A clog heist! a daily Morse game! and a good view from a spire.

• This feels like exactly the sort of thing YouTube was designed for: changing a light bulb at the top of Salisbury Cathedral's spire. Personal footage, someone telling their own story rather than anything professional or corporate. You're not actually going to see the bulb get changed: but you're going to get a view from the very top, and in a way, it'll feel like you've taken the journey. These are the sort of POV shots that, if you're susceptible to them, will absolutely give you stomach-lurches and sweaty-palms. (Warning: flashing images in some indoor shots, due to a 60fps camera trying to cope with a 50Hz lighting environment.)
  
  Side note: I'm really enjoying linking to smaller channels and videos like this, so if you see something that might fit in the newsletter (but which isn't intended to be private or semi-private), do send it over.
   
• And this feels like exactly the sort of thing TikTok was designed for: Steven, the County Collector, is on a mission to dance in every US county. (Alternate link if that doesn't work.) There are 3,144 US counties, which is a possible number for a ridiculous project like this. He says he can't dance, but if that's true, he's certainly making up for it in enthusiasm.
   
• Have you seen styropyro's 20,000 watt microwave yet? 250 times more powerful than an average domestic microwave, it's lethal in multiple startling ways if used incorrectly. There's only one person on YouTube doing experiments on this scale.
   

• Morsle is an interesting daily puzzle (thankfully with an unrestricted practice mode): can you figure out the Morse code? You can replay the word lots of times, and it gets steadily and slower the more times you listen. I found it a fun challenge, and it drilled into me that I should try and listen the "shapes" of the sounds, rather than decoding dots and dashes. That said, I've seen comments about this from people who know Morse, saying that there are better ways to learn. Slowing down the patterns, while it's fun for a game, isn't necessary going to teach people!
   
• The Great Bedrock Clog Heist (strong language): a story that includes international crime, truckers that can't be trusted, and someone holding yogurt for ransom.
   
• The brain has a waste-clearance system, and it's been observed in people for the first time. It's tempting to think, from a lay perspective, that human biology is charted waters, but if I'm understanding the right, then this is an entire system in every human that was unknown (or, at most, only theorised) at the start of this century.
   
• A fascinating article by David Moser, a Beijing linguist: Character Amnesia in China. Why are some people in China forgetting how to write the characters of their language? (I'm not forgetting how to write English words, but my handwriting is terrible.)
   

And finally, a song about a twelve foot Home Depot skeleton. Happy Hallowe'en, everyone.

All the best,

— Tom