Self-experimentation! stage presence! and border technicality news.

Hello! And welcome to a newsletter that was written while I was in an excited mood for no reason I can figure out. Let's go:

First up: on this week's Lateral, it's the return of the Let's Learn Everything crew! Which is always a joy: Ella Hubber, Caroline Roper and Tom Lum face questions about concealed clocks, unique units and sneaky shoplifting.

The Lateral book is now out in the UK! You can buy it in physical shops! I've seen it in an actual bookshop! And it comes out in the US tomorrow. Thank you to all the folks who've bought a copy, and to all our listeners.

Now! Time for good stuff I've seen on YouTube this week:

HG Modernism fixed her lactose intolerance... by chugging all the lactose. "So, of course, I read this paper, and I had to try it myself." Thankfully, this is not a daily vlog about the process itself, just a charming retelling of the story and the consequences. And the papers are referenced properly in the description!
A heavy equipment manufacturer attached a GoPro to the treads of one of their 90-ton excavators. This is just a really good, short, 60-second camera shot, and creates an intuitive sense of how tracked vehicles work: intellectually I knew how they moved, but now I feel like I understand it.
Jeremy Jordan sings "It's All Coming Back To Me Now". What a voice! What stage presence! This is part Broadway song performance, and part comedy routine. I wish I had a fraction of this vocal talent. (Thanks to Suzanna for sending this over!)

Other interesting links I've found this week:

The Magic Circle, the British magicians' secret society, is trying to track down their first female member... who was expelled because she posed as a man.
Visual Basic 6.0, reimplemented in the browser. This will create a huge amount of nostalgia for a very certain type of nerd, myself included. It's not been fully reimplemented (at least not yet!), you can't actually make an executable file with this as far as I can tell. But there's a certain feel to designing Windows 95 and 98 forms that I hadn't felt since... well, since the 20th century.
Minor border technicality news! Texas and Oklahoma have redrawn their boundaries ever-so-slightly to avoid having a water pump station break the law.
Today I learned about baby evacuation aprons.

And finally, police have tracked down an unlikely shoe thief in Japan. (And here's a wonder of the modern world: if you watch the original Japanese TV news report, and go to YouTube's settings, the automatic subtitles and automatic translation are good enough to easily understand what's being said!)

All the best,

— Tom