A quick and dirty video from Tom (http://tomscott.com - @tomscott) and Matt (http://mattg.co.uk - @unnamedculprit) - ten illegal things to do in London. Yes, these are all properly illegal: you can see our references at http://tomscott.com/law/
There's a good argument that lyric videos count as a whole new genre. Here's that genre's history, presented in its own style.
Tom Scott (http://tomscott.com @tomscott) and Matt Parker (http://standupmaths.com @standupmaths) investigate some of the London Underground's greatest lies.
Jonathan Ross is known as "Wossy". He can't say his Rs. But there's a good chance that you've got the same speech defect he does, and you don't even know it.
There are lots of interesting features in other languages, some of which English would really benefit from having. I'm going to talk about four of them: time-independence, clusivity, absolute direction, and evidentiality. Also, I've learned from last week: no irritating piano music this time!
Colours are easy, right? They're one of the first things you learn as a kid. But what if "blue" and "green" were the same colour? Or "light blue" and "dark blue" weren't? Well, guess what: there are languages out there that do exactly that.
I give Thinking Digital 2013's health and safety crew a massive headache, while talking about sentimental value, physical objects and digital data.
Why is an "odour" classier than a "smell"? Why is a "beverage" fancier than a "drink"? The answer lies in English history - and in the way we automatically know which 'register' of language to use. (Includes bonus medieval advice for constipation!)
If you see the phrase "10 items or less" in a supermarket and immediately cringe and complain that it should be "10 items or fewer"... well, you are not going to like this week's video.
Every so often, someone has a brilliant idea to reform English spelling. And you're probably thinking that I'm about to go off on a rant about how spelling reform never works. The trouble is... sometimes, just sometimes, it does work.
CORRECTIONS March 9th, 2019 Back in 2013, I made a video about ‘singular they’ and gender-neutral pronouns. Looking back on it with half a decade of hindsight, there are several things I want to correct. I also have a few thoughts on how the reactions to it have changed over time, and why the video’s comments will remain off. Firstly, while editing the video, I cut the first sentence of the script. That sentence didn’t seem to add anything, and I’m a believer in ‘don’t bore us, get to the chorus’. That would have been fine — if only the script didn’t refer back to that first sentence later on, noting that the viewer probably didn’t notice the singular they in it. There used to be an annotation explaining that mistake, but YouTube’s deleted all annotations now. I regret the error. Secondly, I mentioned that recently-coined gender-neutral prounouns (hir, xe, etc) haven’t caught on in regular usage, and that trying to deliberately add new words into a language is extremely difficult.
It's not that Hawaiian has a completely different word for Christmas -- it's just that Kalikimaka is the closest that Hawaiian can possibly get to the word Christmas.
Or: what happens when you privatise Big Brother.
In one of the tallest buildings in London, Tom answers the question of how many Gs you pull in a lift, with the help of some sugar and a very dirty kitchen scale.
Why do we say "Ye Olde"? Why is "Menzies" pronounced "Mingis"? To find out, we have to go back into history.
The order of adjectives is one of those wonderful linguistic things that no-one really notices until it's pointed out to them.
Twitter was set up to support 140 characters. And in the English alphabet, that's easy to understand: a character is a letter, number, space or punctuation mark. People more or less agree with computers there. And if it was twenty years ago, that's exactly how the system would work. That far, no further.
There's an interesting thing about English that hardly anyone thinks about. There are two "th" sounds. And if you want to know why it took me twenty-one takes to record this intro, you try switching them round.
If you wander the footpaths and bridleways of Britain, you might stumble across a special crossing for horses.
Helicopters in London have a simple rule that means they're safer for everyone in the city. I stand on something a bit too high in order to explain it.
I'm joined by Felix Cohen from http://manhattansproject.com to learn how to make orange oil go up in flames. Add flavour, aroma, and a touch of danger to your cocktails. Personally, I don't drink, but that doesn't mean I can't learn to mix 'em. Please drink responsibly.
There's a hidden pattern on banknotes, all around the world, that means photocopiers refuse to copy them.
I'm up in the Arctic Circle, by a large ship on the Hurtigruten line, to talk about the longest TV program in the world, and why Norway excels at something called "slow television".
In the Norwegian city of Tromsø, there's a bit of city planning straight out of science fiction: an underground road network, complete with junctions and roundabouts, bored into the mountains around the city.
When you film with an iPhone or other smartphone in Europe at night, there's often a weird rolling banding effect over your footage. The reason has to do with power grids, frequencies, and some rather American-centric smartphone makers.
A message from the Interstellar Safety Council. What if the rest of the universe wasn't built on "survival of the fittest"?
Since 1624, Members of Parliament haven't been allowed to resign. And yet, they do: how do they manage it.
Joseph Bazalgette moved most of the Thames stink away, but there's still some 19th-century dodginess in the river now and again.
There's a hidden nodule on some British pedestrian crossings that provides a vital clue for folks who might otherwise not be able to cross the road safely.
Using edible gold leaf, gold that's been rolled out to a fraction of a micron in thickness, you can have a gold plated tongue, at least for a few seconds. File this one under 'stupid human tricks'.
Zeppelin trivia expert Simon Willison (@simonw) explains why the world's first in-flight radio message was "Roy, come and get this goddamn cat".
I was walking through Kings Cross, spotted Platform 9¾, and thought I'd share something you might not know: thanks to redevelopment of the station, right now it's in the wrong place. It won't be for long, though.
I spin a (fictional) tale of the day that Google accidentally opened everything. Performed at GeekyConf, with thanks to Betsy Weber and Natalie Downe on camera.
In the first of two videos filmed rough-and-ready in an alley behind a pub, all-round lovely person Norm (@cackhanded) teaches me how to safely strangle someone on stage.
In the second of two videos filmed rough-and-ready in an alley behind a pub, all-round lovely person Norm (@cackhanded) teaches me how to safely slap someone across the face on stage.
We go back to our old-school YouTube days, and try to cook bacon with a thing that isn't designed to cook bacon. It doesn't go well.
Why don't wind farms always turn, even if there's a lot of wind?
We'll hopefully never know what's written in the letters of last resort: top secret, handwritten notes from the British Prime Minister to be opened by submarine captains in the event of nuclear war. This video contains an error: I say "Trident-class", but that's the name of the missiles. It should be Vanguard-class.
Ninety metres above the river is really tall for a cable car. Why build it so high, and spend so much? Well, other than the Mayor of London being a bumbling buffoon, there's a reason it's got to be that high.
Have you noticed? That reversing beeper you find on trucks has been replaced by a squelch of white noise. Today, standing on a lay-by next to a busy construction site, I explain why -- while trying not to get run over.
I'm flying to the US. Ten hours on a plane is a long time, so I'm filming a video in an airplane bathroom, about something that makes sense in an airplane bathroom: relativity. "Galilean invariance" is the idea: centuries before Einstein, someone else had the idea that there's no privileged frame of reference.
I honestly thought this was an urban legend until I looked into it, but it's true. (The urban legend is that Margaret Thatcher invented it.)
Things that can hurt you just by looking at them are science fiction and fantasy, right? Well, not quite. Inside Walt Disney World, home of the most terrible earworm known to humanity, I talk about the McCollough Effect.
Hitting someone in the chest with a bucket of water looks impressive at close range, sure. But on stage, there's a different technique you need to use to make sure the back row is just as impressed.
(YouTube ate this first time around, so I've reuploaded it.) From the flame trench of Launch Complex 39 at the Kennedy Space Centre, under the pad from which the Apollo astronauts went to the moon, here's the reason that orbit is so damn hard to get to.
If a GPS goes over 1200mph or 60,000 feet, it'll shut down. And the reason why is linked to here, at the Kennedy Space Centre, and the Cold War.
A few days ago I was pushed into a pool. This is how to get pushed into a pool properly.
There were a lot of embarrassing things on TV in the 1990s, and Andy Crane in a baseball cap was just one of them.
Oneironauts are "dream travellers": folks who say they can become aware of, and control, their dreams. But how do you tell if you're dreaming? Well, there's this one weird trick...
SPF is meant to be a multiplier, but it's much more complicated than that. And as a Brit in Florida, I have to take care about burning.
The corporate behind-the-scenes workings of Walt Disney World are interesting, to say the least. They've got their own private city.
Remember the "dumbest dot-com", AllAdvantage? They paid you to surf the web, at least for a while. And one day, they announced that they were incredibly popular in rich Beverly Hills, California. The reason connects them to the US Postal Service... and Jason Priestley.
Rivers change course. They leave behind old channels, oxbow lakes, and a dozen other things you learned about in geography class. The trouble is, some rivers can't be allowed to move any more.
I'm not saying that you shouldn't trust moss if you have absolutely no other options. I am saying that you shouldn't get lost in the woods in the first place.
If I were in Iceland, I'd have a different name: and not only that, but the Icelandic government would have made my parents pick a name from a list. But there are more lessons to learn about names, particularly for those of us from the English-speaking world...
Bar billiards is a little-known British pub game. And in the tradition of video game "let's plays" -- only in the real world -- I got some folks together for a match. THE RULES: Pot the balls in the holes. Each hole's worth some points. Red ball's worth double. Don't knock over the pegs. And you only score those points when you play a legal shot that doesn't pot anything. Don't worry, you'll work it out soon enough.
There aren't that many places in the world where you can find geysers: even fewer where they blow regularly. Here, amongst the volcanic landscape of Iceland, is one of them. Here you'll find the original Geysir, plus its more regular cousin Strokkur. And a lot of wind.
It's a good question: with so many medical advances, how is "a cure for the common cold" still shorthand for "something that'll never exist"? Well, there's a good answer too -- and your body already knows it.
I'm joined by tef (@tef - http://programmingisterrible.com) who explains the Miura fold, a fancy origami fold that has uses both up in space and down on the ground.
There's a famous British euphemism: "tired and emotional". Which means drunk. But if you're being recorded, or writing down your thoughts, you might want to stay away from it - because the British legal system is terrifying.
In every Hollywood movie where someone dials a phone number, it starts with 555. Turns out Britain's got a similar system, and it's one of the few good decisions Ofcom's ever made.
When there's no room left to be buried, the dead will... take a train? It's hard to believe, but the London Necropolis Railway has a history.
And this particular tank, although it's a Soviet one, is accessible at the corner of Mandela Way and Pages Walk in Bermondsey. (And I know the term's "combat vehicle", I just prefer using "fighting machine".)
There were lots of Victorian engineering plans that never got off the drawing board - but one attempt at a Channel Tunnel remarkably did.
At the front of Notre Dame cathedral in Paris sits a mostly-ignored marker. Mostly ignored, that is, until one person arrives and takes pictures, at which point everyone crowds round it and ruins the shot.
As ever, I'm not a lawyer -- but even professional lawyers can't give consistent advice on this. I'm still a bit worried that I'm going to get sued in France.
Facebook bought Oculus Rift for $2bn. Yep, two billion dollars. I made them a commercial. They probably won't like it.
A few years ago, there were a lot of news reports about Paris Syndrome, an affliction that hit people whose ideas of Parisian delight were a long way from reality. A correction to this video: tachycardia is accelerated heartbeat, not irregular. The video's also a very early one that, in hindsight, I'm not particularly proud of, but that's not technically a correction. All corrections can be found at https://www.tomscott.com/corrections/
Out in the countryside near Canterbury, on the London to Ramsgate line, there's a strange level crossing - one that requires human effort. It's strange what railway history leaves us with. (Thanks to @quixoticgeek on camera duty!)
Buffer exploits are one of the basic bugs of computer science. They're responsible for glitches in games, for all sorts of viruses and exploits, and any number of technical disasters. Here's the basics of how they work, and a non-technical breakdown of Heartbleed, this week's rather startling attack.
In towns and cities across Britain, Europe, and occasionally the rest of the world, there are still some odd circular scaffolding structures. And younger viewers might not know what they are -- or why there aren't many left.
We've invented a new game: Chess Clock Jenga. It's... well, it's Jenga with a chess clock, but you probably worked that out already.
Despite the rather mythical title to this video, it's actually mostly about technicalities. And not about the dodgy vampire books.
With thanks to all the team at the National Railway Museum, York! You can ride in the passenger section behind Rocket on certain days; get in touch with the Museum at nrm.org.uk for details.
In ninety minutes, one of the most watched TV events of the year will happen. I'm there. It's going to be close. This is what happens if it's too close.
From tracking a point, to analysing pixels, to plotting 3D camera moves: here's how you go from shaky handheld shots to that "gliding through the Matrix" effect. Thanks to Matt Gray for his excellent camera work - he's at http://mattg.co.uk - @unnamedculprit
Angels. Gentle people with wings, and puffy-faced children with serene faces. Right? Wrong. Thrones and cherubim? According to the great Biblical scholars, they're like terrifying aliens.
Originally, I was going to try and tell this story while inside the bubble. That plan lasted until the very first tackle.
Who'd be stupid enough to put an actual nuclear reactor in the middle of London? Well, the Royal Navy, for more than thirty years, at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich -- that place that got blown up in Thor 2. It's not quite as bad as it seems, though. Thanks to David and Oli for sending this in, and to Rob Blake on camera! PS: here's my favourite Thor joke. A man in a Viking helmet with a giant hammer walks into a bar. The bartender says "hey, are you Thor?" And the man replies, "No, I alwayth walk like thith."
"Fail-safe" doesn't mean "we have a backup", it means "if this fails, nobody gets hurt". So I went to see the master of inventions that aren't failsafe, Colin Furze, for a more visual demonstration.
It should never have happened. Defending against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks is Web Security 101. And yet, today, there was a self-retweeting tweet that hit a heck of a lot of people - anyone using Tweetdeck, Twitter's "professional" client. How did it work? Time to break down the code. (Remember the old Myspace worms? They worked the same way.)
In Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse in London -- and a few other science museums around the world -- sits Longplayer, a musical composition designed to last a millennium. How do you keep something running for that long? Thanks to Rob Blake for holding the camera through the many takes. This one took a while... And thanks to Martin Deutsch for reminding me about Longplayer!
A few centuries ago, the arbiter of "local noon" wasn't the mechanical clock, it was the sundial. The pseudoscientific-sounding "equation of time" is how you convert between the two -- and perhaps not the way you'd expect.
If you've tried to tweet a national flag emoji lately -- I can't imagine why -- you'll have noticed that you can only fit 70 of them into a tweet. The reason why is buried in a bit of technical specification, and shows how your phone can lie to you...
Reserve your username now: http://emoj.li - your username, of course, has to be emoji. Matt Gray and Tom Scott present Emojli, the first emoji-only social network.
ALL THE ELECTRICS I USED WERE UNPLUGGED. DO NOT DO THIS. Yep, I'm going all patriotic again. And while I'm willing to bet that a good number of British folks know the first half of this video, there's one thing about slack in here that I only just learned myself.
I know, technically everywhere has the same "gravity", but there's less gravitational pull from the Earth in some places. You try fitting that into a YouTube title. (Filmed at Zip World Titan in Blaenau Ffestiniog. That's not product placement, I paid for my ride just like everyone else, it's just that I know loads of people will ask if I don't mention it.)
I'm getting a bit linguistic in this week's video, from the Welsh village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. And as often happens with linguistics, the answer depends on how you define things. What counts as a word, after all?
I try not to do too many "look at this thing" videos, because it's better to have an interesting backdrop and an interesting fact. This time, though, I'll make an exception. Welcome to Bounce Below. No product placement here, by the way: I booked and paid like everyone else! Bounce Below is at the Llechwedd Slate Caverns in Blaenau Ffestiniog, and you can find out more here: http://www.bouncebelow.net/
Another close call with gravity, this time with a little more coherence and on an alpine slide. Although I'll be honest: this is one of those times where "I told you that story so I could tell you this one".
A brief introduction to password hashing for the uninitiated -- and why you should never trust a site that emails your password back to you!
A filming drone, video goggles, a Mazda MX-5 Miata and a disused airfield. Paul and Oli compete to answer the question: can you drive in a third person view? The stunts in this video were performed by trained drivers on a closed course. Do not try this at home. Paul is on Twitter at @cr3 and http://cr3ation.co.uk - Oli's at @coldclimate and http://www.theapproachablegeek.co.uk/ Thanks to our aerial filming crew, Neil and Rob from Skypower, http://skypower.co.uk - they stepped in at very short notice to make it happen!
No, seriously. Here's how to read text when all you can see is a bunch of 0s and 1s. It's easier than it seems. I... I think I might have gone off the deep end a bit here.
The mammalian diving reflex is a quirk of evolution that means a shock of ice water does the unexpected: it lowers your heart rate. I demonstrate using not a bucket, but a bathtub. This was probably a bad idea.
A £20 ultrasonic fogger, some rum and vodka, and a lot of style: put them together and you get Toby Jackson's (@matingslinkys) Marvellous Booze Fogger, part of Nottinghack's contribution to the Electromagnetic Field festival this weekend. Always drink responsibly!
At dConstruct 2014, I spin a tale of the future: not to make a prediction, but to put our current world in perspective. Thanks to all the dConstruct folks at the Brighton Dome: crew, volunteers, and audience!
Emojli, our emoji-only messenger, has launched! Today at Electromagnetic Field, the UK hacker camp, Matt Gray and I gave a talk about how it was made, why it was made, and why we never want to build anything like it again.
All three of us got the plane down on a perfectly still day with no wind. But an autopilot could do that. That's not nearly as interesting.
I was passing by the Thames Barrier today, and figured it'd be a good time to talk about Scotland -- and how it's quite literally rising up. With "post-glacial rebound" and "glacial isostatic adjustment", though, not the referendum.
Back at the same pub where he taught me to strangle someone, stage-fighting and lovely improv person Norm (@cackhanded) returns to show me how to break someone's neck in the movies. Listen to the warnings on this one, folks.
Remember Heartbleed? Well, this is probably worse. Here's a (somewhat simplified) explanation of what Shellshock actually is. Don't worry: I haven't included instructions on how to actually exploit it. The moral of the story is: keep your security patches up to date!
Why don't we use mixer taps? I've talked about the British plug before, and how it's a wonderful design: British plumbing, on the other hand, still leaves a lot to be desired.
Welcome to the Kelston Toll Road: Fed up with a 14-mile diversion caused by a landslip, businessman Mike Watts has taken a £300,000 risk and set up his own private toll road. It costs £2 for cars to travel the 400 metres -- which is slightly less than the cost of the petrol to take the detour. And the odd thing is this: despite the Kelston Toll Road not being approved by the local council, Mike is still on the right side of the law. Many thanks to Mike Watts and the team at the Kelston Toll Road: they can be found on Twitter at @KelstonTollRoad and, obviously, between Bath and Kelston on the A431!
Those potions in Macbeth are a lot less mysterious than you might think. The Harry Potter ones don't really work, though. Thanks to the Warner Brothers Studio Tour for letting me film, and to Amy Louise Gwynne for spellcasting!
Some folks might leave their heart in San Francisco, but over at Waterside Plaza in New York, there's a much more real and physical souvenir: a part of Bristol, a port town in the south west of England, that literally makes up the foundation of a development near the East River.
On a busy street in Manhattan, there was once a place called Tad's 30 Varieties of Meals -- or possibly Tad's 57 Varieties, or maybe just Tad's. It closed long ago, but the idea was this: diners would pick a frozen meal, take it to their own table, and put it in their new, shiny, space-age microwave oven. Needless to say, it didn't catch on: but there's more history there than you might think.
I was walking through New York and found a couple of seemingly-abandoned liquid nitrogen tanks on the street. Except they weren't abandoned: they were full, making a very quiet hissing noise, and plumbed into... somewhere. I did a bit of research, and found out why they're really there. Thanks to David Bodycombe, who tipped me off to the tanks' existence: I was planning to go looking for them, but instead I just found them, casually sitting on the street corner, while I was headed to the Rockefeller Center...
With many thanks to the South Street Seaport Museum! Visit them at http://southstreetseaportmuseum.org/ or at Pier 16 in New York. These days, if you have dangerous, underwater shoals and you need a lighthouse, you build a big tower and anchor it to the seabed. But a hundred years ago, that technology wasn't there: and so you'd build a lightvessel: a floating lighthouse with a crew of twelve, who's stay out in the dangerous channel in all weathers. At the South Street Seaport Museum, Mike Weiss, the waterfront foreman, gave me a tour around the Lightship Ambrose. (Apologies for the audio on this one: I was shooting quickly, and it turns out it's windy on the East River in New York!)
Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is one of the great moments of American history. There's a myth that he wrote it on the train to Gettysburg -- which isn't true -- but I want to dive into something a bit more linguistic. Those opening words: "four score and seven years ago": why do they sound so resonant? And where might you have heard something similar?
Around the United Kingdom there are odd concrete pillars on the top of hills, built to last for decades if not centuries. They've got a cryptic marking on them, and the words "Ordnance Survey Triangulation Station". What are they? (They're trig points.) Who put them there? (Brigadier Martin Hotine and thousands of people working with him.) And why? (To get an accurate map of the UK, with maths.)
There's been a "Life Pro Tip" going around the internet lately saying that the numbers on toaster dials are actually minutes. I was so sure it was false. Oh, I was so sure. I got four toasters set to "2", and I had one take to film it all in a back room at my office. This is that one take. Thanks to Dan W (@iamdanw) on camera and Jonty (@jonty) on toaster-wrangling! UPDATE: An error pointed out by a couple of folks in the comments: modern toasters likely don't use bi-metallic strips. They either use a capacitor charged through a variable resistor, or specialised silicon. See this great Technology Connections video.
On Swanscombe Peninsula sits Gravesend Weather Station: a Met Office station that consistently records the hottest temperatures in the UK. Is it particularly warm there? Or have they put it in the wrong place? And what'll happen when they have to make room for Paramount London, the coming BBC-linked theme park?
On the winter solstice, I trekked out to a cold and muddy Avebury Henge, out in Wiltshire, to talk about two things: first, the peculiar and mostly-British belief of ley lines, and second, the fact that it's basically a hipster version of Stonehenge: bigger, cooler, and you've probably never heard of it. Oh - and if you want to play about with ley line data yourself, I made http://www.tomscott.com/ley/ a couple of years ago. It still gets me occasional disappointed emails from believers. And yes, I know that's Ben Goldacre in the by-line of the Guardian. He wrote the article about it; Matt Parker did the mathematics, but most of those references have since gone offline. (I'm willing to bet someone'll comment about that without reading the description within the first few hours after this goes up.)
There's an old saying: that it's "too cold to snow". Can that really be true? It started snowing outside, on the day after Christmas, and so I thought I'd do a bit of research, check my facts, then hurry out to film something in the cold.
In 1993, the New York Times called rabies a "shared national nightmare" for Britain. For younger viewers, and those outside the UK -- say anyone who doesn't remember the Channel Tunnel opening -- "rabies" may just be one of those things you hear about on the news sometimes. But there are a lot of people who are proud of Britain being free of it. Here's why. I'm indebted to Pemberton and Worboys' wonderful "Mad Dogs and Englishmen: Rabies in Britain 1830-2000" - http://amzn.to/1xr1x2B - for a lot of fact-checking here, as well as inspiration. It turns out this is a properly fascinating subject: I had to cut so many fascinating things out of my script. (A five-minute monologue to camera on a windy beach isn't interesting.) I recommend you at least get the book from your local library. For example... FACT: The requirement for muzzling dogs extended to tiny, tame lapdogs, but not to "sporting" dogs, those used for hunting -- because the men writing the laws didn't want to muzzle their...
If you travel to Greenwich, stand on the famous Prime Meridian Line -- which is marked with a physical line and a sculpture at the Royal Observatory -- and look at your GPS, it won't read 0° longitude. It'll be slightly out. Who's right? And why?
It's been all over the British news today: developer Paul Price found a bug in photo-crap-maker Moonpig's site, one that might have exposed three million users' personal information. Paul's got a great technical post about it at https://www.darkport.co.uk/blog/moonp... -- but there's no decent non-techie explanation except for the one-paragraph summaries in newspapers. It was a perfect storm of tech incompetence: here's how to avoid doing it yourself.
Despite its reputation as being a Traffic Circle of Hell, Swindon's Magic Roundabout -- like the couple of other "ring junctions" in the UK -- is a triumph of road design. Here's why it works so well.
In the 1970s, at the height of the space race, British Rail -- the government organisation that ran all the UK railways -- patented a flying saucer. How? Why? And could it ever have worked?
Yes, there are more than seven; but they include a few colours that most people can't see, too. We're going to trace a two-minute course through Isaac Newton, cataracts, Claude Monet, and the wonders of evolution.
For those of us who grew up in the age of CGI, green screen is just "a thing that computers do". But how did effects like this work before the age of pixels? With the help of some suitably shiny graphics, here's a quick summary.
Comic Relief raises millions every year to fight poverty around the world. This year, they're asking you to make your face funny for money -- so here I am, in the wind tunnels at the University of Southampton, ready to find out what it's like to stand in a hurricane. Please, if you can: donate or, better yet, fundraise yourself: http://rednoseday.com/ideas/
Thanks to the Transport Research Laboratory for letting me have a test ride on one of the Meridian Shuttles they're testing on the Greenwich Peninsula! If you want a ride, they'll be there, on and off, between March and May -- not often enough to make a special trip worth it, but if you're in the area, see if you can spot one!
This isn't going to give you all the details of how to program a quantum computer: but it'll at least explain what you're doing in the simulator! Play here: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/physics/rese... -- I don't understand it, but then I don't have a qualification in quantum physics! Thanks to Jacques Carolan, and all the team at Bristol University's Centre for Quantum Photonics -- and thanks to Tom Morris for holding the camera!
The idea of a "public road network" is a relatively modern one. After all, the US Interstate System was only finished in 1991, and UK motorways aren't that much older. What if history had taken a different turn? Let's talk about turnpikes, toll roads, and perhaps even zeppelins.
What if you could have a perfect filter for the web? Anything you'd regret seeing or reading: it's gone before you even see it. Welcome to the Bubble.
I took a trip to the University of Bristol, to have a look inside a nanomaterials lab, and to be surprised at a combination of massively expensive equipment and very basic tools... Thanks to the Bristol Centre for Functional Nanomaterials and the Chemical Imaging Facility at the University of Bristol -- and to Kate Oliver and Andy Collins!
Back in the Caledonian orogeny, 400 million years ago, two bits of the Earth's crust began to collide. The result, a long time later, was the Central Pangaean Mountains: and now, you can find their remnants all over the globe.
Don't worry: unlike last time I did a video like this, I'm not actually going to attempt to do any of these. I swore off politics a long time ago! Purdah also applies to civil servants, who basically can't do anything public for weeks. All the government departments' Twitter and Facebook accounts will be going very quiet...
In the foothills of the Dolomites, an hour or so north of Venice, lies Ai Pioppi, a restaurant that's home to an astonishing, giant, human-powered, kinetic-art theme park playground. It was designed and made by a man called Bruno over forty years, and it's free for folks who eat at the restaurant. I'll be honest: I sort of thought it was a myth. The idea of unattended, huge kinetic ride-on sculptures was surely false? There was some evidence: a very artfully-shot documentary, and some shaky tourist footage, but I couldn't quite believe that something this potentially dangerous could still exist. So on Easter weekend, when it was quiet, Paul (@cr3) and I took a road trip to try it. And it's real. It's very, very real. Watch as we try and take a somersault on the Bicycle of Death. And if you don't take the right amount of caution, it can hurt you -- although my eventual injury didn't come through any rides, but just by tripping over by running!
This weekend, the Royal Navy was offering public tours of HMS Defender, one of their new-generation Type 45 destroyers. It's an astonishing ship: about 8,000 tonnes of steel and high-tech equipment designed to defend an entire fleet against air and missile attack. There's another type of attack it's more vulnerable against, though: the sea mine. And by luck, there was a good example of mine defence docked a little way upriver...
In a fjord near Stavanger, in southern Norway, is Preikestolen: Pulpit Rock. It's known as one of the world's scariest tourist attractions, for good reason -- but despite the millions that visit it, it's pretty safe. At least, for current human values of safe. Let's talk about risk, immortality, and what it means to be human. Thanks to my friends Tim, who held the camera, and Matt, who got the shot from the boat below. Tim did manage to dangle his legs off the end: I got a photo of him, while muttering "no, no, no, no" under my breath...
The Delta Works, to the west of the Netherlands, are one of the modern wonders of the world. But there's other, lesser-known infrastructure there too: including the Rozenburg Wind Wall, on the Caland Canal, which turns a dangerous, windy stretch of canal into a much more navigable bit of water. It's a triumph of humanity over nature, and it's astonishing.
Machine translation's a useful tool, don't get me wrong. But if you actually try to use it for regular conversation, it'll fall down really quickly. Why? What makes it so difficult?
On stage at Thinking Digital 2015, I talk about angry people, livestreaming, and how nothing seems to have changed recently. Thanks to all the crew, volunteers, sponsors and technical team at Thinking Digital -- I'm using several camera angles and the audio from their livestream, plus my Periscope broadcast and a GoPro from the front row (thanks Emilia)!
In Spijkenisse, in the Netherlands, are a set of small bridges that most of Europe should recognise instantly: because they're the fictional ones from their banknotes, made real as a wonderful piece of public art and infrastructure.
One comma can make a lot of difference. Language is ambiguous -- but in some very specific ways. Here's how.
There are all sorts of theories about why a string of weird, mostly-Arabic text can crash your iPhone. I've hunted through them, summarised the ones that seemed plausible, and the first part of this is a run-down of what's going on. The second part: well, I'm going to take a punt at explaining why Arabic, in particular, causes this bug -- and hopefully we'll see if I'm right or wrong soon!
Yes, plenty of folks already know about the most complicated borders in Europe, in Baarle-Nassau (the Netherlands) and Baarle-Hertog (Belgium). But why did we end up with this particular system? Why do we have nations in the first place? Most historians would say it goes back to something called the Peace of Westphalia, many years ago...
Kids learn languages really easily, don't they? There's this thing in your brain that just works it out -- but it switches off when you're an adult. Right? Well, maybe. But it's not that simple.
There aren't many paternoster lifts left in the world: they're inaccessible, tough to maintain and a bit more dangerous than a regular lift. But some of them still exist: so if you're ever nearby, do stop by the University of Sheffield's Arts Tower and have a ride up and down. Just don't go over the top. Thanks to Chris Dymond, who was my camera operator for this trip to Sheffield!
Some languages have longer words than others -- but that's not just a simple choice. There's a lot of different ways to mix up morphemes, even if they all mean the same thing in the end.
In a disused quarry at Harpur Hill, near Buxton, there's a bright blue lagoon. It looks like a perfect place to cool off in summer. And it is, if you enjoy skin irritation and fungal infections. But the strange thing is: I arrived expecting to find it black, not blue...
"Word Count" is going to count plenty of things that aren’t words too -- and it doesn’t get to a more fundamental question: what actually is a word?
There's a strange avenue of trees in Richmond Park, ten miles from St Paul's Cathedral; and an odd, wedge-shaped skyscraper in the city. At the New London Model, at the NLA Galleries at the Building Centre, I explain both of these. London is going vertical: but there are quite a few places where tall buildings aren't allowed, and here's why. Thanks to Dan W on camera, and to the team at the New London Model!
You might have heard of the Svalbard Global Seed Vault: it's called the "doomsday vault", the backup of last resort for if the apocalypse happens. Except... well, perhaps that's a bit too dramatic.
(EDIT: Of all the things not to fact-check! It's UTC, not UCT. Which is short for Coordinated Universal Time, because reasons. Well, that's embarrassing.) There's a leap second tonight! And while there's not the Y2K-scale of disaster being predicted for it, there are probably going to be a few problems. Here's why computers have trouble with something that should, in theory, be pretty simple.
In Svalbard, in the Arctic Circle, there's a sundial that works 24 hours a day! Sort of. When it's sunny. Which it wasn't. Basically, don't rely on this for telling the time. CORRECTION: "solstice", not "equinox".
I had an enormous amount of B-roll footage of Svalbard that I couldn't use, and the internet had a lot of questions about how to get there. Time to solve both those problems in one go!
Welcome to Svalbard, a group of islands in the High Arctic, north of Norway; the one place on the planet where carrying a gun is a legal requirement, and for a very good reason.
Robert Llewellyn is lovely! He agreed to drive me at 135mph for this video, and I was in a remote controlled car that he drove over on his channel.
With many, many thanks to all the team at DP World London Gateway (http://londongateway.com - http://twitter.com/LondonGatewayUK )! This isn't a sponsored video: they just went above and beyond to make sure this looked good, and I'm so grateful to them.
The biggest uninterrupted indoor space on the planet, Tropical Islands Resort ( https://www.tropical-islands.de/ ), sits on an old airfield in Germany. How on earth could anyone afford to build something that big... and then use it as a waterpark? Well, the story's a bit more complicated than that. (And full disclosure: this isn't a sponsored video, no money's changed hands, but Tropical Islands were happy to let me in free and give me a ride up on their balloon. I'm grateful to all the team there for a fantastic day!)
Deep in rural Ukraine sits what was once the V.I. Lenin Nuclear Power Station. Now, it's the site of the worst nuclear disaster in human history: and one that still needs to be contained, thirty years later. How do you deal with something that'll be this toxic for so long into the future?
In the abandoned theme park of Pripyat, I have a banana. For scale. Let's talk about the Banana Equivalent Dose. Thanks to Ashley Shepherd for the drone footage
Here's the behind-the-scenes video from Chernobyl week, where Paul (@cr3) and I answer how we got here, and what it's like -- while you see all the B-roll footage that I couldn't fit into the regular videos!
Thanks to Ashley Shepherd for the drone footage - see the full video on his channel here: • 4K Drone Footage from Chernobyl and P... This is the Duga-3 array, inside the Chernobyl Exclusion Zone. It's an incredible piece of Soviet engineering, capable of sending radar pulses so powerful they could see over the horizon. Which, when you think about it, is more complicated than it might initially appear...
There are only a few transporter bridges still working in the world. What are they for? Why weren't there more of them? And why don't we build them any more? Those answers and more, from an unsettlingly high position fifty metres above the River Usk.
Hovercraft were the future. So what went wrong? I had a brief stop on the Isle of Wight last week, and had one chance to get this video. Turns out hovercraft are loud, and you shouldn't stand too close behind one. Correction to this video: a comma got moved in the script. The section about Concorde should read "after one of the planes crashed, in 2003 the airlines decided...". Punctuation's important!
For a few weeks every year, the road through the abandoned village of Imber, in the middle of the military firing range of Salisbury Plain, is open to the public. How can the government seize and evacuate an entire village? And would it be possible now? Thanks to Paul (@cr3) for his camerawork!
A guide for the newly empowered, courtesy of the Superhero Help Academic Foundation Trust, Education Division. Sure, you could jump a few places and fight crime: or you could take over the world. Thanks to YouTube Space London, who offered me time on their science lab set -- and thanks to Matt Gray (http://mattg.co.uk - @unnamedculprit) who directed the shots! Oh, and if you want to see teleportation in fiction done well, have a look at Steven Gould's Jumper series -- the later books really start playing around with physics in fun ways, like building a... well, I'll leave that for you to read. (Amazon UK affiliate cash-in link: http://amzn.to/1gYOEZx )
Time to learn about graveyard spirals, while trying not to be in one! I was so far outside my comfort zone for this. Thank you to Bruce Duncan from the Edinburgh University Gliding Club, who got me safely up and down again, and to Alistair Hammond from the Loughborough University Gliding Club, who managed to talk me into experiencing serious G-forces for the first time in my life! We launched from Bicester Gliding Club. I'd seriously recommend giving it a go if you can!
Thanks to the Environment Agency for letting me film! The invite came via my friend Paul Curry - you should read his write-up, which features a few more details about the boat, its controls, and hunting for eels
On a windy day in Gloucestershire, I find one of the few parts of the once top-secret GPSS aviation fuel pipeline (now called CLH-PS after privatisation) that pokes above ground, and explore the balance between secrecy and safety.
With many, many thanks to the Royal Navy and everyone at HMS Excellent! http://royalnavy.mod.uk How do you train sailors to save a sinking ship? Sure, you can teach them the theory, but there's no replacement for having to hammer softwood wedges into deck and bulkhead splits that are spraying cold, high-pressure water in your face. At HMS Excellent in Portsmouth sits Hazard, a Royal Navy Damage Repair Instructional Unit (DRIU). Every Navy recruit who's going out to sea will have to go through something like this -- and on a much harder level than we did! But then, they'll have had months of training and teamwork beforehand...
In the cloisters of University College London sits noted philosopher Jeremy Bentham: the man who asked to be dissected, stuffed and preserved in his will. WARNING: This video contains a really gross shot of his preserved, severed head.
This is the most ridiculous thing I've built in a long while: a full-size, real-life emoji keyboard, made of 14 keyboards and over 1,000 individually placed stickers. And yet, it's got everything from Unicode 8 -- but not yet the candidates from Unicode 9. I might need another keyboard for them, next year.
In the news today: a link which, when moused over or clicked on, crashes Google Chrome. It's a heck of a bug: but how does it work, and what does it have to do with "null-terminated strings"?
Here's the behind-the-scenes "how I made the emoji keyboard" video! If you haven't seen the original: • Real Life Emoji Keyboard! But the thing is, the truth is basically just "I bodged some stuff together". Which gives me the opportunity to tell some stories...
The Falkirk Wheel sits between Edinburgh and Glasgow, in the southern parts of Scotland, and it's the world's only rotating boat lift. There's some very clever design going on here -- and some physics that goes all the way back to Ancient Greece.
Thanks to all the folks at the Institute for Computational Cosmology! You can find out more here: http://icc.dur.ac.uk/Eagle/
Deep in the Essex countryside lies Kelvedon Hatch, and the Secret Nuclear Bunker that's now an off-beat tourist attraction. Inside, I met up with Greg Foot from the BBC's Brit Lab, and discovered the rather optimistic 1980s plans for tracking nuclear fallout, and helping the survivors of a nuclear war... if there were any.
Under the Elbe river in Hamburg, Germany, lies the Old Elbe Tunnel in St Pauli. Like early 20th century tunnels around the world, it has lifts or stairs to take you down and under the river. But this is on a whole different scale to those you might have seen elsewhere...
In north-west Germany sits Bielefeld, a city complete with castle, cathedral and citizens. Just one catch: according to something that's half urban legend, half in-joke, it doesn't exist. Let's talk about belief and Bielefeld.
Goalball was invented after World War 2 to help rehabilitate blinded ex-servicemen. Nearly seventy years later, it's now a Paralympic sport, where every player has a full blindfold and puts themselves deliberately in the way of a very heavy ball going at 25mph -- and in world-class games, anything up to 60mph. Do try this at home - just with the right safety equipment.
Trademark rights are an interesting thing. You can see this thing from all over the city of Los Angeles: but if you want to use it for anything commercial, well, then you're going to start having some trouble.
Los Angeles needed water, and lots of it. It still does. And that water comes from the LA Aqueduct, masterplanned by William Mulholland. The end of his career, though, wasn't such a triumph. This is the story of the St Francis Dam, and the collapse that stopped Los Angeles from taking over an entire valley. CORRECTION: It actually held back 47 million tonnes of water, 470 times more than I said. I mistook the dam volume for the reservoir volume when researching! Thanks to Josh for pointing that out.
The Rosetta Stone is one of the most famous archaeological finds in history: and it was the key to cracking Egyptian hieroglyphics. And while it took scholars years to work it out, there was one clue in there that helped unlock everything that followed. After hours in the British Museum, I went to explain...
Welcome to Galco's Soda Pop Stop, and the wonderfully knowledgeable John Nese. Thank you to John for his time, and to all the team at the Soda Pop Stop! You can visit them here: http://www.galcos.com/ In Highland Park, in Los Angeles, sits something that most business analysts would say couldn't exist any more: an independent store selling soda pop. 700 flavours of it. There was so much I couldn't include in this thanks to my dodgy camerawork -- the create-your-own soda section, John's absolutely perfect recommendation for a soda I'd like. But hopefully I got all the important parts! If you're ever nearby, do stop in.
In the desert of California, we're flying drones. It's safe out here: but just how many people are flying near airports? The answer: a lot.
Mevea Simulation sit in Lappeenranta in Finland, and they may well make the greatest industrial simulators on Earth. I had to go check them out. And no, this isn't a sponsored video: I found out about them, emailed them out of the blue, and they were nice enough to agree to show us around and use their contacts to get us to the steelworks! (See the behind the scenes video for more!)
In Europe, you're legally protected from "automated decisions". The US Army, in a recent report, may have to take issue with that. What's the battlefield of the future going to look like? And why is there a tank painted bright blue in the middle of London?
In 1987, a German student wrote CHRISTMA EXEC - a virus whose basic mechanisms still work if you port them to today's desktop computers. Why haven't we changed in nearly 30 years? And what could we do instead? Merry Christmas to all, and to all a good night.
On Christmas Day, someone at Steam changed a setting and brought down their whole games platform. I wasn't expecting to do a video this Christmas, but when enough people tweet me, it turns out I can be convinced... (I should note: while Steam have officially confirmed "a caching problem", I've got no privileged information about the specifics. It's possible (but unlikely, I think) this was a misconfiguration at Akamai, or a bizarre server bug that happened to exactly match a much more likely caching misconfiguration error!)
Britain has some of the strongest product placement rules in the world - and it means YouTube vloggers have to declare their advertising before you click on the video. Why? And what did it mean for our version of The Price is Right?
Zebra, pelican, puffin, toucan, pegasus: Britain names our crosswalks after creatures, thanks to historical reasons. But do they actually make you safer? Well, not always.
In Slough, outside the headquarters of Blackberry, I talk about an urban legend that's almost true: the idea that calling 999, the British emergency number, could actually charge your phone battery. It's not quite right, but it's close. (It's easy to make fun of Slough. There's no second part to that, it's just easy to make fun of Slough.)
In Wuppertal, Germany, there's the Schwebebahn: a suspended monorail that carries 80,000 people a day above the streets of the city, and above the river Wupper. It's a wonderful thing: but it wasn't the future of travel, and here's why.
Crash Safari dot com -- and no, I'm deliberately not linking to it! -- crashes your phone. Or your browser. Pretty much instantly. How? And after several months of obscurity, why did it go viral so fast today? And yes, I did have to put this video together really quickly. Thank you SO MUCH to the wonderful Matthew Walster, @dotwaffle on Twitter, who not only found me somewhere to film at short notice but also volunteered to hold the camera. I am massively grateful to him -- thank you!
In Lillehammer, Norway, it's time to make some snow. With science. As well as being one of my regular videos, this is an ad for the 2016 Youth Winter Olympic Games! Subscribe to the Olympic YouTube channel: http://bit.ly/1MFol69 - and see the rest of this description for more links.
The famous Lillehammer Bobsleigh Track! Massive, fast, and working in summer. Here's how. As well as being one of my regular videos, this is an ad for the Youth Winter Olympic Games! Subscribe to the Olympic YouTube channel: http://bit.ly/1MFol69 - and see the full description for more links.
Welcome to one of the toughest winter sports - although it might not look like it. As well as being one of my regular videos, this is an ad for the Youth Winter Olympic Games! Subscribe to the Olympic YouTube channel: http://bit.ly/1MFol69 - and see the full description for more links.
Time is complicated. World records are complicated. Put the two together, and you've got a fight about large clocks between Düsseldorf's Rheinturm, the Mecca Clock Tower, and a laser sculpture from Burning Man.
This video has a correction! Turns out "Nuclear Gandhi" is a myth: https://kotaku.com/civilization-creat... - for all corrections on this channel, see https://www.tomscott.com/corrections - People keep finding bugs in iPhones, and other people keep asking me to make videos about them. So here you go! Here's a tale of binary, of the Unix epoch, and a date beyond the lifespan of the universe.
Back in the 1920s, electricity was generated by hundreds of small companies in towns and cities across the country. They were all different and mostly incompatible: London alone had 24 voltages and 10 frequencies. How did we get from there to the billion-pound tunnel projects of today?
Welcome to Innovative Space Logistics, in the Netherlands: they invited me inside their clean room to see an actual CubeSat satellite that's going into space soon! (No, this isn't a sponsored video: I paid my own way there!) Go look at their site: http://isilaunch.com - and if you need to send something into space, get in touch with them!
In the Thames Estuary, near a town called Sheerness, a few dozen miles east of London, lies a World War 2 shipwreck that contains over 1,000 tonnes of unexploded bombs. Is it a risk to the area? Or is it just an interesting historical artifact? The trouble is, no-one's quite sure...
In the south-east of Estonia, there's 800m of road where you can drive through Russia without a visa. We drove it. This video has a correction: Further research revealed that the camera tower Matt spots is, almost certainly, just a regular cell tower. Or, at least, that's what they want us to think.
Don't worry, I've not gone all DJ Khaled. ???? Let's talk about an interesting quirk of psychology, and a TV "Year of Promise" telethon that didn't stick around too long. EDIT: my conclusions here are questionable.
In the URL of each YouTube video is the 11-character video ID, unique for each video. Can they ever run out? Just how many videos can YouTube handle? To work it out, we need to talk about counting systems, and about something called Base 64.
No, it wasn't called "hacking" back then: it was called "scientific hooliganism". Let's talk about Marconi, Nevil Maskelyne, and a demonstration that didn't go as planned. And go check out the Royal Institution's channel! • Slow Motion Contact Explosive - Nitro... I'm indebted to Sungook Hong's wonderful book "Wireless", which helped me track down some of the more obscure sources here -- and to the British Library, whose incredible archives and microfilm tapes helped me find the original newspapers and journals you see in the video.
On stage at An Evening of Unnecessary Detail - http://aeoud.com - I tell a dramatised and extremely shortened history of emoji, run through what's coming up in 2016, and have a look at what might be coming up for them soon. Also, I use the word "dysentry". Thanks to the Festival of the Spoken Nerd team for inviting me, and to the lovely audience and crew at the Backyard Comedy Club in Bethnal Green!
Wage transparency is a strange concept for most of us: not so in some of the Nordic countries. And while Norway, Sweden and Finland differ in exactly the amount of access they give the public, fundamentally your tax return would be public knowledge there. So how does it affect the world? And is it a good idea?
At the JET reactor at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy -- http://ccfe.ac.uk -- I talk to the engineers about fusion power, being the hottest place in the solar system, deliberate disruptions, and about the surround-sound speakers that give a diagnostic test you might not expect.
At Culham Centre for Fusion Energy -- http://ccfe.ac.uk -- my camera's being held by a robot. Well, not really by a robot. It's being held by a man called John. It's... complicated.
I know, I know, it's a clickbait title. But I stand by it, because the water is so deceptive, and so pretty, and there's a path that leads straight down to it and that jump looks very, very possible... The 12th century legend is the "Boy of Egremont", immortalised in poetry by the famous William Wordsworth. His "The Force of Prayer" is about the Strid and the Boy of Egremont, and the full text is here: http://www.bartleby.com/145/ww342.html Also, I need to make one correction: I say "a hundred metres upstream", but that shot's actually about that far downstream. I couldn't fix that in post, but since the river's basically the same for a mile or so in each direction with no significant confluences, it's a small enough slip that I don't think it's too bad. The amount of water is the same!
Continuing the occasional Weird European Infrastructure Tour: an Italian lift that switches direction from horizontal to vertical. And honestly, until someone pointed it out to me, I could not figure out how this could possibly be done safely. In hindsight, it was kind of obvious. (By the way, the Ascensore Castello d'Albertis-Montegalletto is known by a few names: I went by the one that seems most commonly used online by both Italian-speaking and English-speaking folk.)
Your sports team wins. The confetti drops. And suddenly, the video quality falls apart. Why? Let's talk about interframe compression, bitrate, and unnecessary green screen effects.
In a small town with an unfortunate name, let's talk about filtering and innuendo. And use it as an excuse for as many visual jokes as possible.
This week, TV star Noel Edmonds endorsed the "EMP Pad". He said it could help with cancer -- and the company behind that claim denied it right away. Here's why. (Pull down the description for a full bibliography!)
There's a titan arum - a corpse flower - blooming at the Eden Project in Cornwall. For years, it stores energy: and then for 48 hours, it heats up and sends out the smell of decay and death through the rainforest. And it stinks.
Yes, it's only micrograms of difference, but it's still really weird: until 2018, the kilogram is defined as "the weight of this physical object". So what happens when that object changes?
Victor Gruen is, according to history, the man who invented the shopping mall... but that wasn't quite what he was aiming for. And it seemed like an appropriate day to do a video about suburban sprawl -- happy Independence Day, America!
This may be the most British video I've done in a while! But I saw the news story and immediately wanted to film it: the volunteer-run, narrow-gauge Leadhills and Wanlockhead Railway, in the south of Scotland, has stepped in to replace buses while a road is being resurfaced -- avoiding a 45-mile diversion and meaning that local residents can still get to their neighbouring village. This isn't the first bus replacement train in British history, but it's pretty rare. You can find out more about the Leadhills and Wanlockhead Railway here: http://www.leadhillsrailway.co.uk -- thank you so much to all the volunteers there for the time they spent with me today!
In Crystal Palace Park, in South London, are 150-year-old dinosaur models: the first ever full-size replicas of extinct animals. But they're... well, they're a bit wrong, and they likely always will be. Here's why.
The inevitable Pokémon Go security video. With many thanks to Simon Coxall - http://mushybees.tumblr.com/ - for the wonderful not-Pokémon illustrations, and to Sheila for holding the camera at very short notice! Here's the wonderful breakdown of the technical details by Ari Rubinstein: https://gist.github.com/arirubinstein... And have you, or someone you know, would like a guest slot for Things You Might Know or Amazing Places while I'm off in the Arctic, have a look at https://www.tomscott.com/guest for more details!
"Non-brewed condiment" is what they call it: it's chemically very similar to proper vinegar, a mixture of ethanoic acid, colourings and flavourings, but it's put together by just combining simple chemicals rather than brewing. Hardly anyone knows, and those that do know don't generally care; so here's my question. Does it matter?
Near the village of Hanbury is RAF Fauld. Once it was a munitions dump: now it's a crater. Here's why. (I'm indebted to authors, archivists and aerial crews for this video: here's a full bibliography and list of image credits!)
If your robot-building skills aren't quite up to Battlebots or Robot Wars, then Hebocon might be for you. Described "as a robot sumo-wrestling competition for those who are not technically gifted", the emphasis is on having fun, entertaining the crowd, and "heboiness". At Electromagnetic Field 2016, a maker festival in the UK, I hosted one of the UK's first hebocon contests. I'll be honest: we skipped over a few of the more complicated rules about penalising high-tech robots in favour of entertaining the crowd, but no-one seemed to mind. Not even the actual Robot Wars competitors. Thanks to everyone who helped put this together: Alia Sheikh, Andrew Vine and Robert McWilliam on the film crew, Jim MacArthur who actually ran the show, and all the folks at EMF Camp -- and of course, all the people who built the robots!
( This isn't a sponsored video, but I am massively grateful to all the team at SSE! Go look: http://sse.com/whatwedo/ourprojectsan... , and pull down the description for more. ) As the world switches to renewable energy - and we are switching - there's a problem you might not expect: balancing the grid. Rotational mass and system inertia are the things that keep your lights from flickering: and they only appear in big, old, traditional power stations. Here's why that's a problem, and how we're likely going to fix it. CORRECTION: I say that turbines spin thousands of times "per second" when it should be "per minute".
In a laboratory at Oxford University sits the Oxford Electric Bell, which has spent 176 years constantly ringing. And no-one's quite sure what the battery that powers it is made of...
"Hi Tom, I've got two of my sister's teeth dissolving in cola." That was the best pitch I got for guest videos - and so please welcome Chase from ScienceC, to talk about pH, TA, and show off some really disgusting close-ups of rotten teeth!
Welcome to Thames Town, the fake-British ghost town in China. Why did they build it? Who lives there? And why is it all so quiet? Today, Collin from the Collin Sphere Travel Vlog is guesting on this channel to investigate!
Inés is a PhD student researching insect flight at Oxford, and enjoys making videos about the fun and curious bits of science in her spare time!
At Qaanaaq, in Greenland, there's IS18: an infrasound station that's quietly listening for nuclear tests — or any other large bang. Here's what, why, and a few words the man who, for years, has been quietly keeping it running. Pull down this description for more! I'm here because of Chris Hadfield's Generator Arctic - go check out everyone else who was on the trip, and have a look at tickets for their show at Massey Hall, Toronto, on November 12th! http://generatorevent.com
Glaciologists will find this video obvious. Everyone else... well, maybe I slept through a bit of sixth-grade geography, but I didn't know this, and I reckon I should have done. Pull down the description for more! I'm here because of Chris Hadfield's Generator Arctic - go check out everyone else who was on the trip, and have a look at tickets for their show at Massey Hall, Toronto, on November 12th! http://generatorevent.com
I thought I knew who got to the North Pole first. It turns out that it's a lot more complicated than you might think. [Pull down the description!] Frederick Cook; Robert Peary; Roald Amundsen. They all have claims, and they can all be disputed for one reason or another...
Jakob emailed me when I said I was headed to the Arctic, offering to help out with a video. I don't think he knew what he was signing up for! Thank you so much to both Jakob Schytz and John Davidsen: we had only a few minutes to film this before I had to be on the last Zodiac boat out of town, so I'm really happy with the result!
Inuktitut syllabics are brilliant. A writing system that's not an alphabet, but something really clever: an abugida, one designed from scratch for a language very unlike anything European. [Pull down the description!]
There are a few communities, up in northern Canada, with a dark history and a worrying future. Resolute is one of them, sat at the east of the once-legendary Northwest Passage. In a few years, it might be a tourist destination. Here's why. [Pull down the description!]
Tucked away in a valley in the Allegheny Mountains in West Virginia, is this: the Green Bank Radio Telescope, the largest steerable radio telescope in the world. And there are some rather special rules for the area around it... Thanks to Justin Richmond-Decker and Mike Holstine at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank for inviting me over and letting us film at the Telescope on one of their maintenance days! For more about the Green Bank Observatory: https://science.nrao.edu/facilities/gbt Want a tour? You can! (Although you won't be allowed up the telescope!) https://greenbankobservatory.org/visit/
The Morgantown Personal Rapid Transit system threads its way through West Virginia University, taking thousands of people a day around the campus, non-stop. It's a system that was meant to be the future: so why isn't it?
El Caminito del Rey, the King's Little Pathway, is now a tourist attraction near Malaga, in southern Spain. But once, it brought adrenaline junkies here - sometimes fatally. Now it's safe: but the internet doesn't really know that yet...
In Sanlúcar de Guadiana, in Spain, there's a zip line called Límite Zero: the only cross-border zip wire in the world, landing in Alcoutim, Portugal. You land about an hour before you set off. It seemed like a good time to talk about programming.
In the Aljarafe region of Spain, there's PS10 and PS20: concentrated solar power towers. They're huge towers surrounded by heliostats: movable mirrors that track the sun and reflect its light onto a giant boiler. They are beautiful, but they're also controversial: here's why.
Herman Sörgel wanted to create the largest civil engineering project the world has ever seen: a colossal dam across the Strait of Gibraltar, lowering the Mediterranean sea. There were, of course, a few problems with this.
In a cemetery in Huelva, in Spain, is the grave of Major William Martin, of the British Royal Marines. Or rather, it's the grave of a man called Glyndwr Michael, who served his country during World War 2 in a very unexpected way... after his death.
Fashion-tech designer Anouk Wipprecht has built a Spider Dress, which reacts based on how close you're standing and how quickly you approached. It's based on 'proxemics': the study of personal space... although how much of that counts as science is an open question. Let's talk about Edward T Hall, about what counts as science, and what happens if you get too close to someone.
At Autodesk's Pier 9 workshop in San Francisco -- and no, this isn't an ad, pull down the description for more! -- there are giant robot arms using welders to 3D print with stainless steel. Which seemed like a good place to talk about programming abstractions, high-level languages, training pendants, and just how safe something like a robot arm needs to be. FULL DISCLOSURE: Autodesk were good enough to cover my travel to San Francisco, but they haven't paid me and they had no control over the script, the content or the final cut! You can see more about Pier 9 at http://www.autodesk.com/pier-9/
At the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California, there sits a small teapot. It's the world's most famous teapot, after a computer graphics researcher called Martin Newell digitised it. You've probably seen it: here's its story. And thanks to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California: you can visit them online here: http://www.computerhistory.org/
In Gävle, Sweden, every year they build Gävlebocken, an enormous traditional Swedish Christmas straw goat. And every year, someone tries to burn it down. Here's to holiday traditions.
John Reber had a plan: to dam the San Francisco Bay. He convinced some politicians - and it took the US Army Corps of Engineers, and the Bay Model they built in Sausalito, to prove him not just wrong, but dangerously wrong.
In this small city near San Francisco, the dead outnumber the living by a thousand to one. There's some gruesome history here - and a few questions for the future.
Perpetual motion machines are badly named. And impossible. But that hasn't stopped a lot of people trying to build them. Sure, you could try and argue physics: but there's a more common-sense reason why free energy's not coming any time soon.
Brace yourselves, we're about to get into some serious detail about telephone systems. Thanks to all the folks at Seattle's Museum of Communications! http://museumofcommunications.org/
At the University of Salford's Energy House, all the energy use is monitored and controlled, allowing researchers to experiment with all sorts of insulation and energy-saving techniques. But how to control for factors like sun, wind and rain? The solution: put the whole house inside an environmental chamber: a building inside a building that means the weather is controlled, repeatable, and part of the science.
The Christmas Number One is a British tradition: but it's one that's having to go through some changes -- because not many people buy music any more. Here's how the charts are calculated these days, and why listening to "All I Want For Christmas" on repeat isn't going to change who wins. Thanks to Martin Talbot and all the team from the Official Charts Company, who agreed to an interview on less than two hours' notice for this video! You can visit them here: http://www.officialcharts.com/ or on Twitter at @officialcharts
Switzerland has a reputation for being... not paranoid, exactly, but certainly careful with their own safety. Zurich exemplifies this: not just with its fallout shelters, but with an entire backup water system. Just in case the world ends.
If you're sitting on a boat in Lake Constance, are you in three countries at once? Or just in one? Does it even matter? Because strangely, it turns out there are parts of the world where no-one really minds when international borders are not just ignored, but are completely undefined.
I thought about saying "secret patterns" or "mysterious patterns" in the title, but that'd be a lie: they're just mostly unknown! So let's talk about tactile paving, about design, about accessibility, and about those bumpy bits that you stand on when you're crossing a British street. // Thanks to Richard Holmes and the team from the RNIB!
In Bremen, Germany, there's a tower more than a hundred metres high: it's called the Fallturm, or the Drop Tower. If you want a cost-effective way to test an experiment in microgravity -- and your project can survive some pretty strong deceleration -- then this might well be a good place for you. And then there's the slingshot...
The Jelling Stones, thousand-year-old Viking runestones, sit in the town of Jelling in Denmark. They tell the tale of Harald Bluetooth: one of the first kings of Denmark. Here's why his name is on your phone.
Near the town of Herning in Denmark sits Elia, a giant metal dome sculpture by Ingvar Cronhammar that occasionally spouts flame. I reckon it's the world's most frustrating piece of art, and here's why.
One woman's face is all over New York, although you've probably never heard of her. This was written with Amor Sciendi: go check it out!
I never thought of sand as a non-renewable resource, but there's only a limited supply: and to make things worse, it keeps getting washed into the sea. At Cape May, New Jersey, the US Army Corps of Engineers have just finished rebuilding a beach: here's why.
At YouTube Space New York, there's the Mixed Reality lab: a virtual reality setup using an HTC Vive, a third controller, and some fancy compositing equipment. It's brilliant, and I got to visit and look behind the scenes.
In Belgium, there's an underground beer pipeline. Yes, it's inherently difficult to film something that's underground, but I headed over to Bruges to investigate anyway.
Yttrium, terbium, erbium and ytterbium were all named after one small town on the Stockholm archipelago. But it could have been different, and there could have been many other names. From a snowy bit of Sweden, and a mine that's a historical landmark, let's talk about discovery, chemists, and a man named Gadolin. Thanks to Paul (@cr3) on camera, and to @de_isja, @Ekkelos, @chemician and Chris Armstrong for proofreading the chemistry in the script!
Hot and cold water sound different when you pour them. When Steve pitched this to me, I didn't believe it, and then he sent me a couple of sound files, at which point I knew this was going to be the first of the guest videos!
The Hyatt Regency Hotel collapse was a disaster that changed engineering: it's taught in colleges and universities as a way to make it clear: you check and double-check everything. Something that seems like a subtle change can cause a catastrophic failure if it's not thoroughly checked first!
Amy brings with her one of the greatest props I've ever seen: an actual piece of Kapton foil from Apollo 11. This tiny little sliver of material went around the moon, and helped keep three people safe as they blasted out of our atmosphere and back. Here's why it was there, and why it changed colour!
It's been a long time since I did a linguistics video, but today Alex has stepped in and done a brilliant job. Song translations usually suck: and it's because you either have to lose the meaning or the sound. Let's talk about syllabic vs melisamatic singing, about music, and about Beethoven.
Splenda is a "zero-calorie sweetener", at least in the US. Or at least, that's what it says on the packet. With the help of some Benedict's Solution, and his chemistry teacher, Alex is going to do some food science.
At the University of Manchester's High Voltage Laboratory, we see what happens when a DJI Phantom 3 drone gets hit with an electrical impulse of 1.4MV - basically, a lightning strike. Actually, two Phantom 3 drones. We had a backup.
The Voyager 1 space probe is the furthest man-made object from Earth, and the fastest. But right now, it's moving towards us. Relatively speaking. At Mission Control for the Deep Space Network, inside NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, let's talk about why -- and about how to stay in touch with something so small and so far away.
The Mars Yard, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, is one of the closest simulations of Mars that we've got. Admittedly, there's a bit more atmosphere and gravity, but it's the only way to test what might happen before sending commands to a rover that's light-minutes away.
There's a reason that a lot of planets in American science fiction look the same: they're all filmed in the same places. But why those particular locations? It's about money, about union rules, and about the thirty-mile zone -- or as it's otherwise known, the TMZ.
The radio telescope at the Arecibo Observatory in Puerto Rico can do something that most radio telescopes can't: it can transmit. And that's useful for something other than sending messages to the stars: it might just help save the world one day.
The mysterious YouTube algorithm. It's confused people for years, and will continue to do so. So why isn't YouTube more transparent? It used to be that they wouldn't tell anyone how it works - but now, it's that they can't. Let's talk about deep learning algorithms, neural networks, and search engine optimisation.
Near Bodø in Norway, there's the strongest tidal current in the world: Saltstraumen Maelstrom, a constantly-changing rush of whirlpools, boils and vortices. It might not be quite the whirlpools of myth and legend, but it's still an impressive sight to see.
Inside the beautiful Alnwick Garden, behind a locked gate, there's the Poison Garden: it contains only poisonous plants. Trevor Jones, head gardener, was kind enough to give a guided tour!
I'm not saying this would be a good idea, and it's definitely not a prediction of the future. It's just a story. I think. An Evening of Unnecessary Detail runs once a month from January to June at the Backyard Comedy Club in London: thanks to all the team there, including Matt Parker and Hannah Fisher! Tickets at http://aeoud.com
In Helsingborg, Sweden, the Museum of Failure has just opened. It's just one room, but inside, curator Samuel West has assembled some of the world's greatest commercial disasters - and also a few things that just didn't work out the way anyone planned.
Landing on a runway surrounded by fire might not sound like a good idea, but it's better than trying to land without modern instruments in thick fog. This was FIDO: "Fog, Intensive, Dispersal Of" (originally "Fog Investigation and Dispersal Operations"), the Royal Air Force's strange but brilliant scheme that saved thousands of air crew lives. Unlike a lot of World War 2 experiments, this one not only worked, but was deployed around the country. It would have been used in peacetime, too, except for one rather big problem: petrol's really expensive.
I've filmed a paternoster lift; I've filmed the strange Genoa elevator that sort-of goes sideways. So when I got an email from Thyssenkrupp, an elevator company, saying "come and see our Multi elevator that actually goes sideways", I wasn't going to turn it down. Full disclosure: Thyssenkrupp paid for my travel to Germany, but that's all they did. I'd got in touch with them last year asking to see this when it opened; their PR firm replied, offering to fly me out. They had no editorial control over this, and didn't get to see it before it was uploaded!
Encryption backdoors - breaking WhatsApp and iMessage's security to let the government stop Bad Things - sounds like a reasonable idea. Here's why it isn't.
Last week I made a video surrounded by old-school CRT monitors and televisions - cathode ray tubes. And I completely forgot to remove the high pitched whine they produce. Here's why: why they make that noise, and why I didn't notice it.
I can show a brighter pink. I can show a more saturated pink. But I can't show you this pink. Not quite. More about Stuart Semple and his pigments: https://www.culturehustle.com/ [that's his store, we overloaded Stuart's personal web site, http://www.stuartsemple.com, within a few minutes...!] (I reached out to Anish Kapoor's studio twice for comment; I didn't get any response.)
There's an MRI scanner in Cardiff that can look at how the brain's wired up: your connectome. It's nowhere close to science fiction singularity brain-uploading, but it might well be part of unlocking new medical treatments in the years to come. Thanks to Prof. Derek Jones, and to all the team at CUBRIC : http://sites.cardiff.ac.uk/cubric/ -- and to the Cardiff University film crew with their gimballed camera!
There are a lot of opinions on how to hire coders, and most of them are terrible. The opinions, that is, not the coders. But a basic filter test to make sure someone can do what they say they can: that seems reasonable, and FizzBuzz is one of the more common tests. Even now, interviewers use it. Let's talk about why it's tricky, and how to solve it.
I'm at the top of Mount Evans, more than 14,000 feet - 4.3km - above sea level. This is definitely a mountain: but why doesn't the smaller summit next to it also count? Let's talk about prominence. (Just not for too long, I'm getting low on oxygen.)
Welcome to the US National Ice Core Laboratory in Denver, Colorado, where there's a giant freezer filled with 20km of ice cores from Greenland and the Antarctic. Here's why. Thanks to everyone at the US National Ice Core Laboratory! You can find out more about them here: http://icecores.org/ The Ice Core Laboratory is supported by the National Science Foundation: https://www.nsf.gov/
The National Institute of Standards and Technology, NIST, sells Standard Reference Materials, or SRMs for short. They're analysed, quantified, and certified substances: everything from metals, to elements, to food items... to, yes, freeze-dried urine.
In Weldon Spring, Missouri, there is a strange, grey, windblasted seven-storey pile of rocks. It's the Weldon Spring Site: a nuclear and toxic waste dump on the site of an old uranium processing factory. And you can walk on it: it's technically a tourist attraction. That was going to be the whole of my video... and then I did some more research.
Computers store text (or, at least, English text) as eight bits per character. There are plenty of more efficient ways that could work: so why don't we use them? And how can we fit more text into less space? Let's talk about Huffman coding, Huffman trees, and Will Smith.
In Crawfordsville, Indiana, there's a rotary jail: an invention that, with hindsight, should probably never have been built. But it was, here and in other towns across the United States. It might have sounded like a good idea on paper, but in practice, it had a few unfortunate problems... including occasional accidental amputations.
In the archives of Yale University, there's a 367-year-old bond from the water authority of Lekdijk Bovendams, in the Netherlands. And it's still paying interest.
On the river Rhine in Switzerland, there are reaction ferries: boats with no engine, no paddles, no onboard motive power at all. Here's how they work -- and a question about what other simple ideas are out there.
In Lancaster, California, there's a musical road. When you drive over it, it plays the William Tell Overture. Unfortunately, it's out of tune. Here's why.
In Calipatria, California, the town is below sea level -- but their flag pole isn't. But what does "sea level" mean? Is it just theory, or is there more behind it?
Near Slab City, California, a man painted a hill. It was outsider art: Leonard Knight had no training and no great masters to imitate. But somehow, he created something that resonates with the world. This is the story of Salvation Mountain. Thanks to Ron and to all the team at the mountain; you can find out more about them here: http://salvationmountain.org/
At the headquarters of Cloudflare, in San Francisco, there's a wall of lava lamps: the Entropy Wall. They're used to generate random numbers and keep a good bit of the internet secure: here's how. Thanks to the team at Cloudflare - this is not a sponsored video, they just had interesting lava lamps! There's a technical rundown of the system on their blog here: https://blog.cloudflare.com/lavarand-...
I'm visiting the University of Iowa's National Advanced Driving Simulator, to answer a question: how unsafe is it for me to vlog while driving? Is vlogging while driving dangerous? The team at the simulator are the experts to ask.
The town of Staufen, in the south-west of Germany, has a problem: a drilling operation in 2007 that went very wrong. Half a metre of movement might not sound like much, but in this town, that's enough for the buildings to crack and fall apart.
It's not your imagination; hold music on phones really did sound better in the old days. Here's why, as we talk about old telephone exchanges and audio compression.
There's a link from a 13th century legend, to a 16th century insult book, to a 19th century writer, to a 20th century comic book hero. And it starts in a small village near Nottingham, in the time of Robin Hood. Here's why Batman comes from Gotham City. (I am reliably assured that the modern-people of Gotham are not, in fact, fools.)
The European Space Agency offered me a seat on their zero-g plane: it's an Airbus A310 that flies parabolic maneuvers, pulling up into the sky and then arcing back down, giving its passengers about 20 seconds of weightlessness (or "microgravity") at a time. Here's how it works. Some people would have filmed their script on the ground, and just messed about while floating. I decided to go for something a bit more challenging.
While I was trying to read a script to a camera in zero-g, the student researchers behind me were trying to prove their own ideas -- or rather, to disprove their "null hypothesis". Let's talk about how science works -- and have a look at one of the teams flying in that plane.
Hold on tight, because with a stabilised camera shot and a pair of sunglasses, you're about to see a video that works in both 2D and 3D at the same time. The technique's called the Pulfrich Effect, and this is how it works.
At the Richard F. Caris Mirror Lab, under the football stadium of the University of Arizona, there's an enormous rotating furnace, keeping tonnes of glass heated as it forms the mirrors for the Giant Magellan Telescope. Here's a look inside!
There isn't one universal sign language for all: even British and American sign languages have very little in common. Here, with full subtitles, is someone actually qualified to explain why!
Solresol is a language, invented out of whole cloth by Jean-François Sudre in the 19th century, that used seven musical notes to create all the words that he thought you'd ever need. It did work: so why aren't we all speaking in notes right now?
William Lyon Mackenzie King was a sexually repressed, hypocritical, guilt-ridden, prostitute-visiting momma's boy who was exceptionally weird. He was also, perhaps, Canada's greatest prime minister. This week, Evan talks about legacy, and about how you don't need to be a good person to be a good politician.
London City Airport's getting a new control tower: but it's just going to be a large mast with 14 high-definition cameras on it. The actual tower will be 80 miles away, in the headquarters of NATS near Swanwick. It feels questionable: but is it?
I was going to tell a science fiction story about faceswapping, and mass blackmail. Then the news broke about unethical faceswapping videos, and software designed and marketed for creating them: and I realised the future had arrived faster than I thought. (This was originally a talk given at An Evening of Unnecessary Detail earlier this week, but I managed to mangle the audio recording settings, so I rerecorded it in a muddy park! It's not the same without the audience, but hopefully it's close enough.)
In Göttingen, Germany, there's a four-tonne steel ball that can be raised up a 14-metre tower -- and then dropped in less than two seconds, crashing back to earth. It makes tiny, artificial earthquakes: here's why.
In the Quadratestadt of Mannheim, Germany, the streets aren't named: instead, the blocks are. It's an exception to a rule that most people don't even think about — especially not mapping companies. (Thanks to João Correia for sending me this idea back in 2015!)
Human error has launched massive barrages of fireworks at the wrong time before. We're doing it deliberately!
I'd never heard of moiré effect beacons until I got an email asking me about them. It seemed like a really clever idea - but it was really hard to research. Or at least it was, until I stumbled upon one magic phrase that revealed its history. It turns out this thing's called an "Inogon leading mark" or "Inogon light" -- Inogon, not Inogen -- and it's a Swedish invention from the 1980s. But there's still a question: why is being used to mark an undersea cable, instead of guiding people home? (Full disclosure: there were some weird strobing effects from the light that only showed up when I got the footage into the edit, so the image you see here has been digitally stabilised so it appears the same way on screen as it does in person!)
Many people sent me this story: it covers my favourite topics of power grids and temporal anomalies. But when the mainstream press have already covered it, how could I add something more? The answer: by adding another pet topic, Unnecessary British Patriotism. And a teasmade.
The Red Arrows are the Royal Air Force's aerobatic display team - the best in the world. They fly Hawk T1 jets, powering through the sky at hundreds of miles per hour, pulling high-G maneuvers with just a few metres between their wingtips. Here's how they do it: and part of it's a skill that you probably already know.
In Weeki Wachee Springs State Park, Florida, there's a mermaid show -- and there has been for 70 years. It's one of the United States' oldest roadside attractions, and it still does three shows a day. At least, provided the local wildlife doesn't get in the way.
US Car Number 1, the Ferdinand Magellan, sits in the Gold Coast Railway Museum in Miami. It's 120 tonnes of bulletproof, armoured railcar: a train carriage designed to move the President of the United States around the country in safety and style. At least, it was, until other transport came along to do a better job.
As far as I can find, no-one has actually made a International Standard Cup of Tea - ISO 3103 or BS 6008 - for the internet before. Lots of people have talked about it, but that's easy. Making one? That requires precision... and some specialist equipment.
At the Royal Air Force training centrifuge in Farnborough, pilots learn how to avoid G-LOC: g-induced loss of consciousness. Let's talk about g-force, about jerk, and about how to keep circulation flowing to your brain.
The title says it all, really. Thanks to Barry from My Virgin Kitchen - go see him cook and test three different garlic breads here: • 'Out of this world' Garlic bread ft T... - and to Steve from Random Aerospace, http://www.randomengineering.co.uk/Ra... ! Pull down the description for more details. This started as a conversation in a pub a few weeks ago, and turned into one of the more ridiculous videos I've ever done. We send home-made garlic bread skyward on a balloon; exposed it to the stratosphere, 35km up; successfully returned it to earth in a protective box; and then ate it. It tasted... cold.
"_If you touch the????black point then your whatsapp will hang_", says the message that's being sent around, and it's right. It's a text rendering bug, the same as many others -- which isn't interesting. But the characters it's using, Unicode RTL and LTR marks, are worth knowing about.
Over the North Atlantic, there's no radar coverage: so how do air traffic controllers keep planes safe? The answer, at least in part, can be found at Nav Canada's Gander Area Control Centre in Newfoundland. The North Atlantic Tracks are like freeway lanes in the sky, if freeway lanes were stacked a thousand feet on top of each other.
In Quebec, Canada, there's a town called Asbestos. It's an alarming name, one that conjures up images of lung disease and mesothelioma. So why haven't they changed it? [Update, October 2020: they've changed it! It's now Val-Des-Sources. https://www.npr.org/2020/10/20/925820... ] Dr Jessica van Horssen's book, "A Town Called Asbestos", was invaluable for my research. Its ISBN is 9780774828420, and it can be ordered from most libraries and bookstores.
Rue Canusa (or Canusa Avenue) is a street that's split in two by a border: the northern part is in Stanstead, Canada, and the southern part is in Derby Line, USA — and border crossings here aren't as easy as they used to be.
The St Lawrence Burns were a series of deliberate fires in the soon-to-be-demolished village of Aultsville, Ontario, which was due to be flooded to make way for the St Lawrence Seaway. The results changed the way buildings are constructed around the world, and saved lives.
If you're in Canada, you need good winter boots. But how do you know whether they're actually safe, or whether you'll fall over the first time you step on ice? This is WinterLab, part of the Challenging Environment Assessment Laboratories at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, where they're testing winter shoes with science.
Giant Mine sits near Yellowknife, in the Northwest Territories of Canada. Once it was a productive gold mine, but after the gold ran out, the mining company went bankrupt and left the government to clean up the mess: enough arsenic trioxide dust to kill everyone on Earth. The solution: freezing it, at least for now.
Until recently, Canada didn't have a road link to the Arctic Ocean. But last year, the all-weather Inuvik-Tuktoyaktuk Highway opened, which meant that finally the country was connected "from sea to sea to sea". I set out to drive it, but it didn't quite go how I planned.
In the far north of Canada sit the DEW Line stations: "Distant Early Warning". Built in the 1950s, these were the sites that would have sounded the alarm if the Soviet Union ever attacked North America. Or at least, they were until they went obsolete just a few years later.
In Dawson City, a small mining town in the Yukon, sits the Downtown Hotel. Inside there is a tradition that tourists have been trying out for decades: the Sourtoe Cocktail.
In the last few years, wildfires have been getting worse - and, oddly, it's because humans have been preventing them. From a helicopter above the forests of British Columbia, and from the Tree Ring Lab at UBC, let's talk about how we should just let some wildfires burn.
There are some stories in Canada that I'm not qualified to tell. Pull down the description to find out about them.
90s VHS video filters are in fashion right now, and most producers are using the same filter as everyone else. Why does the filter look like it does? To answer that question, I went to talk to the person that wrote it!
At Reed College in Portland, Oregon, there's a TRIGA nuclear reactor, used for research. You can stand next to it and watch the blue glow from the bottom of a deep swimming pool. I had to visit.
Over on the RAF Starrship channel, I'm talking about the history of radar: • A Brief History of Radar with Tom Sco... - but over here, we're testing a 90-year-old piece of technology that was meant to be part of Britain's air defence. The Sound Mirrors, on Romney Marsh, were built in the late 1920s as a way to amplify the sound from aircraft engines over the English Channel. We're flying a bit closer than that, with a drone.
The White Horse, in Uffington, is one of the oldest surviving works of art in Britain: carved into a hillside in Oxfordshire 3,000 years ago. Every year, it's rechalked by volunteers co-ordinated through the National Trust, a line of maintenance going back to before England had written history.
In Porthcurno, Cornwall, there's an old telegraph cable landing station. It's how Britain talked to the Empire -- and it's now a museum. But the technology here isn't quite as obsolete as you might think.
The first part of "How To Be Popular On The Internet*" is all about an old saying: if at first you don't succeed, try, try again. And if you do succeed... well, you're still going to need to do that.
I've put the North-o-Meter, and some other old UsVsTh3m games, up at https://www.tomscott.com/usvsth3m/ - I've disabled the sharing buttons, though. No-one needs them to go viral again. In the middle part of "How To Be Popular On The Internet*", it's time to talk about giving the people what they want, about getting noticed, and about the north-south divide.
On a rainy Scottish island called Jura, it's time to talk about the Manual, about long-term sustainable success, and about not having just that one catchphrase. The term "viral" has fallen out of fashion in the last few years, which is why this series wasn't called "going viral". And in truth, that's not what you want to do. Post Audio by Emi Paternostro, http://proximitysound.com Jimmy Cauty and Bill Drummond were better known as the KLF (or the Timelords, or the JAMs, or...). Their Manual is out of print, but I'm sure that won't stop enterprising people from tracking down versions of it, or footage of their burn. The music for this series has been an instrumental version of "Game of Taking Chances" by Johannes Hager feat. Josefin Backrud, from Epidemic Sound
The Global Vehicle Target is the new standard for testing autonomous driving and crash test systems. To cameras and radar, it looks like a car: but if you hit it, it'll fly apart. So if your emergency braking doesn't quite work... well, this is what happens.
For years, moderators of online forums and chat rooms have wielded a metaphorical "banhammer" to deal with anyone who steps out of line. Now it's real. Well, a bit more real, anyway.
Back in the 1920s, wingwalking claimed lives. Daredevils would move around on the top of a plane's wings, in mid-flight, often without any harness or any safety line. Maybe they'd be able to clip onto something during takeoff and landing, but maybe not. There are still a few of those true daredevil wingwalkers out there in the world, but in the 21st century... it's usually a bit different.
In the 1830s, two French brothers, François and Joseph Blanc, pulled off the first telecoms scam in history. The optical telegraph, a line of semaphore towers stretching from hilltop to hilltop, was for government use only: but something as simple as the law wasn't going to get in their way.
That's right, we're kicking Season 2 of the Basics off with a technical episode about a somewhat-obsolete technology! IT'S PARTY TIME. Wait, no, not party time. IT'S CODE TIME. Close enough. Let's talk about seven-segment displays, and about the longest word you can write with them.
There's a reason music videos look strange. I could just talk about framerate, cuts and continuity... or I could get an actual music video director. And a leaf blower.
Ogham is an old Irish script made by carving notches into stones. It fell out of use more than a millennium ago - but it's an interesting exception to a linguistics and computer-science rule that I'd never even realised existed. Let's talk about the Ogham Space Mark.
Every month or so, somewhere in London, a manhole explodes. It's so common that it doesn't make the news unless it's spectacular or someone gets injured. Here's why, complete with gratuitous pyrotechnics.
Dinorwig Power Station, otherwise known as Electric Mountain, is a pumped-storage hydro station in Llanberis, Wales. And yes: it's Britain's largest battery. Here's how it works, and why some of the things you think you know about TV pickups might not be so true any more.
Sometimes, numbers on sites like YouTube and Twitter jump up and down; subscriber counts lag, like-counts bounce all over the place. Why is it so hard for computers to count? To answer that, we need to talk about threading, eventual consistency, and caching. Thanks to my proofreading team, and to Tomek on camera!
Technically, the Inchindown oil tanks in Invergordon, Scotland, have the world's longest reverberation, but that makes a much worse title. We tested them with a loud noise and some very sensitive microphones.
[See pinned comment for an important update.] In a field near Elberton, Georgia, USA, sit a set of mysterious standing stones: mysterious not because they're ancient, but because they were funded by someone anonymous in 1980, perhaps as a message to any survivors of the end of the world.
The Tree That Owns Itself in Athens, Georgia is well known. The other Tree That Owns Itself in Eufaula, Alabama, really isn't. It's the same story in a different place. Why?
In the last week of December, 2028, humanity forgot about more than a century of pop culture. You've probably never thought about it, and never found it strange — but the reason is an artificial intelligence called Earworm.
Some American cities use buses, or trams, or trains. Peachtree City, Georgia, has a different solution: it's not quite public transit, but a hundred miles of golf cart tracks helps to keep cars off the road.
From January, every citizen of England and Wales will have a new social credit score. Advice from the Department for Community and Culture. [This video is fiction. See the pinned comment.]
This is the story of one of the best, and also one of the worst, text messages I've ever received. It's about harm, about consequences, and about the responsibilities that designers, coders and hackers have to make sure we treat other people with care.
WASSUP KINGDOM, it is time to GET JACK BACK for last week. Callum has Jack's backup and it's time for some FUN
The tourist guides promote it as Georgia's Little Grand Canyon: but this is a scar on the Earth, caused by humans either not understanding or not caring about geology. Is it natural? Or man-made? Or both?
The Multi Axis Trainer, or MAT, is an icon of space exploration and astronaut training. But other than spinning round kids at Space Camp: what's it actually used for?
The Bajau people of Borneo can hold their breath longer than almost anyone else on the planet. How? Why? And how can the rest of us learn to hold our breath for longer? Rohin from Medlife Crisis explains.
You've got a painting and two nails. Can you use both nails to hang the painting so that if either nail is removed, the painting falls? That's the puzzle: in this week's guest video, Jade's going to solve it with maths.
Inside his homemade, hermetically-sealed, airtight biodome, Kurtis Baute is already out of breath and surrounded by more carbon dioxide than he should be. And that's going to affect a lot of things -- including how smart he is.
We're all used to seeing MRI scans of brains. But how do they work? Can you really "see" brain activity, or read someone's mind? Alie and Micah from Neuro Transmissions went to get scanned -- and ended up having some fun with 3D printing, too.
High-frequency traders have a few tactics on stock exchanges: but simply put, they gather price information faster than anyone else, sometimes even faster than the markets themselves, and use that to make a tiny profit many, many, many times. There are all sorts of solutions: but it turns out there's a simpler one that involves physics.
Pitch correction: it can make terrible singers sound decent, brilliant singer sound mediocre, or Cher sound like a robot. But how does it work? And is it possible to explain that without actually trying to understand Fourier transforms?
Measuring time is a complicated thing. Computers, banks, and stock markets in Denmark all use UTC, the international standard: but according to the law, they shouldn't. UPDATE, March 2023: The law has now been changed! https://www.ft.dk/samling/20222/lovforslag/l19/20222_l19_som_vedtaget.htm
We built a car that you drive with real-life video game lag, and used it for an ill-advised, mostly-unscientific experiment about motion sickness. In case it wasn't obvious: we did this in a private area away from public roads and other traffic, and I insisted on more safety checks than William and Michael would normally have. Don't try this unless you're doing the same!
Welcome to the Game Garage! A series of three new, experimental quizzes and games. Thanks today to Evan Edinger - / naveregnide - and Luke Cutforth - / lukecutforth - for being the guinea pigs for Game 1: Weight For It. Sure, we could have spent a fortune on a massive studio, huge props and a giant seesaw: or we could get a garage, some GoPros, and some boxes of sand.
St Peter's Seminary sits in woodland about an hour west of Glasgow, near a village called Cardross. If you like Brutalist architecture, then it's a beautiful ruin: if not, then perhaps your view isn't so kind. It's a historic, religious building: but it's also a money sink that can't be demolished.
Today in the Game Garage, it's not about what you know: it's about what you can do. Pull down the description for the full cast and links to everyone's channels!
UPDATE: In 2019, the Fascination Parlor was hit by storms, and the building didn't survive. The games have been stored, and hopefully it'll reopen somewhere at some point! • On Nantasket Beach in the seaside town of Hull, Massachusetts, sits the last play-for-cash Fascination Parlor in the world. It's a century-old arcade game, made of relays that click and buzz. There are a few other parlors left in the world: but this is the only one where you're playing for actual money.
The final episode in this run of the Game Garage gives us a Proper Quiz: complete with all-or-nothing questions and a prize of FIVE THOUSAND PENCE. That's pence. It's £50. We didn't have that big a budget.
The Forbes Pigment Collection at the Harvard Art Museums is a collection of pigments, binders, and other art materials for researchers to use as standards: so they can tell originals from restorations from forgeries. It's not open to the public, because it's a working research library -- and because some of the pigments in there are rare, historic, or really shouldn't be handled by anyone untrained.
The Multi-Axes Rotation and Tilt Device (MART) is used for spatial orientation experiments: it's a chair balanced on a metaphorical knife-edge, powered by precise and fast motors. And my job was to not fall over.
In the Ashton Graybiel Spatial Orientation Laboratory at Brandeis University, there's the Artificial Gravity Facility: otherwise known as the rotating room. No-one's invented futuristic gravity plating yet, but if you want to test how humans would cope with artificial gravity, this is the best way.
When I was a kid, I played the demo version of Need for Speed II a lot. Just the demo: it came free on a CD with a monthly computer magazine. Every detail of that one demo track was stored in my head, long-dormant... until I ended up in Vancouver, and memories started surfacing in very odd ways.
Cape Reinga, at the very northern tip of New Zealand, is known for being where the Tasman Sea meets the Pacific Ocean, where two oceans collide. The truth, though, is a little more complicated than that.
Gibbs Farm, in New Zealand, is an enormous private sculpture collection. Its most famous piece is Horizons, by Neil Dawson - and it looks like a cartoon tissue somehow painted onto the landscape. To see it in person, though, will take a bit of effort.
The Ports of Auckland are automating their straddle carriers, which might not seem like much: until you phrase it as "hundred-tonne autonomous robots guided by nanosecond-precision tracking".
Kerosene Creek is a natural hot spring near Rotorua, on the North Island of New Zealand. And there have been official warnings for years: don't put your head under water. It turns out that "brain-eating amoebas", naegleria fowleri, are a real, if rare, thing.
At the University of Canterbury, in Christchurch, New Zealand, the team at Mars Bioimaging are using detector equipment originally developed for the Large Hadron Collider, and putting it to a very different use: medical imaging that allows 3D, false-color images inside the human body.
Mount Taranaki, on the North Island of New Zealand, is a large-scale circle that's visible from space: a stratovolcano with six miles of forest around it. But that didn't happen naturally. Oh, and there's a good chance that, in the next fifty years or so, it might explode.
If you invent a new theme park or amusement ride, how do you test it to make sure it's safe? There's no Federal Bureau of Zip Lines. I visited one of the companies that does just that sort of testing - and, now, inventing.
Baldwin Street in Dunedin, New Zealand, has the Guinness World Record for "steepest paved road over a continuous distance of more than ten metres". Which is enough to bring in quite a few tourists. What's the history? And what counts as "steepest street"?
Near Hindon, on the South Island of New Zealand, there's one of only two remaining one-lane road-rail bridges in the country. No barriers, no lights, no sirens: if you're driving across this, you need to make sure to listen out for the train horn.
Olds Engineering, a traditional workshop and foundry, sits in Maryborough, Australia. It's not the sort of place you'd expect to find a new industrial invention in the 21st century: and yet the Olds Elevator, patented by Peter Olds, is just that.
The Byron Bay Railroad Company runs the world's first 100% solar-powered train. It wouldn't work everywhere - but in the bright sunshine of Australia, it might just be the right tool for the job.
I went to a place called Coober Pedy to tell a story about water.
If you believe the hype, then the Metropolitan Area Underground Discharge Channel stops Tokyo flooding. It doesn't. But it is one colossal part of a huge network of flood defences that protect a city that would otherwise be... well, very wet.
This isn't going to be a click-a-button and follow-along series that gives you the same result as everything else. We're not even going to talk about code. This is everything you didn't know you needed to know about building an app.
Language changes over time, and that's fine. Time for a dose of descriptivism, as the Language Files return. Pull down the description for the references!
A decade ago, engineers found the Humber Bridge had the same problem as many of the world's suspension bridges: unexpectedly fast corrosion. Here's how they fixed it, and how they're checking that it's staying fixed. Thanks to all the team at the Humber Bridge board, at Cleveland Bridge, and Visit Hull and East Yorkshire, all of whom spent a lot of time and effort getting me up to the towers!
The fetch-execute cycle is the basis of everything your computer or phone does. This is literally The Basics.
"Hello!" "Thank you!" "You're welcome!" These are all phatic expressions, and people can argue about them.
Time to tell a story about idempotency, computer science, and the Night of the Multiple Orders.
Aerosparx are a British aerobatics team that perform displays with fireworks attached to their wings. This is how they do it.
We're back! New games, same garage.
What those boxes are for, and why you might not have to click them soon.
This game turned out a lot more stressful than we thought it would.
The International Phonetic Alphabet: one sound for each symbol, and one symbol for each sound. Except for the sounds we can't make.
I'll say this about this week's Game Garage: we definitely had fun.
On a coastline that's steadily sinking under the waves, the Wax Lake Delta is rising: which is a wonderful thing for researchers.Historically, every time humans try and mess with the Mississippi, there have been unintended consequences: and even though we can now model it fairly well, there are still surprises.
The Berkeley Pit, in Butte, Montana, was once the richest hill on Earth: the Anaconda Copper Mine. Now: it's not all that rich, and it's not much of a hill. Instead, it's a toxic pit filled with sulfuric acid.
If you've been a subscriber for a while, you probably know where this one is going. Although you may still be surprised about where I ended up going... Montana's Giant Springs State Park, and Lake Sumiainen in Finland, have very short rivers. Finding the shortest in the world, though: that could be trickier.
Onkalo, on the Finnish island of Olkiluoto, is planned to be the first geologic storage facility for high-level nuclear waste: eventually sealed for 100,000 years. I got to see inside.
I got an email asking if I wanted to be driven around the most famous racetrack in Britain by an autonomous racing car. I wasn't going to refuse that offer.
Oodi, the new Helsinki Library, has robots to help reshelve books. They get a lot of press attention. But they're not the important part of the library: here's why.
Next to Amsterdam Schiphol Airport is the Buitenschot Land Art Park, a giant set of ridges and furrows cut into the landscape. Yes, it's art: but it also stops some local residents from being exposed to jet noise.
I tried to write a more honest VPN commercial. The sponsor wasn't happy about it. • Get ██ days of ███ VPN free at ██████.com/honest
"Build some models" seems obvious: but this is a story of ingenuity, of using natural resources well, and of a country that humans dragged from the sea.
In Stockholm, there's a diagonal wind tunnel, used for one very specific purpose: learning to fly a wingsuit. I tried. I almost managed it.
It sounds ridiculous, but it's true. At the Cooper Union Foundation Building in New York, there's the world's first elevator shaft: constructed four years before the safety elevator was invented. • Thanks to Prof. O'Donnell and all the team at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art.
At the National Helium Reserve in Amarillo, Texas, the US government once stored 32 billion cubic feet of helium. There have been breathless news articles recently saying the world's running out: but it's still possible to buy party balloons. What's going on?
"Priming" is the idea that the words you read can change the way you act. And yes, there are papers that show an effect: but we also need to talk about the Replication Crisis.
We still shouldn't be using electronic voting. Here's why.
In Wichita Falls, Texas, the Newby-McMahon Building stands 480 inches tall. Not 480 feet: 480 inches. There's a story of a smooth-talking scammer that sounds almost too good to be true. But is it?
Gestures are a really important part of language. But how do we use them, and why?
Weird calendar edge-cases and computer bugs. It's an old-school video. • The Fasthosts Techie Test competition is now closed!
When I was a teenager, I wrote some terrible code. Here's why.
The brain is a mass of neurons, but some areas are more important than others. How can surgeons navigate inside the brain? How do they know exactly where to operate, and what to do? Alex from Brainbook explains.
"12kg of Martian soil simulant" is a pretty good guest video pitch. This week, Tom from Aspect Science tries to grow a salad in Martian soil.
Schengen is a small town in Luxembourg, on the borders with France and Germany. But one of those borders is a little more complicated: the Mosel (or Moselle) river is a condominium, it belongs to both countries at the same time. And thus, so the bridges above it.
INT, BOOLEAN, STRING and FLOAT: these are the things that data is made of.
About once a year, on the Oosterscheldekering barrier in the south of the Netherlands, there is NK Tegenwindfietsen: a bicycle race cycling into a headwind. This year it was 120km/h: this is why it's so difficult, and also why it's so brilliant.
The Winograd schema is a language test for intelligent computers. So far, they're not doing well.
From March 1st 2020, Luxembourg will have free public transit throughout the country: you'll be able to travel on buses, trains, trams, and that one funicular railway without a ticket. It sounds like a good idea: but is it?
Lasers travel at the speed of light. You can't stop one in mid-air like Kylo Ren. Except: we just did. Here's how.
Coca-Cola's brand of bottled water, Dasani, was a flop in the UK after the public realised it was just filtered tap water. But the story's a bit more complicated than it might seem.
Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant, in Austria, was ready to go: it just needed starting up. But that never happened, and forty years later, it still sits mothballed. Here's why.
No copyright infringement intended.
Dark scenes in television, YouTube, and streaming platforms all look pixelated and blocky. Here's why.
The title of this video should change with the times. But nothing lasts forever: here's the story of how I made it work, why it used to be easier to make that work, and how it all ties in to the White Cliffs of Dover and the end of the universe.
There are rules in the English language that you've probably never been taught, but you know anyway: how to split apart words with "infixes". But you've never been taught it because some of those infixes are words you probably shouldn't use in front of your high school English teachers...
The short answer is "backwards compatibility". The long answer is... well, it's the rest of this video.
UPDATE: The crossroads has now been fixed! Ipley Cross, in the middle of the New Forest, is one of the most dangerous road junctions in Britain. Why?
Gricean Maxims are a vital part of how we understand each other: a set of... well, maybe "rules" is a bit strong. They're guidelines that we follow without realising it. And it's the reason that "asbestos-free cereal" sounds suspicious.
All about Hilbert's Decision Problem, Turing's solution, and a machine that vanishes in a puff of logic.
This isn't "the way they were meant to be seen".
"Schwa" is the most common vowel in English. Every English speaker uses it, all the time, but most people have never heard of it.
When 'undo' won't do.
[UPDATE: This video has an important update! As of February 2022, the deadline for paths has been cancelled. The mapping still continues, and there's still a plan to have a definitive map, but old rights of way will no longer be wiped The Icknield Way, in south-east England, is a road and footpath that's been part of the landscape for millennia. But if parts of it hadn't been legally marked down, then those parts would have become private land, gone forever. Who has the right to walk where?
In the Abbey Gardens of Bury St Edmunds, in a quiet corner of a park, sits the World's First Internet Bench. Well, sort of. It's been nearly twenty years, and it's arguable whether it ever did the job in the first place...
Thanks to Jack from Jacksfilms on piano: / jacksfilms • And thanks to everyone who answered! Sources and a data download are in the description.
Green screen looks terrible sometimes. Here's why.
Old Sarum, in Wiltshire, is a now-desolate hillfort run by English Heritage. But it was once one of the most important sites in southern England: so important that it had two members of Parliament. Then, it became a "rotten borough": and a warning about power.
There are lots of ways to compare a million to a billion, but most of them use volume. And I think that's a mistake, because volume just isn't something the human brain is great at. So instead, here's the difference between a million and a billion, in a more one-dimensional way: distance.
Linby is a small village in Nottinghamshire, England. It wouldn't have much strategic value... unless some commander didn't read their map properly. Here's a local legend, with a few questions about it.
In 1834, Parliament burned down, and the Standards of Measurement were melted or destroyed. So when there's no agreed-upon standard for length: how do you fix it? Also: how you can still publicly check the length of your sandwich.
The short answer is: "because it'll make things more secure". The long answer involves Ronald Reagan.
Cornwall rises and falls by a few centimetres, twice a day. I didn't believe that when I read it. In this video: "ocean tide loading": why, how, and does it actually matter?
I invited Jaiden, Ellen and Hank to play a trivia quiz! The sort of quiz where you can get away with wrong answers... if nobody spots them. And since they couldn't be there in person, I've got a massive virtual set. Too many wrong answers, and our players will be Disconnected.
Kolbeinsey is the most northern part of Iceland, a tiny island that, according to Wikipedia, is due to disappear due to wave erosion "probably around the year 2020". Which raised an obvious question: is it still there?
Alec, Sally and Arun join me at the top of the virtual tower for a game where it doesn't matter if you're wrong... as long as no-one calls you on it.
Sooner or later, I was going to get around to this: it's one of the most famous experiments in linguistics. • Written with Molly Ruhl and Gretchen McCulloch.
Vanessa, Kati and Jarvis are the final three players on the broadcast tower, playing a quiz where if you bluff well enough, you don't even need to know the answers.
Silfra, in Þingvellir National Park in Iceland, is where the Eurasian and North American continental plates are dividing. It's a crack in the earth where you can snorkel or dive between the continents. Well, sort of. As ever, it's a bit more complicated than that.
The three players who've already won come back to the tower for one final battle. One of them will leave the Champion of Champions: and two will be Disconnected.
Sometimes, you regret asking a question.
Normally, the answer would be no. But in these very limited circumstances, at Iceland's Blue Lagoon, you can swim in geothermal power plant wastewater, and it's even healthy: although the marketing material doesn't usually mention it. Here's a story about geothermal energy, cheap heat, and how to keep some ducks warm.
The Roadmachines Mono-Rail may have been the only truly useful, fit-for-purpose monorail in the world. Of the hundreds that were built, most were never meant for passengers. But they did carry a couple of famous people in their time, including a certain secret agent...
Featuring binary versus linear search, and non-clustered indexes. Uh, indices. However you want to say it.
Happy October. Thanks to Daniel, Tom, and Chloe, their channels are below!
Wunderland Kalkar, near the German-Dutch border, is a family amusement park... inside a nuclear power plant that was never turned on.
Is there a "right" way to pronounce it? And why is it so complicated? • Written with Molly Ruhl and Gretchen McCulloch.
If you want to sell alcohol in England, you need a license. But the Licensing Act 2003 has some unusual exceptions.
The Ruhr Valley, in north-west Germany, is an industrial coal-mining area. And because of that kilometre-deep mining, parts of it have sunk, the drainage patterns have changed: and now, if the pumps of Emschergenossenschaft ever stop, quite a few towns and cities will end up flooded.
Pull down this description for information on all the shows I mention, plus all my references, and some advice if you're looking to subtitle your videos!
Gravity Industries make jetpacks. They're not practical. They're not meant for mass use. But they are a lot of fun. They asked if I wanted to try flying one.
Tim Berners-Lee envisioned a "universal information system". What went wrong?
The Broomway is surrounded on both sides by quicksand and deep, sucking mud. It has no markers and no guideposts. And if you mistime your walk, you won't outrun the tide. Oh, and it's in the middle of a Ministry of Defence firing range. But most of the time, if you want to visit Foulness Island, it's the only way.
The answer is, of course, a bit more complicated than you might think. • Written with Molly Ruhl and Gretchen McCulloch.
There are lots of disused and never-used roads and bridges in the world. But the Road to Nowhere in Yate, in south-west England, does still sometimes have traffic driving on it. And crashing on it.
This is a story about a television title sequence, and about me, as a child, watching it. It’s also a warning about how YouTube won’t last forever, and it's the reason I'm climbing one particular hill in the Lake District. Merry Christmas, Denis Norden.
I asked my audience six questions: some sensible, some ridiculous. I compared their results to the public. And the results were... interesting.
Drug tests don’t just work as a buzzkill, they can keep doctors and patients honest regarding some of the more dangerous drugs known to man. The problem is, poppy seeds can throw a giant wrench in that circle of trust! Poppy seeds come from the papaver somniferum flower native to Turkey, and even though they don’t contain opium, consuming the seeds has historically caused the tests to register opiate use! In this video, I explore how these tests work, what they look for, and how something as simple as a bottle of seeds available at any grocery store, can cause a false positive for painkillers, heroin, morphine, and other drugs.
Turns out that trying to precisely detect fire from space is more difficult than "point a camera at it".
And, please don't try this at home.
Dead Horse Bay served as an unofficial dump for decades, and now as the sand is washed away the boroughs' history is slowly being revealed, one china plate and glass bottle at a time. It's popular with local archeologists (both ameteur "treasure hunters" and professionals) as they wade through New York City's past. But this year, a darker side of the city's history has emerged: traces of radon gas and gamma radiation exceeding ambient levels. As parts of the beach have been closed off, locals are worried: will their artifacts and their history now just wash out to sea? And when trash becomes treasured, do we have a responsibility to preserve it?
Torpenhow Hill, in the Lake District in the north-west of England, is the only place in the world whose name has the same word four different times. That's the story, anyway. The truth is a bit more complex.
Around the world, there are regulations for "influencers". Those regulations make sure that if someone is paid to endorse a product, they have to declare that payment to the people watching. But why does no-one on TV, or film, or anywhere else have to do that?
I didn't expect this to work so well. • Includes text generated by OpenAI's GPT-3 at my request
4 minutes remaining. Then 15 seconds. Then 5 hours. Why can't computers just tell you how long something's going to take?
Explosions on film are made to look good: fireballs and flame. In reality, though, they're a bit disappointing. Here's how Hollywood does it. • Produced with an experienced, professional pyrotechnician. Do not attempt. Thanks to Steve from Live Action FX!
On the south-east coast of England sits Covehithe: a little Suffolk village going back at least a thousand years. By the end of the century, it'll likely have fallen into the sea. Here's why no-one's planning to save it.
Shakespeare sounds a certain way. Why? And why could it only work in English? • Written with Gretchen McCulloch of Lingthusiasm!
I didn't even realise that "low explosives" were a thing; let's talk about deflagration, detonation, and how high explosives can actually be safer. • Thanks to Steve from Live Action FX!
"Life support system" were the three key words that convinced me to do a video about an aquarium. Because yes: behind the scenes at The Deep, an aquarium in Hull, there's a life support system, and it deserves that name.
Grey? Blue? Purple? It can look different, depending on the context. Let's talk about color perception, color temperature, and the history of laundry.
GPT-3: not quite up to the task. Yet.
In Knaresborough, in Yorkshire, sits Mother Shipton's Cave. Folks there have been charging admission for nearly 400 years, and the star of the show is a "petrifying well". A few folk legends do actually turn out to be true.
Wind turbines have emergency exits, but they might not be for the reason you think.
Perranporth Beach, in Cornwall, is famed for being the "Lego beach". The truth is more complicated.
I found an article that said "The microwave was invented to heat hamsters humanely in 1950s experiments." And I thought, no it wasn't. ...was it?
Decades before NASA's Apollo program, the British Interplanetary Society wanted to go to the moon: in a spacesuit that looked like a suit of armour.
Gruinard Island, in the north-west of Scotland, was where Britain tested its biological weapons. That story's been told many times: but I found something in the archives that I don't think anyone's ever noticed before.
In Glenelg, on the west coast of Scotland, there's the Skye Ferry: the last turntable ferry in the world. And the reason for that turntable is a lot more clever than I initially thought.
Barra Airport, in Na h-Eileanan Siar in the west of Scotland, is unique: it's the only commercial airport where the runway's made of sand, and tide covers it up twice a day. Here's how it works.
Around the old mining areas of North Wales, you can find rock cannon: old Welsh firework sites. Most of the world has never heard of them: so we recreated them on a test range. • Thanks to Steve from Live Action FX: http://liveactionfx.com/ • Thanks to Owain for the idea!
What do you do with a disused phone box? And can they help save lives?
In Ocado's grocery warehouses, thousands of mechanical boxes move on the Hive. Are they all individual robots? Or is this one giant hive mind?
In Claughton, Lancashire, the Forterra brickworks produces 50 million bricks a year, from shale that's quarried a mile and a half away. To get that shale to the brickworks: the last aerial ropeway in the country. These used to be common: but now, the last one will be gone by 2036.
Here's the full video from a camera attached to a bucket on the Claughton Aerial Ropeway!
Iceland has a new volcano, Fagradalsfjall: I wanted to visit, to talk about the infrastructure around it, and work out how the country deals with a new and dangerous tourist attraction. It didn't go well.
On the German coast of the Baltic Sea, there's a tourist attraction that I think is very strange: the "Tauchgondel", a room that sinks under the waves and lets you go diving... without getting wet.
Tower Bridge is a tourist attraction these days: but first and foremost, it's a working, lifting bridge. And river traffic comes first.
Ness of Brodgar, in Orkney, is one of the most important archaeological sites in western Europe. This week, it was covered by old, worn-out tires. Here's why.
The Orkney Islands, off the northern tip of Scotland, have so much electricity that it's actually a problem. Here's why: and here's what they're doing about it. • This video has a correction: Hornsdale Power Reserve didn't catch fire! It was the newer Victorian Big Battery, near Geelong. Complete blunder on my part, apologies to the Hornsdale team.
The flight between Papa Westray and Westray takes 80-90 seconds and covers about 2km. Why does it exist? And what's it like? On a rainy day in the Orkney Islands, I went to find out.
NERC's Space Geodesy Facility, hidden away in the English countryside, fires lasers at satellites. Because it turns out that knowing a satellite's position exactly is really, really difficult.
Over the Manchester Ship Canal, you'll find the Hulmes Ferry, the Thelwall Ferry, and the Warburton Toll Bridge. They're all strange in their own way, all under the control of one company, and all dating back to old laws and legal documents from a hundred years ago. I was in the area, so I stopped by, and found that things might be changing soon.
The Nürburgring Nordschleife is the longest permanent racetrack in the world: 21km of unforgiving blind corners and hills, nicknamed "the Green Hell". Oh, and some days, it's also just a public toll road with no speed limit.
In Darmstadt, Germany, there's the Eisenbahnbetriebsfeld: a model railway connected to actual railway signalling equipment, so that controllers can learn without putting any real trains in danger. I got to learn the very basics.
An elevator that can go smoothly from horizontal to vertical isn't possible... right? Turns out that the conventional wisdom is wrong, and the Schmid Peoplemover has been doing that for many years.
On a little canal off the Elbe river in Germany, sits the McBoat: the world's only paddle-through McDonalds. It seemed like the sort of thing I should investigate.
The Brünnlisau shooting range in Switzerland has its targets on the other side of a major road. And it's safe. Here's how and why. Thanks to everyone at the Schiessanlage Brünnlisau!
In Lübeck, Germany, there's one of several eHighway test projects: overhead catenary wires, where electric trucks with pantographs can pull power directly from the grid. Thanks to everyone who gave so much time to make this video possible!
At a pumped storage plant in western Austria, a company called Energy Robotics is testing robot dogs for inspection. All the fancy Boston Dynamics publicity stunts aside: are the robots actually useful? ■ As ever: this is not an advert, Energy Robotics and illwerke vkw had no editorial control. They just asked "do you want to fly your drone inside the Obervermuntwerk II hydroelectric power plant to film a robot dog", and of course I immediately said yes.
In Brienz/Brinzauls, a small village in the east of Switzerland, there's a village slipping into a valley and a road that's surprisingly dangerous. Thanks to everyone I interviewed: pull down the description for links and more details!
The Lorenbahn, the Lüttmoorsiel-Nordstrandischmoor island railway, is famous for the tiny, private trains that take residents to and from the mainland. But that's not why it was built: and it's got a more useful purpose as well. Thanks to everyone from Landesbetrieb für Küstenschutz, Nationalpark und Meeresschutz Schleswig-Holstein, and to the islanders, for all your time and patience!
In most of the world, inhaling radon for pain relief sounds like a bizarre idea. In some places, though, it's so accepted that it's prescribed by doctors and covered by health insurance. And I have no idea how to talk about it. Thanks to the team at the Radonstollen in Bad Kreuznach: you can find out more about them at https://www.acuradon.com
Bridgwater Carnival, in Somerset, has a long tradition of squibbing: a huge procession of people holding fireworks right above their heads. This year, I got the chance to be one of the squibbers. Thanks to all the Bridgwater Carnival team: their site is https://www.bridgwatercarnival.org.uk/
At $8.3 million dollars for around 40 milligrams, the British Guiana 1c magenta is the world's most expensive object by weight: it's a postage stamp from 1856, the only one of its kind.
The Thames Barrier is a wonder of engineering. If it fails, then London floods. Here's how the engineers there make sure it doesn't fail.
Electrical Network Frequency analysis, ENF analysis, matches background hum against power grid logs. I talked to one of the researchers who works on it, and also set them a challenge.
I invited Rohin from @MedlifeCrisis, Sophie from @SophsNotes, @MikeBoyd, Sam from @Wendoverproductions, and @MiaMulder to play some games. They'll be tempted by individual profit over group wealth, in an environment designed to slowly break their team apart. But all they knew is: they'd be sat around a table trying to win cash: over $10,000. This is a show about trust, about loyalty... and about Money.
Mannequins are generally bought, used once for a project, and then thrown away to landfill. Except here, at Mannakin in Lincolnshire. Thanks to Roz and the team at Mannakin: https://mannakin.com My first thought was "don't those mannequins rot, just sitting out there in the weather?" And then I realised: no, not really, they're fibreglass. That's part of the problem Mannakin's trying to help with!
Predicting the future is a fool's errand, but I tried it: talking about phones, lifelogging, and social changes. And on top of that: what do I think's coming in 2032?
The 1933 British penny is one of the most famous coins in the world. I'm not saying this is definitely a heist movie waiting to happen... but I do think someone should write it. ■ Thanks to the team at Baldwin's, and the penny's owner, for letting me film it! https://www.baldwin.co.uk/
The International Cocoa Quarantine Centre, at the University of Reading, has an important job: stop pests and viruses from hitching a ride, as researchers try to breed better and hardier varieties of cocoa. Here's how they do it.
Hutton's Unconformity, at Siccar Point, is about an hour east of Edinburgh, in Scotland, and I've wanted to set my own two feet on it for years. And from it, I've got a bigger question: is there anything we've missed?
The Hill House, in Helensburgh, Scotland was decades ahead of its time... but that means it's also experimental. And damp.
In the 1960s, America was running "Operation Plowshare": the idea that perhaps nuclear bombs could be used for peace, not war. At least some British scientists had similar ambitions, and it involved setting off a nuclear bomb under Wheeldale, in the North York Moors National Park. Based on catalogue reference ES 26 in the National Archives, mainly ES 26/2 and 26/4. "Atomic Weapons Research Establishment and Atomic Weapons Establishment: Peaceful Uses of Nuclear Explosions: Files and Reports".
Rochester, in the south-east of England, was a city for nearly 800 years. And then, in 1998, an administrative error took that city status away, likely forever. Here's the story. Research and script assistance from Jess Jewell
In Fife, in the south-east of Scotland, there's the Elie Chain Walk: a footpath that's got a reputation for being dangerous. It isn't — as long as you're prepared, and as long as you watch out for the tide. Thanks to Allan Dunlop and Carrie Blair from Outdoor Education Fife, for both guiding me and holding the cameras!
"Anderson's Piano" is a set of wires and signals at the Pass of Brander, near Falls of Cruachan in Scotland, that try to detect when there might be a boulder on the track. They're 140 years old, and so far no-one's been able to find a better solution — but they're working on it.
I can't make science fiction any more. So, to get the ideas I have out of my head, I went to a Standard BBC Quarry, and put all of them one video. Pull down the description for a list of the books that inspired these!
On Sunday, the South Terminal at London's Gatwick Airport will reopen for the first time since 2020. It turns out that mothballing an entire terminal isn't quite as easy as turning out the lights. Thanks to all the team at Gatwick Airport! (To be clear, this isn't a sponsored video: I approached them about filming this, and I'm grateful for the access. I did not expect to get out on the airfield.) Bonus fact for pulling down the description: this was filmed on Wednesday, when the cloud of Saharan dust was in the atmosphere. I had to do a lot of colour-correction to make the outside scenes look normal!
Deepstore doesn't let many people film in their massive facilities. So when the team at Laura Ashley invited me down into the mine to look at their archives, I jumped at the chance.
Did I need to get a radio controlled clock and travel to Anthorn to film this video? Absolutely not. But for a few minutes, that clock was really, really accurate.
With many thanks to all the team at Engineered Arts who worked on this. To be clear, this is not sponsored by them, I paid money (technically, NordVPN's money) for the Mesmer robot -- or at least, for the silicone mask and 3D printed skull that were put together for just one day!
"Daly's Bridge", in Cork, Ireland, is better known as the Shakey Bridge. Because it shakes. But what happens when a bridge like that has to be repaired and refurbished?
The Monte Toboggans, in Funchal on the island of Madeira, are wicker sofas: a bit like the gondolas of Venice, only you're going downhill in regular traffic.
Funchal Airport, on the island of Madeira, was too short for modern commercial airliners: but there was nowhere to extend to. The solution is one of the greatest civil engineering projects of our time.
The Chauvet cave, in the south of France, is one of the most important archaeological sites in the world, filled with art that's tens of millennia old. No-one's allowed in, for very good reasons: but just a few kilometres away, there's a near-exact copy. Is that enough?
In southern France, there's a man called Christian who flies a microlight aircraft, alongside flocks of birds. And he takes passengers.
The "accelerated pavement testing facility" in Nantes can simulate decades of road traffic in a few months. Here's how.
Les machines de l'île, in Nantes, are famous for their giant mechanical elephant. And to my surprise, tourists can just pay and ride it.
The Wasserspiele of Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe are 300 years old, powered entirely by gravity, and entertaining tourists. As legacies for rich people go, there are far worse ones.
Monte Kaolino, in Bavaria, Germany, is 35 million tonnes of quartz sand, piled up over the years from a nearby kaolin mine. In the 1960s, one guy just turned up with skis, and now half a century later it's a theme-park destination for sandboarders and skiiers.
The team at Sparkmate (https://Spkm.co/Build) asked if I had any ideas for things to build. And I realised that, yes, I had a question to answer: and it all goes back to an old kids' television show called "Captain Scarlet and the Mysterons"...
It feels like no-one's told the world about this yet.
There are only a few working Link Trainers left in the world: but before microprocessors, before display screnes, half a million pilots learned the basics of instrument flying inside one.
The Hudson River Special Flight Rules Area is an incredible thing: unrestricted airspace right next to Manhattan. We flew it.
I feel like there are other YouTube channels that would take a different approach here.
Tradinno weighs 11 tonnes, has a 12-metre wingspan, and breathes fire. And every year, someone has to stab it with a spear.
In Soda Springs, Idaho, there's a geyser that fires carbonated water into the air, on the hour, every hour. I paid a visit.
At the Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, keyers process 1.2 billion images of mail every year. It's a more difficult job than I thought.
On Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, there's a summer tradition: "mail jumping". It's a bit dangerous, a bit ridiculous, and would never be allowed to start today. But it's a tradition.
The Chicago and Sanitary Ship Canal is the path that invasive carp would take to reach the Great Lakes. So to stop them, the US Army Corps of Engineers has installed an electric barrier. Although for obvious reasons, I didn't get to see it close up. [The interviewee is project manager Jeff Zuercher, whose name caption got missed out! Apologies, Jeff.]
The "T-Rex" is the University of Texas' large mobile shaker, and I got to see it in action.
The @royalalberthall is 150 years old; the roof is 600 tonnes of glass and steel. And it turns out that there's a terrifying technicians' trampoline, acoustic-dampening mushrooms, and a complete lack of connections.
The Aéroplume, in France, is a helium blimp sized for one person. €60 gets you half an hour's flight. I had to try it.
It's about synchronisation, right? Well, not exactly...
The treadwheel crane, or treadmill crane, sounds like something from Astérix or the Flintstones. But at Guédelon in France, not only do they have one: they're using it to help build their brand new castle. ▪ More about Guédelon: https://www.guedelon.fr/
The Doppelmayr Garaventa Monorack is a decades-old product. I've no idea how I missed it before. But for the third video in the Monorail Trilogy, this isn't an advert: I'm just happy to be proved wrong.
The Gotthard Base Tunnel in Switzerland is 57km long: and I think its greatest piece of safety equipment is nowhere near the tunnel itself.
At the Swiss Military Museum in Full, there's the last remaining example of a 1970s tank-driving simulator. But there's no virtual worlds here: it's connected to a real camera and a real miniature model.
The Headington Shark, in Oxford, UK, is a local icon: but it was protest art, put up without permission. Now, the local government wants to protect it. ▪ The Shark House: https://www.headingtonshark.com/
There's a lot of articles written about how tap water in Warsaw is constantly tested by a small team of clams. It felt like a hoax to me: so I went to find out. ▪ Thanks to MPWiK Warsaw: https://www.mpwik.com.pl/
The Udbyhøj Cable Ferry across Randers Fjord in Denmark is electric-powered: but rather than batteries, it's plugged into mains electricity. Here's how it works. ▪ More about the ferry: https://www.randersfjord-faerger.dk/
Surely water simulation can be done with computers now? Well, not quite. At the University of Sherbrooke, there's an artificial research river, and I asked them to start it up. ▪ The University's civil engineering department: https://www.usherbrooke.ca/gcivil/
The Montreal Olympic Sports Centre has a 20m (65ft) diving board. That's twice the Olympic height. Why would anyone need that?
The Bay of Fundy has cheap, clean power: if you can harness it.
TRIUMF's Rabbit Line, on the University of British Columbia campus, sends slightly radioactive material under the streets of Vancouver at 100km/h (60mph). Here's how and why.
The brown marmorated stink bug is an invasive pest. To help deal with its numbers, the Oregon Department of Agriculture is releasing its natural enemy: the tiny samurai wasp. There's a lot of work that goes into it. ▪ Thanks to all the team at the ODA, and to Chris Hedstrom for the macro footage.
Did 18th century firefighters really let buildings burn? Sources below
Thanks to Lazarus 3D: https://www.lazarus3d.com/ ▪ Lazarus had no editorial control over this video, and I paid for my own MRI, but of course they helped set everything up and provided the print!
Poly Canyon, at Cal Poly, is an experimental architecture laboratory.
The Great Scenic Railway, at Luna Park in Melbourne, Australia, is the second oldest rollercoaster in the world: and it's one of only a few which still uses a manual brake. Here's how it works.
"Sentinel chickens" are an early-warning system against some nasty mosquito-borne diseases. I visited a flock in New South Wales, Australia.
The Parkes Radio Telescope, Murriyang, part of CSIRO, is one of the most famous telescopes in the world: and it's got a unique way of getting equipment up and down from the central section.
Every few months, when the wind's blowing in the right direction, a bottle of air is taken from Kennaook / Cape Grim, at the northern tip of Tasmania, and saved for science. Here's how and why.
At Velocity Valley in Rotorua, New Zealand, there's the Shweeb: a pedal-powered monorail. It's a fun ride: but in 2010, Google gave it a million dollars as a potential "future of transit".
I just wanted to fix my email.
C1 Espresso, in Christchurch, New Zealand, has a set of pneumatic tubes. But that's not enough on its own to keep a business running.
The common wisdom is that, once an invasive species is truly established, it can't be eradicated — but I talked to the team from Predator Free Wellington, who think they can do just that.
Wellington, in New Zealand, has more than a hundred private cable cars. I found out why.
Nishiyama Onsen Keiunkan is not just the world's oldest hotel, but the world's oldest still-operating business. Or at least, that's one way of looking at it. But things are changing here, just like they always have.
The DMV, or Dual Mode Vehicle, on the Asa Coast Railway in Shikoku, Japan, is a hybrid bus and train. And I rode it.
I was going to film a video about a robot bicycle park. And then GIKEN, the company who built it, said: you know we do this for cars as well, right?
I thought maglev trains were a dead-end technology: but it looks like I was wrong. At JR Central's Yamanashi Maglev Test Track, I rode Japan's new maglev.
Hideyasu Ito runs the Micro Hovercraft Laboratory, and I got to meet him and ride his incredible four-bubble hovercraft.
At the Department of Collective Behaviour, part of the Max Planck Institute of Animal Behavior, researchers are putting locusts into simulated worlds, both virtual and physical, in the hope that they can figure out how devastating swarms form and move.
Meiringen Air Base, in Switzerland, has an unusual feature: two public roads that go straight over the runway. How do they keep it safe? And, as a side note, just how loud is it when you're standing next to a fighter jet? (Bonus things that didn't fit into the video: the aircraft aren't stored in hangars, but in caverns tunneled into the hillside! And if you want to get really close to the jets, there's a second, much narrower crossing over a taxiway to the caverns. They're not taking off at high speed there, though.)
Agroscope is a Swiss government-backed agricultural research lab. It's got a lot of other resarch projects too, but it also keeps a backup of the Swiss cheese bacterial cultures... just in käse.
At CEA-Leti, in Grenoble, there's a "funicular" that not many people get to ride: because it's between two clean rooms, and getting to it requires quite a lot of preparation.
I went inside the former hotel where, for science (and money), people are volunteering to get colds, flu, and RSV.
At the University of California San Diego, there's the Shake Table: an earthquake simulator with the heaviest payload capacity in the world.
The Catesby Tunnel, in the UK, is an old Victorian railway tunnel that has a new use: a secretive car testing facility, like a wind tunnel but in reverse. So rather than just show it to the world, I thought I'd answer a question: if you stick a camera on the outside of your car, how much does the drag cost you?
The first few moments of an explosion can't be simulated yet. But there's a team at the University of Sheffield working on it.
In an old mill in a remote corner of Italy, sits the Bathysphere Project at Explorandia: a submarine simulator that explores an actual, small pond. It might be the best homemade project I've ever seen.
Through the mountains of Slovenia, there are manual cable cars: some historic, some more modern. There aren't many left. I was able to try one, and to talk to the person who still maintains it. Just to be clear, there are a few of these in other places in the world, too. There's at least a couple in North America, one in Germany, and one in Turkey! (Or at least, I think they still exist.) But the video of the Cicka got me to beautiful Slovenia, and the story that I found there was worth the trip.
Well before the first climbing frame was patented as "jungle gym", mathematician Charles Hinton thought they might be able to teach kids four-dimensional thinking.
Near Dayton, Ohio there's a lookalike of the Wright Brothers' Model B: a 1910 aircraft with no cockpit. It's a modern plane with a very old design, and I went for a ride.
Near San Diego, California, there's a rotating house: and somehow, all the utilities, the electricity, gas and water, work even on the rotating part. How's that possible?
At the Grizzly & Wolf Discovery Center in West Yellowstone, Montana, you can get a product certified as bear-resistant... by actual bears.
This footage is public domain, and the raw files are available at https://archive.org/details/grizzly-b... ■ An explanation, which is not public domain: • A bear found my GoPro and took a selfie ■ Two videos taken by grizzly bears at the Grizzy & Wolf Discovery Center, West Yellowstone, Montana. The bears found a previously-lost GoPro Hero 11 in a protective case, in their pond, which had enough battery left to take a couple of brief shots, including a selfie. As these video files were created entirely by bears, by accident, I believe them to be in the public domain. If that's not the case, then as the owner of the camera and potential copyright holder, I'm happy to license these files under CC0 and dedicate them to the public domain as far as legally possible. However, if I don't upload them to YouTube first, then someone else will — and YouTube's copyright systems often get confused by public domain footage, so for my own safety...
An unexpected update!
In Switzerland, there's a new cryonics company: and they invited me to have a look around. I had questions: legal, practical, and ethical, and I want to be clear: this is not an endorsement. I just wasn't going to turn down that invitation.
Zermatt, in Switzerland, bans all private cars and all gasoline cars. But if you run a business, you might be able to buy one of the special, tiny ones that are built right there.
The Honiton Hot Pennies ceremony is the result of 800 years of tradition: from when rich people would entertain themselves by throwing scalding-hot pennies onto the poor people below. These days, it's a bit less dangerous... but only a bit.
Long barrows are Neolithic constructions that might have been churches, or graveyards, or landmarks. And some are being built again: for the first time in recorded history.
The Baťa Skyscraper, in Zlín, Czechia, is a landmark of architecture. And the office of Jan Antonín Baťa... is an elevator. [Correction: Jan Antonín Baťa's birth year is 1898; the graphic is a typo.]
This was so much more complex than I thought.
The British Library is one of the six legal deposit libraries for the UK — and the only one that doesn't pick and choose, or have to ask for copies. That's a lot of books to store, and the internet's only making it worse.
This is the only pirate reference you're getting from me. • Written with Molly Ruhl and Gretchen McCulloch.
The Bolwoningen, in Den Bosch, in the Netherlands, are experimental architecture: the surprising part is that people still live there.
The asterisk is important. The Extremely Large Telescope, in Paranal, Chile, is probably going to be the largest optical telescope that will ever be constructed. I was invited out there by the UK Science and Technology Facilities Council and the European Southern Observatory, and I wasn't going to turn down a chance like that.
At the New Town Hall, the Neues Rathaus, in Hanover, there's a strange elevator where the track curves unevenly. For years, people from Germany have been emailing me about it: well, I finally visited.
This script was a nightmare to pronounce. • Written with Molly Ruhl and Gretchen McCulloch.
AMZ Racing's "mythen" holds the world record for electric vehicle acceleration: 0-100km/h in 0.956 seconds. And they let me drive it.
There's a world in which everyone boards planes with "mobile lounges", PTVs, or Plane-Mates... but this is not that world.
No. Mostly. Written with Molly Ruhl and Gretchen McCulloch.
Time to correct the record.
At Port Iława in Poland, pilots and captains of massive ships train on 1-to-24 scale ship models: and I got to drive one.
The moonlight towers of Austin, Texas, are the last urban municipal lighting towers in the world: because before every street was wired to the grid, how else would you light up a city?
Translation is really difficult.
Nio is a Chinese auto maker that offers an alternative to charging: just swapping out the whole battery whenever you need it. I borrowed one of their cars.
There's a good reason for it.
Britain's power grid is turning inside-out, which means pylons are about to become a lot more controversial in Britain. At the National Grid Training Centre, I climbed one.