Windswept islands and unauthorised signs

23rd August 2021

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Hello!

This week, in the second video from Orkney, it's about The Islands With Too Much Power. Electrical, not political.

A quick request before the links to other YouTube videos: please avoid posting things like "here from Tom Scott" or similar. It just feels like spam to most people! If you're going to leave a comment, please be both relevant and kind. Thank you!

Right, elsewhere on YouTube this week:

Stuff Made Here's self-aiming bow is an absolute triumph of robotics, presented really well.
Emily Hopkins found the heaviest distortion pedal and used it on a harp and the results sound wonderful.
The Knife Edge is a story about a downhill mountain bike run that goes very wrong (a warning: it includes shots of a bad accident, though there's nothing gruesome). It's the counterpoint to all those spectacular downhill-run videos that are usually so popular.

And then, away from YouTube:

Evidence of fraud in an influential field experiment about dishonesty is an understated title for an excoriating takedown of a famous 2012 paper. As you keep reading, the evidence just keeps mounting up.
Guerilla infrastructure repair: twenty years ago, an artist fixed an LA freeway sign without permission, and it's still being talked about today! This is a short, well-written, definitive version of the story, and it's worth a read.
I realise that, in the grand scheme of things, "what about the Afghanistan flag emoji?" is an incredibly trivial thing to be concerned about: but the last line in that article is a kicker. There are always edge cases.
"Direct potable reuse" is the nice term for it: "toilet-to-tap" is the opponents' rallying cry. Is there a difference between putting fully-treated waste water back in an aquifer, versus just sending it straight to the tap?
And finally, a PhD astrophysicist makes the most important discovery of their career. With one small catch.

All the best,

— Tom

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