Old attractions, mirrors, and landlines (for real, this time)!

14th April 2025

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Hello! For the second time in this newsletter's history, I got the subject line wrong last week. I bumped the "landlines" story into this week's newsletter, and I forgot to update the title. So here is Landlines 2: This Time There's Actually An Article About Landlines. (And yes, I did briefly consider bumping it again for comedy value.)

But first: episode 5 of Jet Lag is out on YouTube, and the finale is now out on Nebula!

And over on Lateral, it's the return of the Let's Learn Everything team, taking on questions about swing speeds, blurted brands and clever coins.

Here's the good stuff I've found on YouTube:

Eddy Burback got rid of his phone for a month. (Strong language.) This isn't some clickbait challenge: this is a really well-told, carefully-considered video diary from someone who went all the way back to having a landline. And while I'm not going to be doing that any time soon, I did consider whether I might want to switch to a phone that does a lot less.
Pete Rondeau restores vintage carnival rides, and he's off to see the Zipper, which fits on one truck and unpacks to become a startlingly-fast vertical spinning ride, like some sort of multi-axis ferris wheel. It was fascinating to see the process; I haven't had chance to check out the rest of Pete's channel, but there's likely more interesting videos there. (Thanks Trevor for sending this over!)
Thanks to the several people who told me there's another new OK Go video! And after the digital-ness of the last one, it's back to the one-take physical props: robots and mirrors and kaleidoscopes. I wouldn't normally mention a second video from the same source so soon, but this time there's a proper behind-the-scenes documentary, twenty minutes with the cast and crew talking about the logistics, and an additional short video about robot control and safety. The song's pretty good too.

And what about away from YouTube?

Thanks to Hazel for sending over this A+ journal article: there's a pun in the full title and a surprising result. But in short: has tap-to-pay resulted in fewer people getting coins stuck in them? This feels like it belongs on the Ig Nobel prize shortlist.
And a fascinating article in Nature: the shingles vaccine may reduce an older person's chances of dementia by 3.5 percentage points. What stood out to me here is the phrase "natural experiment": just by the luck of the draw, a perfect control and test group was created.
Ghosts in the Kinect: "Microsoft’s motion-sensing camera lives on as a tool for paranormal investigations."

And finally, an ultra-high efficiency dishwasher. The quick unload feature "has a range of about eight metres on concrete floors".

All the best,

— Tom

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