Dutch aircraft! linguistic questions! and a good road sign.

• First, what are these black and white discs on the ground for? (Thanks to Seb for sending this over.) This video is in Dutch, but it has full subtitles and YouTube offers an exceptional automatic translation: it's entirely watchable if you don't understand the language. If the creator of this wanted to dub and subtitle his channel into English, I think he could easily double his audience. I've only got a couple of videos deep into the channel, and both the production quality and actual stories are at a really high standard!
   
• How Korea's alphabet is saving an Indonesian dialect. (Thanks to Bagus for sending this over.) This is an interesting linguistics story: the default for transcription of languages that have no writing system is to use Latin letters. But this Indonesian dialect doesn't map well to Latin, so instead they're using Korean hangul.
  
  ...so that seemed simple, right? Of course I'll link to something like that. But I did have some issues with the subtitles in that video. You can't say there's no way to transliterate certain sounds, and then transliterate them in the subtitles! It seemed a bit dodgy. The footage and translation was credited to the Associated Free Press, and I found a closer-to-the-source version of the video, produced by their team, here, although I don't think it's quite as good.
  
  But of course it's more complicated than I thought, and of course the venerable Language Log blog has posts from thirteen years ago being very skeptical about this being a good idea. Is Hangul actually being used? Or is it just PR for the cameras? No idea, and the truth is probably somewhere in between. This is one of those stories where the more you dig, the more confusing it becomes, and short of being embedded on-the-ground for weeks and seeing what people actually use when the camera's not on them, I don't think the truth of this one is possible to resolve clearly.
   
• I was reminded of Weezer's music video for their song Pork and Beans this week. Back when it came out in 2009, I remember thinking of it as pandering: trying to promote a song by just including as many references to then-viral videos as possible. But now, it feels like a time capsule: the early days of YouTube. Still 4:3, still filmed in standard definition (even if it's been "remastered" now). This couldn't be made now, for the same reason that YouTube Rewind can't be made now: there are simply too many different sub-groups with their own references, and there aren't any viral video stars that "everyone" knows.

Away from video, all this week's web links are actually web pages. No social-media platforms here, no big-tent companies where someone's insight is lost in a fog of a million other posts, ready to be lost forever when the company "sunsets" the product. Each one of these is a gen-you-ine, 100% platform-independent page, like it's 2004 or something:

• First, the unexpected survivor: a story of a very old "secret" British road sign, the last of its kind, that was forgotten about until its cover blew off. And in an update from the comments, it looks like it did rightfully end up in a museum.
   
• When NASA used a remote control tank to drill into Space Shuttle tires. (It's an American space agency, so I'm going to use the American spelling of "tyres".)
   
• I'm not saying Boeing is having reputation trouble right now, but when someone sets up IsMyPlaneA737Max.com as a single-serving site, it might be time for their PR team to worry.

And finally, a cartoon specifically for those of us who grew up in the nineties.

All the best,

— Tom