Hot pennies! a camera in a geyser! and a long traffic light.

• In 1991, a team at Yellowstone National Park put a tiny camera into the geyser vent of Old Faithful. I'd love to see this repeated with modern technology.
   
• JJ McCullough found a book with predictions of the future from 1978, and evaluates how well they did. In short: not well, particularly the ones about psychic powers. (And the tangent around airline insurance vending machines was interesting.)
   
• Goodbye to the MV Flip, the world's strangest research vessel, which was able to flip from a horizontal boat to a stable, vertical research platform while in the middle of the ocean. I wish I'd been able to get on board, but it's been well documented over the years, and there are two good videos in that article.
   
• I've finally had some time to start running through the list of ideas that got sent in after my call a few weeks back. One linked to this NYT article on longest red traffic light in America (thanks, Michael!) which, while it wasn't quite right for my channel, did send me searching for information. I was delighted to find that that the light already been thoroughly fact-checked by a small channel on YouTube: the video maker drove to the light and spent enough time observing that he can thoroughly break down whether the story's true, in detail.

• Game designer Adrian Hon took a trip on the about-to-close Star Wars: Galactic Starcruiser, Disney's immersive hotel experience. It's a great analysis of an attraction that may have been a marketing disaster, or may have just been ahead of its time.
   
• Ignore the clickbait title: I wouldn't take this as a marker that the singularity is a few years away. But this description of the apparently-linear improvements to machine translation systems is still interesting.
   
• Results from a randomised trial of "infant simulators", screaming dolls given to children to warn them about what being a parent is actually like. Spoiler: they're worse than useless. (Standard caveats about limited study, etc, but I'd suggest the manufacturers would hope to see some results, not a significant effect in the opposite direction.)
   
• I often get the suggestion that I should visit Centralia, the ever-burning underground coal mine fire in Pennsylvania. I'm not planning to — it's been well-covered by other people, and it doesn't feel right for what I make. But I had no idea that something similar, on a smaller scale, has been going on in northern England.

And finally: here are some photos of what crude oil actually looks like.

Next week: actually, I'm not sure yet. I'm a bit stressed. But there'll be a video of some sort! There has to be, at least until the end of the year...

All the best,

— Tom