An old hotel, the world's biggest toilet, and an interesting puzzle.
13th March 2023
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Heads up! This newsletter is more than a year old. Links may be out of date or lead to unexpected places, or the context may have changed. Please handle with care.
Hello from Japan! A new country, and a new series of videos, starting with: things are changing at the world's oldest hotel.
This video has an experimental feature: for anyone who's unable to read subtitles, an alternate audio track is available with dubbing. It's only an AI voiceover, more lector-style dubbing rather than full, professional (and
expensive) voice acting, and I can't guarantee it'll work long-term or for future videos. But it's hopefully one step in the right direction!
And of course, there's a new episode of Lateral this week
too! 'SuperSaf' AhmedMia, Ali Spagnola and Mehdi 'ElectroBOOM' Sadaghdar face questions about rigging research, dating dwellings and exploiting extras. (There's now a new player built into the main web site, too.)
What about the rest of YouTube? Well, this week:
- Marques Brownlee says yes to every sponsor request. My team gets a lot of weird sponsor emails: I'm envious I didn't think of this idea, but also glad that I'm not going to get more weird emails because of it. And I've never presented anything from inside a
casket.
- While the deceptive world of ghost kitchens (occasional strong language) does start by covering ground you may already know, there's a couple of experiments in here that are absolutely worth your time.
- I've linked to Dianna Cowern, "Physics Girl", a couple of times before: unfortunately there's some bad news about her health. I do wish her and her family all the very best.
- And the Tim Traveller continues to make lovely videos across Europe, bringing viewers along for the journey. This time: why a romantic German town built the world's biggest toilet. (There is an animation gag half way through this video that made me snort with laughter.)
How about elsewhere on the web, away from video? This was originally meant to be "things I found while researching", but honestly, these days it's more "things I found while slacking off":
- Sumplete is a pleasing puzzle game that was, surprisingly, created using AI. I think it could benefit from a human setting the puzzles — randomly-generated sudoku are much worse than ones set by people — and it turns out that there's already something similar. That said: I find that it's a really pleasing game! You'll find the default 3 by 3 tutorial to be trivial; for me, 6 by 6 is a fun, short challenge and 7 by 7 is where it starts taking some serious thought (or full-on frustration if the random generator's been a bit dull).
- There are people in the United States with the first name "Fnu". Except... there shouldn't be. It's the result of a clerical error, and many of them just choose to live with it than try and battle bureaucracy.
- I feel like "there is a virus that can cause obesity" should be far more common knowledge than it is? (Here's a more in-depth look from PubMed: it is, of course, nowhere near as simple as that first sentence.)
And finally, space radio pirates!
Right, that's it for this week. Next week, something a bit more modern...
All the best,
— Tom
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