Brain hacking! ice! and a very fancy bridge!
26th June 2023
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Heads up! This newsletter is more than a year old. Links may be out of date or lead to unexpected places, or the context may have changed. Please handle with care.
Hello! After last week's essay, there are fewer words in this week's newsletter! But not that many fewer. (And at least I didn't make the whole thing emoji.)
In this week's video: the first jungle gym was created to hack kids' brains! That's one of those titles that, while technically correct, is bound to be picked apart by pedants. I'm standing by it, though. And I love that this feels like an old-school video of mine: no interview, no fancy expensive camera rig, just me and a GoPro next to an old bit of infrastructure.
In this week's video: the first jungle gym was created to hack kids' brains! That's one of those titles that, while technically correct, is bound to be picked apart by pedants. I'm standing by it, though. And I love that this feels like an old-school video of mine: no interview, no fancy expensive camera rig, just me and a GoPro next to an old bit of infrastructure.
It's the last in this run of the Technical Difficulties! They go by so fast. And in a video that is definitely not suitable for vegetarians, Gary ends the season with a banger.
On Lateral this week, we've got Jeremy Fielding,
Estefannie and Inés Dawson from the soon-to-return Draw Curiosity, facing questions about treaty texts, shirt sequences and practical photocopies!
What else has been good on YouTube this week?
Well:
- A fascinating profile of a NYC ice seller. But not just a regular ice seller: someone who makes precise, "artisanal", clear ice for cocktails, after spending years working at some of the
greatest cocktail bars in the world. I'd have never considered that a job like this could exist, but of course, it has to.
- In one of the best examples of title-bait I've seen in a while: a flat-earth conspiracy theorist said they'd concede if this guy could photograph the ISS. So he did. This is actually just a vlog, along with explanation of how to do a now relatively common, if difficult, astrophotography trick, but the framing elevates it.
- Did this corporate video (ie, advert) about a new mobile flyover bridge need such bombastic music and a man with a Trailer Voice? Absolutely not, but I'm glad it does. And the technology's interesting, too.
And around the rest of the internet:
- How to hire a pop star for your private party. This isn't a guide for the rich, but instead a look at the industry, and how almost any star is available for a private party. It does sometimes drop into the sort of style that implies the author wants to be seen as 'above all this nonsense', but it's worth the read
all the same.
- Clusterfake is the first part of a four-part exposé on what appears to be utterly fraudulent research: if the evidence in here is true, it's devastating. It includes a deep-dive into Microsoft Excel's document format, but also what
seems to be just staggering incompetence on behalf of the apparent faker.
- We’ve pumped so much groundwater that we’ve nudged the Earth’s spin.
- How space hoppers helped preserve an old airplane: genius archival and preservation work.
And finally: an FAQ: the "snake fight" portion of your thesis defense.
All the best,
— Tom
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