey. However, the two are merely discussing a business venture -- much to Sally’s relief.

Shot in a film-noir style, the film offers a rare glimpse into 1950s marital psychology, with the woman as the subject of the case study. Sally’s insecurity stems from feelings of loneliness and abandonment. She realizes that she might have projected her own desires for an extramarital affair onto Don. Despite acknowledging that he “does tend to get involved in his ideas and forget about [her],” she wants him to remain “just as he is.”

For more from the Prelinger Archive, visit their site. 

Camped out under the stars of Yosemite and the surrounding Sierra Nevada mountains, photographer Tony Rowell spent many moonlit nights capturing gorgeous time-lapses of the region’s impeccable scenery. The result of all his hard work has been compiled in the video above, a series of stunning shots of mountains and stars.

Rowell constructed most of the piece from 2012 through 2013. For the techies out there, he shot everything using his 36MP Nikon D800 E camera mounted on either his Kessler CineSlider or his Pocket Dolly, with equatorial tracking mounts. At night, the landscapes look as alien as they do terrestrial, familiar and unique at the same time.

Rowell is carrying on the family business; his father, Galen Rowell, was a noted wilderness photographer and climber. He was also the first person to shoot color photos of sunset light on Yosemite’s Horsetail Fall, a phenomenon called the “Firefall.” Tony visited the park several times in February of this year in order to capture this rare occurrence. The resulting footage not only includes the Firefall, but also features an extraordinary nighttime lunar rainbow in the mist of Yosemite falls known as the “Moonbow.” All these scenes were recently added to Rowell’s much longer, narrated film Sierra Starlight, available here.

For more work by Tony Rowell, visit http://www.tonyrowell.com/.

"They turn music into fire and back into music again," Blackie Pagano says, quoting The Cramps' Lux Interior on vacuum tube amplifiers. Pagano, who has spent his life dismantling and restoring gadgets, describes his work in this short documentary from New Yorkers. His client list, available on his website, includes everyone from David Bowie to the Jonas Brothers. However, the celebrity clientele "does NOT mean I am rich, snotty, over-priced, or inaccessible," Pagano says. "Most clients are working or practicing musicians or audiophiles."

A series of profiles of the city's most interesting characters, New Yorkers is produced by Moonshot Productions. Read their interview with the Atlantic Video channel here, and catch more of their videos here. 

For more videos from Moonshot Productions, visit http://moonshot-productions.com/.

From director Kat Gardiner comes this charming short about a man and his craft. In Shaped on All Six Sides, we meet Andy Stewart, who comes from a long line of boat manufacturers. Using tools passed down from generation to generation, he finds solace in keeping these wooden vessels alive. For Stewart, nothing else he has done has been quite so challenging or interesting on a daily basis.

In an era when cool is synonymous with artisanal, handcrafted, or local, Stewart's passion for building boats seems genuine. “To build a wooden boat," he says, "is the closest thing you can do to give life to an inanimate object.” 

For more from Kat Gardiner, visit her site.

Via Devour.

At this point there are few fields that haven't been transformed, somehow, by digital technologies. Whether it's dairy production or ramen-making, innovations in production and analysis have shaken, and then stirred, almost every business imaginable. 

One of the exceptions to this, however, has been bartending. Despite all the productive chaos that's going on in the world at large, walk into a bar, and you'll likely have an experience that is fairly similar to the one you might have had in 1989. Or 1889. Glass, ice, booze; drink, rinse, repeat.

That's changing, though -- or it could be, if a collaboration among engineers and marketers gets its way. Researchers at MIT's Senseable City Lab have teamed up with the Coca-Cola Company and Bacardi Rums to design a robotic bartending system called, yep, the Makr Shakr. Connected to customers' smartphones, and complete with three different robotic arms, the bar is capable, Mark Shakr says, of preparing approximately one googol (10 to the power of 100) of crowd-sourced drink combinations. The device is "new mixology system" that allows users to create personalized cocktail recipes in real time through a smartphone app. 

Here's how it works: 

Users download an app on their handheld devices and mix ingredients as virtual barmen. They can gain inspiration by viewing other users' recipes and comments before sending in their drink of choice. The cocktail is then crafted by three robotic arms, whose movements reproduce every action of a barman - from the shaking of a Martini to the muddling of a Mojito, and even the thin slicing of a lemon garnish.

Before you start feeling sorry for Sam Malone or Colin Field, though, you should know that Makr Shakr says it has no plans to replace human bartenders with its robotic versions. As the creators see it, the robo-Malones aren't so much supplanting traditional bartenders as supplementing them. "Instead of trying to replace a bartender with a robot, Makr Shakr aims to be a social experiment that looks at how people might embrace the new possibilities offered by digital manufacturing," the company puts it. "In Makr Shakr, social connections are woven throughout the co-creation and mixing of ingredients, which are then fed back to the user through the app. With this new technology, consumers can learn from each other, sharing connections, recipes, and photos on social networks."

Makr Shakr will be introduced, formally, at the Google I/O developer conference in San Francisco this Wednesday. At which point our robot overlords will officially be serving us drinks. So ... yeah. Remember to tip your bartender robot.

There’s just something magical about a man who rides a giant tricycle while simultaneously tickling the ivories.

Gary Frank Skaggs and his melodious tricycle -- literally a piano built onto a bike, aptly named St. Frankenstein -- are the subject of Unwieldy Beast, a short documentary from San Francisco filmmaker Brandon Loper. The film is a short and sweet chronicle of an interesting man with an eccentric hobby. At a brisk six minutes, it’s a perfectly paced human-interest piece, as much about Skaggs as it is a pictorial travelogue of the city by the bay. Pedestrians smile in wonder as Skaggs plays (and rides on), pedaling ever so slowly, in and out of tune, through the streets. An indie production through and through, the film was shot on borrowed equipment over the course of two days.

Loper’s documentary eye doesn’t stop here. He’s currently in production on a feature-length film about coffee.

Fore more work by Brandon Loper, visit http://brandonloper.com/.

"The history of visualizing data," Edward Tufte says, "is very substantially a history of science." As we develop new ways to observe the world, we develop new ways, as well, to render it -- to recreate it and make sense of it. Google Maps, which Tufte describes as the most widely seen data visualization in the world, is a particularly telling testament to this: It takes the stew of knowledge we have about the natural world and the human infrastructure built on and of it ... and renders that information as a picture. It converts complex circumstances into simple, if not simplistic, images.

In that, according to the latest of PBS's Off Book video series, Google Maps is part of a long line of efforts to conjure the world. From the earliest forms of data visualization -- maps scratched onto rocks, cartographers' renderings of the world -- to the most current and cutting-edge, dataviz has long had a power to explain and inspire.

And it's a power, importantly, that our minds are primed for. "We evolved to see things and make snap decisions," says O'Reilly Media's Julia Steele. The mechanisms that make the human brain exceptionally good at telling the difference between grass blades that are moved by caressing winds and grass blades that are moved by crouching lions are the same mechanisms that give human-rendered images their power. "We react to design and to art and to the aesthetics of a piece just as much as we react to the information contained in it," Steele puts it. "And so if you want to change someone's mind -- if you want to change someone's behavior -- sometimes presenting the information in a visual format is the fastest way to get them to engage with that information."

And yet when it comes to data visualization at its best, information will always trump beauty. As Tufte puts it, "style and aesthetics cannot rescue failed content." And beauty, as a result, is simply "a biproduct of the truth and goodness of the information." This isn't the art of information so much as art for information. "Look after truth and goodness," Tufte says, "and beauty will look after herself."

Juggle & Cut tells the story of Andy Phelps, a gifted kid with a colorful resume: he’s a juggler, unicycler, carpenter, hockey player, and firebreather. But, on an autumn day in 1998, Andy broke his neck in a massive car accident, leaving him without the use of his hands and legs. This film is about Phelps’s journey after his accident, and he how he kept his creative spark alive despite some steep emotional and physical obstacles.

Crafted by the gifted Caleb Slain (he’s only 22!), Juggle & Cut is the rare sort of inspirational documentary that not only manages to tell a compelling story, but reveals a larger, profound theme. As the story develops and Andy’s current occupation is revealed, the film becomes a manifesto for creativity — a call to get out in this world and make something, regardless of one’s personal limitations. The entire piece is a polished, confident example of documentary short filmmaking.

Phelps is currently working on a book fittingly called It Never Ends. Be sure to check out Slain’s other narrative shorts, The Lost and Found Shop and Free Pie, which are equally impressive.

For more work by Caleb Slain, visit http://calebslain.com/.

You'll find wonderful things surfing the pages of the Internet Archive, an online library of millions of books, films, audio recordings, web pages, and more. You can watch what might be the oldest "cat video" of all time -- an 1894 reel from Thomas Edison's movie studio. You can check out what TheAtlantic.com's homepage looked like in 1996, via the Wayback Machine, which has recorded over 240 billion web pages since it launched that year. You can even listen to the crackling notes of 78 rpm recordings from the 1920s.

The Internet Archive is a massive, ambitious effort to digitize the full spectrum of human knowledge. Above, a documentary from Deepspeed Media goes inside the archive to reveal what that looks like in practice. "How do you try to give things away in a perpetual way? Access drives preservation," Brewster Kahle, the founder and digital librarian of the Internet Archive explains from the archive's headquarters inside a former Christian Science church in San Francisco. "If you think, 'why don't we encrypt it and put it in a vault and we'll be able to look at it in 70 years?' ... that kind of a 'dark archive' is the worst possible idea! I think it's keeping things in use and active that keeps it part of the mind share." Sustainability is clearly a priority for the library, down to the way heat from the servers is recycled to warm the building.

This film was shot in October last year when the Internet Archive celebrated a landmark --10 petabytes of stored media. Tour the space, which still looks more like a church than a library and see where millions of books are digitized and stored in a facility in Richmond, CA. 

For more work by Deepspeed Media, visit http://www.deepspeedmedia.com/. 

Via Vimeo Staff Picks. 

In this latest installment from the sustainable food series Perennial Plate, creators Daniel Klein and Mirra Fine tell the story of one small, but resilient, family. As generations before them have done, the men catch fish via nets and poles while the women cook inside the family’s makeshift, one-window hut.

When the 2004 tsunami hit Southeast Asia, they, like many others, were caught in the waves, forced to hold onto trees for survival. Despite losing eight loved ones, the family continues to live at the mercy of the sea. Since the horrific events, they have been unable to catch as many fish as they used to, either because fish are not swimming as close to the shore, or other environmental factors. Whatever the reason, the family is staying put. As one young son says, “we will live with the sea until we die.”

For more from the Perennial Plate, visit their site.

A Fierce Green Fire, a documentary directed by Mark Kitchell, is a sweeping history of the environmental movement recounted through archival footage, interviews with activists, and a host of celebrity narrators. Based on a book with the same name by Philip Shabecoff, the film hopes to be "the first big-picture exploration of the environmental movement – grassroots and global activism spanning fifty years from conservation to climate change."

The filmmaker, who is screening the film in Washington, D.C., on May 3, shared two excerpts with us highlighting two key themes. The clip above tells the story of the Love Canal environmental disaster in the late 1970s -- a community near Niagara Falls that suffered from the effects of toxic waste buried there years earlier. Lois Gibbs, featured in the film, and other parents fought to get relocated while authorities dismissed their reports of birth defects and other health problems.

Another excerpt, below, covers Greenpeace's fight to stop whaling ships -- by physically maneuvering between a Russian ship and its target, a pod of whales. Faced with nonviolent intervention, the harpooner didn't back down so easily. Paul Watson, a co-founder of Greenpeace out there on the boat that day, recounts, "that's when I realized Gandhi wasn't gonna pull through for us that day." 

For more information about the film, visit http://firstrunfeatures.com/fiercegreenfire/.

There's Marcel the Shell small, and then there's atomic-level small. A new movie from researchers at IBM falls in the latter camp, having been magnified about 100 million times just to be viewable. According to the BBC, "It would take about 1,000 of the frames of the film laid side by side to span a single human hair."

While its tiny size is a marvel, the stop-motion film is not much of a film, per se. It's got some cute music and a barebones plot-line, sure, but that's not why you're watching; you're watching it because of the amazing fact that it was exists at all -- that people are able to make a movie this tiny. And how did they do that? In a companion video, also released by IBM, the team explains explains how, and why, they took on this project, complete with a tour of the -436 degree Fahrenheit "set."