Linguistics! musical jokes! and a terrible idea.
16th September 2024
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Hello! Here's the list of Good Stuff Around The Web This Week:
We start at home: this week on Lateral, it's the return of Corry Will, Luke Cutforth and Jordan Harrod, to face questions about animated ants, badminton brilliance and peculiar products.
We start at home: this week on Lateral, it's the return of Corry Will, Luke Cutforth and Jordan Harrod, to face questions about animated ants, badminton brilliance and peculiar products.
And I make an appearance over on That's Absurd Please Elaborate, answering a very XKCD What If-style question: there's a movie where a hockey goalie gets blasted back into the goal by a puck. Could that actually happen? How would it work? (Spoilers: no, and it would not end well for anyone involved.)
Around the rest of YouTube:
- Language Jones asks: "is Gen Alpha slang just nonsense"? Which sounds like a clickbait video, but it's not! Taylor Jones has a PhD in linguistics, a really clear writing and speaking style, and a great way of telling stories. The whole channel is worth exploring.
- Evan Edinger has put together a big video on American pedestrian crossing signals, ranging from the unintuitive Hawk crossing to the incredible "just ask people to wave a little flag while they cross".
- A 17-second video of the Carpentopod, a remote-control table that walks on 12 legs like some sort of stocky wooden insect. If you want the details of how it's made, though? That's in this thorough blog post by maker Giliam de Carpentier, with a load of other clips of the work in progress. (Thanks Nathan for sending this over!)
- Merle Hazard's (Gimme Some of That) Ol' Atonal Music is — and I mean this as a sincere compliment — a series of really silly musical jokes, many of which are telegraphed well in advance. Sometimes, knowing the punchline does not spoil the gag. This was posted five years ago, but it's done the rounds again in the last week or two for... well, no reason that I can figure out!
Away from video and around the rest of the web:
- A scientist carbon dated his own kidney stone. And from this, I found out about the bomb pulse: carbon dating things from 1950 is really precise because of the massive amount of 20th-century nuclear testing, an effect that'll continue until 2030.
- How US Navy chiefs conspired to get themselves illegal warship Wi-Fi.
- Things that I cannot believe are from 1912, not 2024: playing polo with cars. As in, the sport with the mallets that's normally played on horseback. I guess this is easier when the cars are Ford Model Ts, but the photos look terrifying. I'm surprised no-one's created a version of this with modern cars for YouTube, but then I guess polo's less popular these days.
And finally, over on TikTok: a mashup of Chappell Roan vs Jeff Wayne. Or if you prefer, Jeff Wayne vs Chappell Roan.
All the best,
— Tom
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