I visited the world's most useful model railway, and I discovered robot-arm dancing.

27th September 2021

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Hello!

This week, the tour of Unusual German Infrastructure continues, as I visit the world's most useful model railway.

Elsewhere on YouTube this week, I found:

The music video for Noga Erez' "You So Done" involves her being thrown about by a robot arm. There's something jarring about the combination of performance, automation, and implied violence here: I found this both fascinating and unsettling in a way that I think would be difficult to choreograph for human dancers. Compare, for example, the choreography for Pink's Try: it explores similar themes, it's spectacular and affecting (particularly because she's singing live!), but to me it's less unsettling because the movements are clearly human.

Side note: if anyone reading this has access to a robot arm and wants to collaborate on something like this, please do get in touch...!
A 20-minute Russian documentary from 1966, with full English subtitles, about extinguishing a burning gas well with an underground nuclear explosion.
The Corridor Crew break down why the Boston Dynamics robot dance video couldn't be faked with CGI.

And around the rest of the web:

"Every message was copied to the police": a brilliant article revealing the details of how an anonymous, encrypted phone service targeted at criminals was very much not anonymous or encrypted.
Generation Z (or at least, a large portion of Generation Z) doesn't understand the concept of files and folders on computers.
Ambient Chaos is a wonderful web site that starts out as one of those "soothing ambient noise" generators and then takes a hard left.
Concrete clickbait adds a lot of necessary context to those photos of "bizarre Yugoslav monuments" that went viral a while ago.
And finally, which are the closest two houses in Britain which have the same street address? A brilliant investigation with a surprising conclusion.

That's it for this week! Thank you, as ever, for being part of this.

All the best,

— Tom

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