Theme parks, accurate tapes, and cooling towers!
20th May 2024
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Hello!
Normally I have three YouTube links in this newsletter, but there's been so
much good stuff that I've stretched it out to five, and all of them were published this week. I still, occasionally, take a mental step back and remember that, when I was young, the only options I had for watching video were four channels of television.
But before we get to the video: in this week's Lateral, it's the return of Sam Reich from Dropout, Ashley Hamer from Taboo Science and Adam Savage from Tested, facing questions about police paperwork, tiny text and judicial jobs! As with their last show, these three worked so well together; this was a joy to host.
- Is four hours too long for a deep-dive retrospective on Disney's now-shuttered Star Wars
hotel? Jenny Nicholson's video is part review, part analysis, and part excoriation of the recent penny-pinching trends of the Disney parks. And oddly, I don't think this could be much shorter: this feels like an appropriate level of detail, at least if theme parks are your sort of jam.
- Surely you've already seen the new Bobby Fingers video (very strong language, adult themes, irresponsible filming on a roller coaster) but just in case: it's another project where the title and thumbnail under-promise while the content wildly over-delivers. What looks like a video about making a diorama of a notorious bit of pop-culture history becomes a lot, lot more.
- Machine Thinking finds the most accurate tape measure: or rather, the most accurate tape measure measure, with a visit to the US National Institute of Standards and Technology. I've worked with NIST before, and it's good to see behind the scenes at
another one of their testing labs.
- It's rare to see anywhere near this much attention to detail in a video, both in terms of the crafting and the editing: Luca Iaconi-Stewart builds a miniature GE90-115B engine out of manila
folders. Seventy hours of footage in a timelapse, not even showing the design process — with details synchronised to the music! (Thanks to Tian for sending this over.)
- It's been a while since I've linked to one of Destin's videos over at Smarter Every Day: ostensibly this is about photographing something unknown during the eclipse (excellent title optimisation there), but really it's a story about how, in Destin's words, "interested people are interesting". It's a quest to recreate an old shot, and also to solve a minor astronomical mystery.
And
around the rest of the internet:
- Astronomers have discovered a giant planet, 1,200 light years away, with the rough density of candyfloss / cotton candy. (Presumably that's an
average across a density gradient, but it's a brilliant bit of science communication to pick that comparison.)
- A wonderfully pedantic article about non-standard British road numbering. That's not sarcasm, it's a great article
and it's also extremely pedantic.
- The most common PINs used for bank cards and passcodes. It took me a few seconds to work out why "7410" was so popular.
And finally: the Temelin power plant, in Czechia, occasionally projects giant, blinking eyes onto their cooling towers.
All the best,
— Tom
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