After posting a video (almost always an elaborate, well-produced and well-researched one) to his YouTube channel every week for ten years, Tom Scott is stepping back for a break.
I’ve been throwing stuff at the internet since 1999. And for many, many years, that stuff went almost nowhere. I had occasional bits of success, but could never make any of them last long-term. I remember thinking, so many times during all those years… will any of this stuff I’m making ever work?
Well, this did.
I didn’t know that, back when I was filming the first videos for the series that was then called Things You Might Not Know, I just held out my phone at arm’s length and talked into it for 90 seconds with almost no research! I really don’t like those videos now. But the first of them was published exactly ten years before this one. To the minute. 4pm, January 1st, 2014.
For the first month of that format, I was publishing a video almost every day, and then I settled down: one video a week. Mostly on location, near windswept infrastructure, although there’s computer science and linguistics in there too, and occasional green-screen animated videos. I experimented with other formats on other days, but the rule I set myself was: Monday, 4pm, something interesting.
Incredible. Scott has one of the few Weird Internet Careers that I am truly envious of — it just looks like so much fun getting to do all of that stuff and then telling people all about it.
Congratulations, Tom Scott — I hereby induct you into the Internet Hall of Fame! 👏 👏 👏 👏
Over the past few months, I’ve had some time away from the computer and have taken several very long plane trips and some shorter car rides, which means a bit more reading, TV & movie watching, and podcast listening than usual. Oh, and holiday movies.
Anyway, here’s my recent media diet — a roundup of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing over the past few months.
The Killer. The excellent Michael Fassbender portrays a solitary, bored, and comfortable killer for hire who has a bit of a midlife crisis in fast forward when a job goes wrong. (A-)
Fortnite OG. I started playing Fortnite in earnest during Chapter 3, so it was fun to go back to Chapter 1 to see how the game worked back then. (B+)
Edge of Tomorrow. Speaking of video games… Still love this under-appreciated film, despite a third act that falls a tiny bit flat. (A)
The Vaster Wilds by Lauren Groff. I did not enjoy this quite as much as Matrix — especially the last third — but Groff is one hell of a writer. (B+)
New Blue Sun. Good on André 3000 for not doing the expected thing and instead releasing an instrumental album on which he plays the flute. (A-)
Songs of Silence. I can’t remember who clued me into this lovely instrumental album by Vince Clarke (Erasure, Depeche Mode), but it’s been heavily in the rotation lately. (B+)
Trifecta. A.L.I.S.O.N.’s Deep Space Archives is a favorite chill work album for me and this one is nearly as good. (B+)
Shoulda Been Dead. I had no idea that Kevin Kelly appeared on an early episode of This American Life until someone mentioned it offhand on our Thailand walk. What a story…listen all the way to the end. (A)
Train Dreams by Denis Johnson. Oh the writing here is exquisite. (A)
The Mountain in the Sea by Ray Nayler. Are AGI robots intelligent? Are octopuses? Are humans? This novel plays entertainingly with these ideas. (A-)
Myeongdong Kyoja. I stumbled upon this place, extremely cold and hungry, and after a brief wait in line, I was conducted to an open seat by the no-nonsense hostess running the dining room. The menu only has four items, conveniently pictured on the wall — I got the kalguksu and mandu. The hostess took my order and then, glancing at my frozen hands, reached down and briefly gave one of them a squeeze, accompanied by a concerned look that lasted barely half a second before she returned to bustling around the room. A delicious meal and a welcome moment of humanity in an unfamiliar land. (A)
Barbie. Second viewing. Entertaining and funny, but this is a movie that has Something To Say and I still can’t figure out what that is. (B+)
Emily the Criminal. There were a few hiccups here and there, but I largely enjoyed this Aubrey Plaza vehicle. (A-)
Midnight in Paris. Not going to recommend a Woody Allen movie these days, but this is one of my comfort movies — I watch it every few months and love every second of it. (A)
Gran Turismo. Extremely predictable; they could have done more with this. (B)
The Rey/Ren Star Wars trilogy. I have lost any ability to determine if any of these movies are actually good — I just like them. 🤷♂️ (B+)
Loki (season two). This was kind of all over the place for me but finished pretty strong. Glorious purpose indeed. (B)
Home Alone. First time rewatching this in at least a decade? This movie would have worked just as well if Kevin were 15% less annoying. (B+)
The Grinch. My original review stands: “I wasn’t expecting to sympathize so much with The Grinch here. The social safety net constructed by the upper middle class Whos totally failed the most vulnerable member of their society in a particularly heartless way. Those Whos kinda had it coming.” (B+)
Past installments of my media diet are available here. What good things have you watched, read, or listened to lately?
The entire episode of Pee-wee’s Playhouse Christmas Special (1988) is on YouTube, fully remastered in 1080p HD. Special guests include Annette Funicello, Zsa Zsa Gabor, Whoopi Goldberg, Magic Johnson, Grace Jones, Little Richard, and Joan Rivers. From a Vulture piece on the special:
Christmas at Pee-wee’s Playhouse, the 1988 primetime CBS special from comedian and actor Paul Reubens, is one of the strangest, most glorious, most improbable, most confident pieces of entertainment to appear on television. Thirty-five years after it aired, and in a period of reconsideration after Paul Reubens’s death, the Pee-wee Herman Christmas special still looks like one of the major pinnacles of Reubens as an artist, full of silly delight and winking subversion, all framed inside the relative safety of a big sparkly Christmas extravaganza.
And after declaring “This special is one of the gayest things I’ve ever seen”:
What’s so brilliant about it as a piece of queer art is that it is presented so earnestly, and the iconography they’re playing with is Americana. It plays as camp to our modern view of over-the-top earnestness. But it’s a mix of camp aesthetic and an alternative comedy aesthetic of laughing at bad jokes, like the series of fruitcake jokes, which were at the time a cliché, that fruitcake was bad. Why are we going to make this joke about fruitcake over and over again? Because it’s stupid!
{Hyperventilating slightly} They’re making a World of Goo 2 15 years after the original one was released?! Holy smokes! I loved World of Goo back in the day and I can’t wait to play this sequel. (via waxy)
I linked to this in the recent David Bowie post, but it’s worth pulling out separately: the 100 greatest BBC musical performances. This is an incredible trove of late 20th and early 21st century musical greatness. Some selections just off the top of my head:
Blondie – Atomic/Heart of Glass (The Old Grey Whistle Test, 1979):
Talking Heads – Psycho Killer (OGWT, 1978):
Daft Punk – Essential Mix (Radio 1, 1997):
Hole – Doll Parts/He Hit Me (And It Felt Like A Kiss)/Violet (Later, 1995):
Joy Division – Transmission (Something Else, 1979):
The performance launched Bowie to stardom. Thursday 6th July, 1972, is said to be ‘the day that invented the 80’s’ as so many musicians who went on to be household names saw the performance and it changed their lives. Those watching that night included U2’s Bono, The Cure’s Robert Smith, Boy George, Adam Ant, Mick Jones of the Clash, Gary Kemp of Spandau Ballet, Morrissey and Johnny Marr of the Smiths, Siouxsie Sioux, Toyah Willcox, John Taylor and Nick Rhodes of Duran Duran, Dave Gahan of Depeche Mode and many more.
“It’s deceptively easy to forget that in the summer of 1972 David Bowie was still yesterday’s news to the average Top of the Pops viewer, a one-hit wonder who’d had a novelty single about an astronaut at the end of the previous decade,” writes Nicholas Pegg in The Complete David Bowie. But his taking the stage of that BBC pop-musical institution “in a rainbow jumpsuit and shocking red hair put paid to that forever. Having made no commercial impact in the two months since its release, ‘Starman’ stormed up the chart.” As with “Space Oddity,” “the subtext is all: this is less a science-fiction story than a self-aggrandizing announcement that there’s a new star in town.”
Wow, what a lovely, inspiring story this is: in 2022, Gary McKee ran a marathon every single day. On weekdays, he got up early and completed his run before work. And along the way, he inspired a bunch of people to join him (one work colleague ran 92 marathons w/ him) and raised £1 million for Macmillan Cancer Support.
This video from MoMA follows master printer Jacob Samuel as he makes his final print before he retires.
As he inks, hand wipes, and rolls his final print through the press, he reflects on his philosophy. “My goal is to leave no fingerprints,” he says. All you see is the artist’s work. I’m just another pencil. I’m just another brush. But I want the pencil to be sharpened really well. I want the brush to be sable. And to do that and be completely spontaneous, I trust the materials.”
This is probably the weirdest thing you’ll see all week: Bobby Fingers (who you might remember from his diorama of Michael Jackson on fire) made a rowboat shaped like the head of Jeff Bezos. The head is super-realistic and the head/boat is big enough to hold at least one person. What a delightfully odd mixture of exacting craftsmanship, performance art, comedy, and just plain WTF. Slightly NSFW (hairy butt cheeks). (via waxy)
In their latest video, Kurzgesagt takes a break from their more serious topics to consider a scenario from the realm of science fiction: interstellar combat. Using technology that is theoretically available to us here on Earth, could a more advanced civilization some 42 light years away destroy our planet without any warning? They outline three potential weapons: the Star Laser, the Relativistic Missile, and the Ultra-Relativistic Electron Beam.
Here’s what I don’t understand though: how would the targeting work? In order for an alien civilization to hit the Earth with a laser from 42 light years away, it has to not only predict, within a margin of error of the Earth’s diameter, precisely where the Earth is going to be, but also have a system capable of aiming across 42 light years of distance with that precision. Is this even possible? How precisely do we know where the Earth is going to be in 42 years? And if you’re aiming at something 42 light years away, if you move the sights a nanometer, how much angular distance does that shift the the destination by? And how much does the gravity of matter along the way shift the trajectory and is it possible to accurately compensate for that? Maybe this should be their next video…
Philip Glass is coming out with a new album early next year called Philip Glass Solo. It was recorded during the early days of the pandemic at Glass’s home on his piano.
This is my piano, the instrument on which most of the music was written. It’s also the same room where I have worked for decades in the middle of the energy which New York City itself has brought to me. The listener may hear the quiet hum of New York in the background or feel the influence of time and memory that this space affords. To the degree possible, I made this record to invite the listener in.
The video above is a lovely clip of him, in his home, playing one of the songs off the album.
The David Rumsey Map Collection is one of the true gems of the web: a massive trove of maps & related images from over 40 years of collecting.
Rumsey began building a collection of North and South American historical maps and related cartographic materials in 1980. Eventually the collection expanded to include historical maps of the entire world, from the 16th to the 21st centuries. His collection, with more than 200,000 maps, is one of the largest private map collections in the United States.
Italian filmmaker Andrea Gatopoulos has made a documentary film called A Stranger Quest about Rumsey’s passion for maps. Here’s the trailer:
And because I can’t resist, a few maps from the collection:
This fascinating and well-produced video from Vox introduces us to what happens to materials that are put under vast amounts of pressure — I’m talking center of the Sun pressures upwards of 100 billion atmospheres. Scientists are just beginning their explorations of the strange things that happen “when you keep squeezing”.
Tens of thousands of kilometers below Jupiter’s surface, physicists think hydrogen will go through another change becoming a shiny conductor of electricity. It’s thought that a lot of Jupiter is made up of this metallic hydrogen.
We think of high energy density materials as completely inverting the periodic table. So your metals become transparent and your transparent materials become metals. And all these gases become solids…
About ten years ago, after a long campaign by Navajo Nation member Manny Wheeler, Disney/Lucasfilm released the first Star Wars movie dubbed into the Navajo language. In this clip from the PBS series Native America, the Navajo version of Star Wars is shown at a drive-in in Arizona, with some of the voice actors who contributed to the dub in attendance. Some Navajo feel a strong connection to some of the themes in the movie:
The Force and the universe is all interconnected. When you put that in the Navajo language, especially for an elder to hear that, they’re going to just be thinking, like, yeah, of course. It’s not just a movie. That’s stuff we really believe.
To mark the 10th anniversary of their YouTube channel, Kurzgesagt has released a video timeline of the Earth’s evolution, all 4.5 billion years of it. The video is 60 minutes long, which means that each second shows about 1 million years. And it’s kind of a music video…of sorts? There’s talking but there are definitely stretches of just music and visuals…it’s not your usual science explainer video.
Hop on a musical train ride and experience how long a billion years really is. It’s the perfect background for your next party, a great way to take a break from studying, or a fascinating companion while you’re on the go.
Before the iPod, before the Walkman, there was the Mikiphone, a portable record player that folded up into a case that you could fit in your pocket. Invented circa 1924, this portable phonograph was powered by a hand-crank and could play 10-inch records.
At first glance, the closed Mikiphone appears quite compact, easily fitting inside a purse.
However, it requires some assembly, with its components stored within the case, which, when shut, measures just 11.5 cm in diameter and 4.7 cm in thickness.
The recording head and a two-piece Bakelite resonator had to be connected to the foldout tone arm before the shellac disc could be placed on the turntable’s central pin.
This precision engineering feat was awarded first prize at an international music exhibition in Geneva in 1927.
Courtesy of the Stanford Archive of Recorded Sound, a demonstration of how to assemble the Mikiphone and play records on it:
The premiere date for the Netflix adaptation of Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem trilogy by Game of Thrones showrunners D.B. Weiss and David Benioff inches ever closer and, well, I just really want this to be good (because I enjoyed the book series so much). Between the teaser trailer and the clip above, I am cautiously optimistic. 3 Body Problem is out on Netflix on March 21, 2024.
At the beginning of the ninth episode of his 13-part series Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, Carl Sagan says:
If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
Taking a page from Sagan’s book, Zack Scholl made a site called Recursive Recipes, which allows you to drill down into the ingredients of some common foods, replacing them with other recipes.
A recursive recipe is one where ingredients in the recipe can be replaced by another recipe. The more ingredients you replace, the more that the recipe is made truly from scratch.
Here’s what the apple pie recipe looks like when you make everything you can from scratch:
You don’t quite begin at the Big Bang, but if you start with soil, a cow, and some seawater, it’s still going to take you almost 8 years to make that pie. The wheat needed for the flour, for instance:
Plant winter wheat in fall to allow for six to eight weeks of growth before the soil freezes. This allows time for good root development. If the wheat is planted too early, it may smother itself the following spring and it could be vulnerable to some late-summer insects that won’t be an issue in the cooler fall weather. If winter wheat is planted too late, it will not overwinter well.
Thwaites reverse engineered a seven dollar toaster into 400 separate parts and then set about recreating steel from iron ore rocks, plastic from microwaved potatoes and copper from homemade bromide mush.
From a series The Cut did called Deaf People Tell, a group of deaf people teach us how to swear and say bad words in sign language. I really liked the one for “bullshit”. Probably NSFW.
Nearly everything about Fortnite’s popular Battle Royale mode is geared towards creating conflict between its players. In this episode of Pop Culture Detective, Jonathan McIntosh explores whether you can be a pacifist in a virtual world filled with war and, beyond that, whether you can make friends with your fiercest enemy. As a Fortnite player who has qualms about even the cartoony violence in the game, I loved this video. It reminded me of Robin Sloan’s piece in the Atlantic from 2018: I Played Fortnite and Figured Out the Universe.
When they’re successful, these negotiations are honestly more nervy and exciting than the game’s most intense shoot-outs. I’m not the only one who thinks so. In forums dedicated to Fortnite Battle Royale, some players share clips of chance alliances, and others reply glumly: “Super rare to find someone [who] won’t shoot you when you emote.” I dream of a Political Fortnite in which victory goes not to the twitchiest sniper but the most charismatic organizer, with factions forming and dissolving… I imagine the fear and thrill of seeing not one but a dozen tiny silhouettes on the far ridge-a war band sweeping fast down the hillside. I’m outnumbered; can I convince them to let me join them?
A quick and breezy introduction to some basic wayfinding techniques from Fran Scott and BBC Earth Kids. Unless you went to camp as a kid or have spent a bunch of time outdoors, at least some of these techniques will be new to you. I’d never heard of trees growing in a check mark shape. From natural navigation expert Tristan Gooley:
Obviously, all green plants need sunlight. So it’s logical that plants will, all things being equal, tend to grow more abundantly on the side the light comes from. In the northern parts of the world, where the sun is due south in the middle of the day, that means plants are growing more abundantly on the south side.
Try noticing this in a tree the next time you take a walk outside. You should see that there’s more tree on the south side, unless there are other factors-for instance there are amazing examples of glass buildings that can make trees grow the wrong way. But generally speaking, there should be more of the tree on the south side.
Using a custom hydrogen alpha solar telescope, Jason Kurth took a collection of high-resolution photographs of the recent annular solar eclipse and arranged them into an 8K video of the event. The level of detail here is incredible — you can see solar flares and features on the surface of the Sun pulsing and shifting as the Moon moves across it. You can see a bit of Kurth’s setup on Instagram.
The four members of the Beatles, assisted by machine learning technology, come together one last time to record a song together, working off of a demo tape recorded by John Lennon in the 70s.
The long mythologised John Lennon demo was first worked on in February 1995 by Paul, George and Ringo as part of The Beatles Anthology project but it remained unfinished, partly because of the impossible technological challenges involved in working with the vocal John had recorded on tape in the 1970s. For years it looked like the song could never be completed.
But in 2022 there was a stroke of serendipity. A software system developed by Peter Jackson and his team, used throughout the production of the documentary series Get Back, finally opened the way for the uncoupling of John’s vocal from his piano part. As a result, the original recording could be brought to life and worked on anew with contributions from all four Beatles.
In the past few decades, we’ve found out a great deal about pre-Columbian civilizations & inhabitants of the Americas, including those in the Amazon rainforest, where settlements were larger and more numerous than previously believed.
When European colonizers arrived in the 16th century, they were captivated by rumors of a golden city, hidden somewhere in the rainforest. Their search for “El Dorado” lasted more than a century, but only resulted in disaster, death, and further conquest of the indigenous people there.
Experts thereafter looked at the Amazon and saw only a desolate jungle; too harsh for extensive agriculture and therefore sparsely populated. They believed that it had always been this way.
Until recently.
Beginning in the late 20th century, archaeologists began looking more closely at the forest floor. Working with the indigenous people who still remained there, they excavated long ditches and mounds. After mapping them, they could see that these were the markings of large settlements; walls, moats, plazas, and roads that connected even more settlements. And they were all over the Amazon.
I know I always say this, but I didn’t mean for so much time to elapse since the last installment of the media diet. But I have a slightly different reason for the delay this time: I have been really busy with work and family stuff, so much so that I haven’t been reading or watching as much as I usually do. So I needed to wait a couple of months to collect enough stuff.
Anyway. Here’s my recent media diet, a roundup of what I’ve been reading, watching, listening to, and experiencing over the past few months. ✌️
The Creator. Original, engaging sci-fi with good action, heart, and something to say. Madeleine Yuna Voyles is the best child actor I’ve seen in years. (A)
Democracy Awakening: Notes on the State of America by Heather Cox Richardson. I’m still making my way through this one but I’m going to review it now because Virginia Heffernan was absolutely correct in saying that the first part of the book is “the most lucid just-so story for Trump’s rise I’ve ever heard”. Richardson ties so many things together so succinctly that by the end of it, Trump feels not like an abberation but more like the result of a plan that conservatives have been striving towards for decades. (A+)
Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning Part One. Watched this twice: once in the theater and once at home. I didn’t like this quite as much as Fallout (or Top Gun: Maverick tbh), but this is a top-notch action movie. The tiny car chase on the streets of Rome is 💯. (A-)
The ocean. Still undefeated. (A+)
Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Parts 1 & 2. *sigh* Like many of you, I am extremely disappointed with the weird & harmful anti-trans crusade the author of the Harry Potter book series has embarked on over the last few years and it’s prompted me to attempt a reevaluation of my relationship to these movies and books. But I’ve had some difficulty doing so because the Potter wizarding world is so wrapped up in spending quality time with my kids (particularly after their mom and I separated) that it’s hard to have anything but extremely fond feelings for it all. Over a period of five or so years, we read the whole series together at bedtime and I can’t even put into words how meaningful that time together was. We’re listening to the series on audiobook in the car right now…it’s one of the few things my two teens and I really enjoy doing with one another.
Anyway, all that is to say that when some recent changes in our schedule together — good, developmentally appropriate changes for them but changes nonetheless — caused some parental melancholy, I watched these three films on back-to-back-to-back nights just to feel close to my kids in some way. It was just the thing. (A)
American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin. Perhaps not the beach read I needed, but the one I deserved. I liked this maybe a bit better than the movie, but still not nearly as much as Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb (and its sequel, Dark Sun). (A-)
Once Upon a Time in Northern Ireland. This was excellent. Listening to actual people who lived and worked in Northern Ireland during the Troubles — victims, murderers, police officers, bystanders, family members of those who were killed — was completely enthralling and brought the 30-year conflict to life in a way that Patrick Radden Keefe’s Say Nothing couldn’t, as good as it was. I’ve been thinking about this series a lot over the past few weeks as the latest tragedy unfolds in Gaza. (A+)
The Repair. Another excellent podcast series from Scene on Radio, this one on climate crisis. I’ve read quite a bit about the climate over the past decade or two, so I thought I knew what to expect going in, but this takes a pretty unique angle. For one thing, they don’t start with the Industrial Revolution…their lead-in to the topic is the Book of Genesis. And it keeps going in unexpected directions from there. I think even a seasoned observer of the crisis will find something interesting here. (A)
The Belan Deck by Matt Bucher. Maybe a better choice of beach read than American Prometheus…I finished this slim, creative tome in one sitting on my final day at the ocean. Here’s a better review than this one. (B+)
The mashed potato pizza from Bar. I’d tried this once before and found it kinda meh. But not this time around…I couldn’t stop eating it. (A)
Hotel Marcel. If you’ve ever driven on I-95 through New Haven, you’ve probably noticed the brutalist building unceremoniously situated in the Ikea parking lot. Designed by Marcel Breuer, the former Armstrong Rubber Company Building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2021 and converted to the Hotel Marcel a year later. Pretty cool to be able to stay in such a well-designed building. (B+)
The Super Mario Bros. Movie. This was perfectly fine. But it had that tightly controlled and over-engineered feeling that many franchise movies have these days. (B)
Arrival. Still an absolute banger and one of my all-time faves. And I notice a little something new every time I watch it. (A+)
The Flash. Better than I expected! And I bought the Quick Bite emote in Fortnite. Can we staaaahpp with the multiverse tho? (B+)
Ahsoka (season one). Hmm. This was slow, enjoyable, boring, engaging — sometimes all at once. Space whales tho? (B)
The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar. This is Wes Anderson, unplugged: simple sets, lots of acting, spare-but-precise cinematography, and a meta narrative. (A-)
Boundaries, Burnout and the ‘Goopification’ of Self-Care. For the Ezra Klein Show, guest host Tressie McMillan Cottom (one of America’s leading public intellectuals) interviewed Pooja Lakshmin about what she calls Real Self-Care. Not yoga and juice cleanses but more like setting boundaries and practicing self-compassion. An excellent listen. (A-)
Wool by Hugh Howey. After really enjoying the Apple TV+ series, I was looking forward to dipping into the first book of the trilogy. But I preferred the show…and was also surprised when the book, well before the end, continued on past the events of the show. I stopped reading at that point and will revisit after the show’s second season. (B)
Killers of the Flower Moon. I wanted to like this more than I did. Great acting (particularly by De Niro, Gladstone, and Plemons) and it looked amazing but it lacked oomph. Plus I didn’t have a clear sense of what Scorsese was trying to say… (B+)
Batman Begins, The Dark Knight, The Dark Knight Rises. I watched these with my son (a budding Nolan fan) and I know this is sacrilege, but my favorite of the series is The Dark Knight Rises. Heath Ledger’s performance though… 🤡🔥. (A-)
I also have a bunch of stuff in progress, including The Vaster Wilds (good so far, need to make more time for it), the new season of The Great British Bake Off (my fave got eliminated in the first episode 😢), and Loki (skeptical this can match the style & weirdness of the first season). I stalled out on season three of The Great but I’m going to go back to it. I’m two episodes into Reservation Dogs (after many recommended it) and I love it already. And I haven’t even started Emily Wilson’s translation of The Iliad!
How about you? What have you been into lately? Anything you would particularly recommend? Let us know in the comments! (Just don’t argue with my grades…we all already know they don’t make any damn sense!)
If you look closely at a rainbow made from sunlight (e.g. through a prism or an actual rainbow), you’ll notice that some of the colors are missing. It turns out that these absent colors (called Fraunhofer lines) have something to do with the types of elements that are present in the Sun (and the Earth’s atmosphere). Dr. Joe Hanson explains in the video above.
Over 200 years ago, scientists were looking at sunlight through a prism when they noticed that part of the rainbow was missing. There were dark lines where there should have been colors. Since then, scientists have unlocked the secrets encoded in these lines, using it to uncover mind-boggling facts about the fundamental nature of our universe and about worlds light-years away.
Science is fascinating…Fraunhofer lines can tell us something about objects and processes all along the Powers of Ten scale, from the inner workings of the atom to the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere to how quickly the universe is expanding or contracting.
YouTube channel Polyphonic (whose videos I’ve featuredbefore) has taken on an ambitious project: tracing the history of the electric guitar solo from its origins in blues and country music in the American South all the way up to the present day. The series is called Axe To Grind and the first three episodes are available on YouTube (the first two are embedded above). People are sharing their favorite early electric guitar players in the comments of the first video.
The series is also available on the subscription-only Nebula — episodes appear there first and the music excerpts are longer because Nebula doesn’t trample all over creators’ fair use rights like YT does. (via open culture)
Fungi: Web of Life is an upcoming IMAX documentary on mushrooms & their fungi brethren narrated by Björk and presented by Merlin Sheldrake.
Join acclaimed British biologist, Dr. Merlin Sheldrake, on a quest to find an incredibly precious blue mushroom, against the backdrop of Tasmania’s ancient Tarkine rainforest. Merlin will show us some the grandest and strangest organisms ever discovered, showcased through jaw-dropping time-lapse cinematography, in a landscape largely unchanged from the time of the dinosaurs. Fungi have important lessons to teach humanity about survival through cooperation. Indeed, these incredible lifeforms may hold the key to solving some of humanity’s most urgent problems. With millions more species to discover, our journey into the secret world of fungi has only just begun.
Based on the bestselling book Stamped from the Beginning: The Definitive History of Racist Ideas in America by Ibram X. Kendi (also available as a graphic novel), this documentary explores the mythology of American racism and how it still shapes the world today. The director is Oscar-winner Roger Ross Williams and in preparing for the film, he decided that only Black women would appear in it:
“When we started looking at historians and scholars, we came up with a long list. I noticed the pattern that most of the people doing the work around racism in America were Black women,” Williams told Netflix. “I asked them in pre-interviews, ‘Why do you do this work?’ And many of them said the same thing — that they had no choice. This was their experience and their life. And if they’re going to dedicate their life to something, it’s going to be about changing and understanding racism in America because they can’t escape racism in America. I said to everyone, ‘We’re going to have only Black women in this film.’ It was an important statement to make.
Stamped From the Beginning comes out on Netflix on November 20.
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