I drive facing backwards, and a tower of penguins.

20th June 2022

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Hello!

In this week's video, I put fictional technology from a 1960s kids' show to the test: can you really drive while facing backwards?

Elsewhere on YouTube this week:

It's been a long time since I've seen an adrenaline-junkie video that's made me actually exclaim "oh wow" out loud, but the opening shot from the 2.1km slackline record managed it. I'll say that again: a 2.1km slackline. I will confess that I haven't watched the full hour-long documentary, but if you want the technical detail of how the team pulled it off: it's in there. (Thanks to Kai for sending this in!)
PBS Eons might have the best title I've seen this week: something has been making this mark for 500 million years.
Belinda Carr debunks 3D printed homes: I got an offer to film something like this a while back, and I held off because it seemed a bit too good to be true. The technology is really cool, but there's a lot of PR fluff around it!
And off the back of last week's magic: Chris Ramsay performs 100-year-old magic tricks and — importantly — explains how they work, because perhaps there should be a statue of limitations on revealing gimmicks like this. If the start is a touch slow for you, you can skip to 1:43 for the first trick, but you'll miss important context: these are actual century-old magic props he's using. (Thanks to Ethan for sending this in!)

The "other interesting links" in this newsletter are light fluff and interesting news stories. Not this time! I should probably save items for the future so I can provide a balance from one newsletter to the next, but never mind...

This needs a massive caveat both for "I cannot vouch for this being true" and "this contains discussion of disordered eating". That said: A Chemical Hunger sets out a thorough and convincing hypothesis that the modern obesity epidemic is caused, at least in part, by environmental contaminants. (It starts with a simple mystery: even after adjusting for various factors, the higher the altitude in the US, the lower the average BMI!)

It's a long read that could really use an executive summary, and the closest is this summary tweet thread. I'm used to quickly getting through dense writing when I'm researching and even I found myself skimming the full version at points. (I suspect that the authors wanted to avoid criticism from people who'd only read the summary and then ask questions that are answered in the full text.) But with all those disclaimers attached, I think it's worth passing onwards to you.
A great paper: two-way communication between experimenters and lucid dreamers, while the latter is asleep and dreaming. I'm not sure how much real-world use there is for this (and, of course, it needs replicating), but I found the study protocol and results fascinating.
I thought I'd heard about every common cognitive bias in psychology: but apparently not. The conjunction fallacy (or "the Linda problem") is one of those great intersections between formal logic and natural language that can trick your brain.

And finally, it's time for a game: Penga. It's Jenga, with penguins, from the ever-reliable Matt Round. (If you're interested in web design, view the source: Matt's code is all visible, right there, and the penguins are all DOM elements! He has a thread about how his approach to building games, and it's worth a read.)

Well, that was a longer and denser newsletter than usual! Next week, to make up for it, it'll be entirely videos of tiny ducklings.

All the best,

— Tom

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