Locusts! bike stunts! and scurvy!
17th April 2023
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Hello!
After the final video in Tokyo, I took the polar route from Tokyo back to Europe — and I was lucky enough to see northern lights out of the plane window on the way. I have no footage of it, and it's completely irrelevant to this week's video, I just wanted to brag.
Anyway! On to work. I was wondering whether I needed to put a content warning on this week's video. I think it's obvious from the title: it's the Matrix, but for locusts. But just in case: this involves locusts, raises a few questions about the ethics of testing on live creatures, and might make you slightly question your reality.
After the final video in Tokyo, I took the polar route from Tokyo back to Europe — and I was lucky enough to see northern lights out of the plane window on the way. I have no footage of it, and it's completely irrelevant to this week's video, I just wanted to brag.
Anyway! On to work. I was wondering whether I needed to put a content warning on this week's video. I think it's obvious from the title: it's the Matrix, but for locusts. But just in case: this involves locusts, raises a few questions about the ethics of testing on live creatures, and might make you slightly question your reality.
And over on Lateral, we have the return of Bill Sunderland and Dani Siller (from 'Escape This Podcast'), along with new player Amelie Brodeur, facing questions about troublesome tower blocks, bonkers bookings and factually-incorrect films!
Elsewhere on YouTube, some videos that I've found this week that
definitely do not involve locusts:
- A lot of folks, from business magazines to engineers, have covered the various companies that are trying to launch electric short-haul flights. Back in 2021, Joby, one company, invited me to film with them — but it was still in an early experimental stage, and I turned them down because there are a lot of similar
companies, and it was too speculative. Well, two years later, Kirsten Dirksen has taken a close look at them, and it's a better video than I could have made. They're hoping to launch (pun intended) near Chicago soon. (Thanks to Bobby for sending this over!)
- Sellafield nuclear power station, in the UK, is being decommissioned, and for the first time in decades, divers have entered the nuclear storage pool. (Context from a gov.uk press release.) This is a very corporate-promo video, which is to be expected given that the company's got the difficult job of cleaning up an old reactor, but it's still fascinating to see the process.
- Red Bull continue to create some of the most stunning extreme-sports videos ever: like Kriss Kyle pulling BMX tricks in a skatepark suspended under a hot air balloon, 2,000 feet in the air. (A lot of bleeped swearing.) Full marks to the technical crew, including the FPV drone and helicopter pilots: the safety signoffs for this must have been a staggering amount of work (and whoever decided to colour-match the safety parachute to the rest of his clothes: good call). I haven't got around to watching the full behind-the-scenes film but it's on my research list.
And around the rest of the internet, not involving video:
- The gambler who beat roulette. This article's been sent to me by several people, and I can see why: it's a great piece of investigative journalism, it's heist news, and it's the story of someone who,
apparently, did beat the game of roulette. Worth reading to the end.
- Designing for colorblindness. It is so, so easy to just use red and green as "bad" and "good", with no way of adding context
for the huge number of people who can't see them.
- How the cure for scurvy was discovered, then lost: the idea of Vitamin C is really counter-intuitive if you don't even have the concept of vitamins. This
is a very readable summary of a bit of history that I had no idea.
- A wonderfully stupid invention, the sort of thing I might have hacked together years ago after an idea in the pub: a full-body semaphore keyboard, where you type by moving your arms. I really miss making stuff like this, and having the spare capacity (mental and temporal) for ridiculous ideas.
And finally: you know the Wilhelm scream? Well, someone found the entire original recording session, including the
context around it! A tipping point in cinema history that no-one had any idea about at the time.
Next week: Switzerland!
All the best,
— Tom
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