Landlines! looping! and cranes!

7th April 2025

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Hello! Good things from the internet this week:

Episode 4 of my Jet Lag: The Game season is out! It's probably the most calm episode of the run, but that's not saying much — there's a lot of running, and despite the teams briefly taking separate paths, we still manage to interfere with each other just a little.

And the Jet Lag team are on Lateral this week! They're facing questions about animal accidents, severed signage and baby birth rates.

Plus: producer David has started the Lateral Producer's Club, so if you'd like ad-free shows, a companion podcast, bonus questions, downloads, and newsletters, then there's a membership available over there. And don't worry, nothing's changing to the current show!

What have I found on the world of YouTube?

Amy from Vintage Space, who made a guest video for my channel many years ago, has created a great and long-form video on the controversial legacy of rocket scientist Werner Von Braun. This is an incredibly difficult subject to tackle, and Amy manages to pull it off with the help of an enormous amount of knowledge and research. If you'd like to spend an hour on a historical deep-dive today, this is a great place to go.
adumb found the weirdest place in America using data analysis. Watch this, but don't read the comments until you're done, because you don't want spoilers for a couple of delightful moments. This video really didn't go the way I expected it to. (Thanks Alfie for the suggestion!)
And a much shorter video: I was reminded this week of the music video for REM's Imitation of Life, directed by Garth Jennings. It's a tour de force, 20 seconds of film looped back and forth, panned-and-scanned to reveal detail after detail, a meticulously planned shoot that even includes some backwards lipsync. Apparently it's from 12 Super 8 cameras stitched together? I guess the zooms and pans could hide stitches between takes. Someone has even tried to reconstruct the original footage! But: if there was ever a music video that should be remastered, properly, rescanning the original film stock, it's this one. The version on YouTube is awful. The film was was shot at 24fps, but it's been into munged into 30fps with stuttering semi-transparent blur frames, and early SD video compression turns it into mush. Surely someone from the record company can put a fixed version together.

If you'd prefer something outside the world of video, this week I've found:

Excitable cells is a great interactive visualisation by Johannes Enevoldsen, explaining heart attacks and cardiac arrhythmia using interactive, clickable (or tappable) diagrams. This is great science communication.
Ian, from the invaluable London blog IanVisits, goes down inside the soon-to-open Silvertown Tunnel, bringing back photos from a place where humans soon (controversially) won't be allowed to walk.
How silica gel took over the world: a diverting desiccant deep-dive. "It's not like I find shoes slipped into every third thing I buy." (Thanks to Steve for sending this over!)

And finally, in bird news: how humans in costumes teach whooping cranes to be cranes. It's very much worth clicking play on the video.

All the best,

— Tom

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