Skateboards! circling flames! and rude songs.

• KASSO is a Japanese TV show with full English subtitles. First off: how has no-one come up with "Ninja Warrior but for skateboarders" before?! It's a brilliant idea. You get all the wonder of "world-class athletes achieving incredibly difficult things", combined with the schadenfreude of "skateboarder bailing videos" and "Wipeout". This feels like it could be an excellent format for a lot of countries, with various regional tweaks. But my second thought is: what an odd format, at least on YouTube. I'm assuming from context that this is a "highlights reel" of the original TV broadcast; it's missing things like player introductions and proper commentary. And it also spoils the final runs! You know from the voiceover that someone's going to succeed before you see it... but weirdly, that didn't make me enjoy the show less. I found that knowing "this is the one that works" made me sit up and pay attention, perhaps even more than the jeopardy of "will they make it".
   
• Steve Mould continues to make incredible videos using physical props to demonstrate strange real-world phenomena. The matter-of-fact title "bizarre travelling flame discovery" is not clickbait: this is a discovery, it's about travelling flames, and it's bizarre. And it taught me some science, too.
   
• Aaron Fisher animated 2,412 pieces of craft felt. This is perhaps a very basic, route-one thing to say, but there's a real sense of purpose and design here, from the painstaking timelapse and slider shots, all the way through to the final animation. The storytelling, switching between the problems of physical craft and animation, keeps it interesting throughout. And the final result is beautiful. (Thanks Arnas for sending this over.)

Now, what about away from video?

• First up: for those in the UK, another major scientific laboratory is having an Open Day! If you'd like to tour the Harwell Campus, including the ISIS Neutron and Muon Source, RAL Space, Scientific Computing, Particle Physics, the Central Laser Facility and Diamond Light Source, tickets are available here (assuming they haven't sold out between me writing this newsletter and sending it). I've been to a couple of those places in years past and it's worth the trip if you're that way inclined.
   
• When future historians ask what the first truly popular AI-generated song was, the answer is going to be really, really awkward (strong language, very puerile humour, earworm). Someone has generated a novelty song with an AI tool — the sort that just "imagines" the entire waveform from scratch. (Although I'd strongly suspect there's some additional human work to clean it up, too.) Then they've uploaded it to the same services that indie musicians use, so that it appears as a "legitimate" song on Spotify and YouTube Music. The result is more than a million views and probably quite a nice cash-in — and no doubt thousands of zero-effort copycats ready to follow behind. Is this legal? Is this ethical? Does this comply with anyone's terms of service? Absolutely no idea. Is it a coherent song? Almost, but not quite. But is it funny? Yes. And the harmonies on "what did I do" sound really good.
   
• And sure, a well-made, rude comedy song in a retro style is going to be entertaining. But you don't need AI generation, or even modern parodies, for that! Because the dirty blues were a thing. While that Wikipedia link is relatively clean, the songs that it links to really aren't.
   
• The story of an almost-successful helicopter heist in Sweden. That is to say, a heist performed with a helicopter. No-one tried to heist the helicopter itself.
   
• And if you've got time for a longer read, this article from The Verge, about the ships and crews who rush to repair broken undersea cables, is fascinating.
   

One bit of admin: last week, I linked to the Wikipedia article about the prime, a punctuation mark that looks like an apostrophe that isn't. It didn't work, because the link ended in a ) and the email system got confused. No idea if it'll work this time, but I'm trying again!
 

And finally: here's some rats driving a tiny car.

All the best,

— Tom