Translations! time travel! and one month to go.

4th December 2023

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Hello!

A few words to start this week's newsletter: we're into December, which means there's now less than a month to go until the main channel is on pause, and I go off on... well, it's either a break, a sabbatical, or retirement. I'll figure that out when I've got some space!

The newsletter will continue, and so will Lateral (this week, it's a lovely episode with Molly Edwards, Becky Stern and Jenny Draper!) — but as I write this, all the remaining Monday videos are filmed. Barring some disaster that makes one of them unusable (and I'm really, really hoping that doesn't happen), I am wrapped on the main channel. That's both a massive relief and incredibly daunting. What am I going to do with my time off? I'm not sure yet, but there's still a month to go.

So more immediately: it's a video that a lot of people have spent a long time on. Subtitled and dubbed into five languages: why don't subtitles match dubbing? I'd recommend listening to this in a couple of those languages, at least for the bits where I get excited.

Elsewhere on YouTube:

Minute Earth are working together with xkcd to animate "What If" questions! The first video is a short, charming explainer about space, and it's everything I'd want a collaboration like that to be.
My friend and collaborator Matt Gray has started a new series called Matt Gray Is Trying: and he starts with pyrotechnics, helping to rig a commercial fireworks display!
Advice for time traveling to medieval Europe was fascinating, and I was immediately disappointed there weren't similar guides for other eras on the channel. The channel's found a format that really seems to work. Which means that the channel has a challenge ahead: can they avoid getting audience-captured, and only producing that one format? And can they avoid someone else getting there first and producing quicker, cheaper, more engaging versions of the idea? At an hour long, and seemingly improvised, this did drag a bit at times, and "guides for time travellers" is a newly-invented genre that I could really see working as a way to explain past cultures.

(I'm reminded of Ryan North's book "How to Invent Everything", a time machine repair guide that soort-of teaches you how to bootstrap an entire civilisation.)
Hoog breaks down the Genius of Dutch Money with excellent graphics, animation, and interview clips — although, to be clear, he's talking about the old, pre-Euro bank notes there.

And around the rest of the web:

After my video last week on moonlight towers, viewer Matt sent over a link about the apartheid-era high lighting towers in South Africa, and "the violence of lighting". I'd missed this during my research, and honestly, I don't know how (or if) I'd have been able to include it: but it's absolutely worth a read.
A brilliant article on how flavourings for crisps/potato chips are made, and on the secrecy of the "flavour houses". (Dutch "curry mayo" chips are the same flavour as some other country's "honey mustard"?!)
A fun alternate history of Doctor Who, where all the actors playing the Doctor were female. This won't make sense to anyone without knowledge of the history of British television, but I found myself repeatedly going "oh, yep, that would make sense".
"The high priestess of fraudulent finance", a tale of a swindler in the early 1900s.

And finally: an incredible comic about perspective.

All the best,

— Tom

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