I was wrong! Also, I'm on TV soon.

19th December 2022

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Hello!

In this week's video, I was wrong (and so was everyone else).

With that dramatic headline done: over on the Technical Difficulties, Chris moves a boat down some steps! I feel like we're really nailing the deliberately-underwhelming voice on those titles.

And this week's episode of Lateral, it's the return of Marques Brownlee, Wren Weichman and Hayley Loren, on the day that cost $700m.

Plus later this week, I'm on television! This Wednesday at 19:30 UK time, I'll be on Christmas University Challenge on BBC Two and BBC iPlayer! (Links are UK only.) This is a legendary TV quiz show in Britain, it's been going for 60 years; during each Christmas run, alumni get to have a go instead of students. This was an absolute joy to be part of — I'm so grateful to all the production team for inviting me on.

Elsewhere on YouTube this week, some videos that put in incredible amounts of effort for brilliant results:

Cleo Abram and Simone Giertz do actual nuclear fusion. (The setup was in Part 1, a few weeks ago, if you're wondering how they got all the parts so fast!)
I'm not much of a petrolhead — my requirements for a car include "comfort" and "automation" — but even I can appreciate getting the world's three fastest production cars, plus one very fast motorbike, and drag-racing them across a quarter mile. But what stood out for me here was the production effort. There's an incredible bit of storytelling, done with both practical filming and visual effects, near the end of the drag race: it must have involved so much work from all of the production team. (It probably helps that the channel's backed by a large insurance company and its budgets, though.)
A video eight months in the making: "I Built a Wildlife Pond". A calming but clear story; pretty shots of wildlife; a sense of a job well done. Recommended.
Jet Lag: The Game is back! The first episode of the new season starts a little slow, but it's setting up a more complicated game with more strategy, and I'm looking forward to seeing the rest.

And away from the world of video:

The topologist's world map shows only the borders between countries and nothing else: it's one of several interesting projects described as "questions nobody asked".
Decoding visual stimuli from brain recordings is one of those titles that the eye can easily skim past. Take a moment: these are scientists who are working out what people were seeing based on brain scan data. It's not perfect, not by a long way, but they've got a new approach with a latent diffusion model that is far, far beyond what I thought was possible with current technology.
genders.wtf is a site that feels very old-school: a rogue's gallery of badly-designed web forms that accidentally offer gender options like "Hot Bread", "Tax Entity", and "International High School Visit at Ho Chi Minh City at March 19".

And finally: a thread about cooking a steak in a hypersonic wind tunnel.

All the best,

— Tom

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