Spacecraft re-entry, and no more Rickrolls.

• Checkerboarding in the United States is the weird grid pattern of deforestation that's visible from aerial photos in some regions. I wanted to make a video on it, but I could never figure out how. Checkerboarding isn't one story, it's three or four small stories in a trenchcoat, and all of those stories involve history that's fractal and difficult. So thank you to Milli for sending over this great Jon Bois-style explainer video about checkerboarding, made by flatypus. The audio's a bit rough in places, and the story could still use a bit of trimming here and there — but those flaws are easily made up for by the sheer amount of effort and research that's gone into this. Actual phone calls! Original interviews! Big 3D animation! It's great to see so much hard work pay off.
   
• I'd not heard of the Dance Your PhD contest before now. And from that title, I automatically assumed that the result would be amateur interpretative dance, filmed badly, that would come back to embarrass its makers. But I was wrong! This year's winner is astonishingly professional. The song is called "Kangaroo Time", and different dancers displaying different kangaroo personalities is a great metaphor that somehow avoids becoming awkward, probably thanks to both confidence and great production design. The on-screen text does most of the explaining, which makes sense: dance really isn't great at conveying specific facts.
   
• Now, you may have seen the Red Bull-sponsored piece about the world's fastest camera drone following an F1 car, with a top speed somewhere around 300km/h. It's fascinating. But it's also a Red Bull advert, so if the somewhat-manufactured style isn't for you, you can instead just watch the original footage from the drone team, who also included a POV shot of the pilot's hands on the controls, and the live downlink from the drone camera, so you can see what's arguably the greatest drone shot ever made. Or at least, the greatest drone shot ever made so far. (The greatest steadicam shot, meanwhile, is this from Eurovision 2009.)
   
• A private spacecraft touched down in Utah this week after orbiting the Earth: and they had a camera on board showing the whole of re-entry. Here's the full, unedited 27-minute cut, and the 5-minute highlight reel. What an incredible piece of footage.
   

• "The bladder's role in shaping advanced air mobility" is a very fancy way of saying: there are a lot of companies trying to create one-person, automated flying machines. What happens when nature calls in mid-air and there's no suitable landing site?
   
• I had a thought the other day: single-use plastic shopping bags aren't a thing any more. So what happens if you're filming a period piece set in the late 20th or early 21st century? Has anyone bothered to keep— yes, of course they have. TV and movie studios are safe.
   
• Things unexpectedly named after people. A good list, including Taco Bell, Max Factor, and shrapnel.
   

Now, after far too many weeks of messing people around with Rickrolls — as promised, at last, here's Madeon, on TikTok, talking about how he made his famous Pop Culture mashup. It'll be underwhelming after all this buildup, but this time, I do promise those are the actual links. This, meanwhile, is an actual, genuine, honest-to-goodness link to Rick Astley's 1987 hit "Never Gonna Give You Up", just for anyone who missed out hearing it in previous weeks.

And finally: cat theremin. (Thanks Hedgr for sending this over.)

All the best,

— Tom