A new project launch! Plus a firefighting train and a machete-wielding plant.
10th October 2022
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Heads up! This newsletter is more than two years old. Links may be out of date or lead to unexpected places, or the context may have changed. Please handle with care.
Hello!
In this week's video, I'm still in Switzerland, and — in a video that was originally arranged in late 2019 — I finally get to see how the world's longest rail tunnel is kept safe.
In this week's video, I'm still in Switzerland, and — in a video that was originally arranged in late 2019 — I finally get to see how the world's longest rail tunnel is kept safe.
You may also remember, a couple of months ago, I pointed newsletter readers at a mysterious new YouTube channel
and said that it might be worth subscribing over there. Well: that project is now ready to launch! It's a podcast called Lateral, and you can find it at lateralcast.com or wherever you get your podcasts. The trailer's up
now, and the first episode will land at 4pm on Friday. Of course, these days a podcast means audio and video, so the full episodes and highlight clips will go up on the YouTube channel too.
(Thank you to everyone who's subscribed to that channel already! The last time I ran a podcast, it was more than a decade ago: the whole process has got so much more complicated since then!)
And for those who've been around a long time: I may be temporarily setting the original episodes of Lateral (the game show) to
unlisted, just before the first podcast launches on Friday. That's for search engine optimisation. If it does happen, they'll be back shortly afterwards, but I'm trying to make sure search traffic doesn't get confused!
Right. With all that out of the way, here's what I've seen around the rest of YouTube this week:
- I cannot imagine how long The Doodle House must have taken. Days? Weeks? Months, if you include all the planning? It's a staggering amount of effort for a literally spectacular result. (Thanks to
Benjamin for sending this over.)
- The last time there was a significant earthquake near Taiwan, not everyone had a high-quality camera in their pocket. So it took until last month to finally get a decent (albeit portrait) video of the tuned mass damper of Taipei 101 in action. Grady from Practical Engineering has a great breakdown of how it works.
- A brilliant first-person tale of turning the tables on a spy with a hidden camera. (I found that through this Twitter thread, which is a very similar tale, well-told.)
And away from the world of video:
- Imagen Video, Google's new AI text-to-video system, is incredible. I wish I knew where we were on the likely-sigmoid growth curve of this type of AI
tech, because if we're still at the start, then things are about to get really weird really fast.
- The state of Utah has no citizenship or residence requirements for marriage licenses; and during the pandemic, started to allow ceremonies over video call. The unintended consequences, allowing at least a form of marriage equality in countries that don't have it, are heartwarming.
- The first time I saw heating your house with a mechanical windmill, I thought it couldn't work. But of course it does: all the energy from a windmill has to go somewhere, and if you stir water, you'll create heat. (Thanks to Nick for sending this over.) Bonus: that web site is solar-powered, so if it's not working, that's because it's currently too dark and the battery ran out!
- "This installation enables a live plant to control a machete."
And finally, DO NOT
GO NEAR THE BOAT. I'm not sure if my reaction is more "well now I want to go near the boat" or "this feels like a line from weirdly specific horror movie".
All the best,
— Tom
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