Tom Scott

Tucked away in a valley in the Allegheny Mountains in West Virginia, is this: the Green Bank Radio Telescope, the largest steerable radio telescope in the world. And there are some rather special rules for the area around it… Thanks to Justin Richmond-Decker and Mike Holstine at the National Radio Astronomy Observatory in Green Bank

The town of Staufen, in the south-west of Germany, has a problem: a drilling operation in 2007 that went very wrong. Half a metre of movement might not sound like much, but in this town, that’s enough for the buildings to crack and fall apart. Thanks to Constantijn Crijnen for both suggesting the video and

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – We’ll hopefully never know what’s written in the letters of last resort: top secret, handwritten notes from the British Prime Minister to be opened by submarine captains in the event of nuclear war. This video contains an error: I say “Trident-class”, but that’s the name of the missiles. It should be

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – Out in the countryside near Canterbury, on the London to Ramsgate line, there’s a strange level crossing – one that requires human effort. It’s strange what railway history leaves us with. (Thanks to @quixoticgeek on camera duty!)

Mount Taranaki, on the North Island of New Zealand, is a large-scale circle that’s visible from space: a stratovolcano with six miles of forest around it. But that didn’t happen naturally. Oh, and there’s a good chance that, in the next fifty years or so, it might explode. GOOD VIDEOS ON NATURAL PERSONHOOD: Law professor

The “T-Rex” is the University of Texas’ large mobile shaker, and I got to see it in action. ■ More about the shakers: https://utexas.designsafe-ci.org/ I’m at https://tomscott.com on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott on Facebook at https://facebook.com/tomscott and on Instagram as tomscottgo

The @Royal Albert Hall is 150 years old; the roof is 600 tonnes of glass and steel. And it turns out that there’s a terrifying technicians’ trampoline, acoustic-dampening mushrooms, and a complete lack of connections. Thanks to everyone at the Royal Albert Hall: https://www.royalalberthall.com/ Camera by Jamie MacLeod https://www.jamiemacleod.co.uk/ Aerial operations by Phil Conrad and

http://techdif.co.uk – This week… well, there’s more than one type of toilet humour in here. Brace yourselves, folks: ‘cos we’re goin’ lowbrow.

http://tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – The Falkirk Wheel sits between Edinburgh and Glasgow, in the southern parts of Scotland, and it’s the world’s only rotating boat lift. There’s some very clever design going on here — and some physics that goes all the way back to Ancient Greece.

In Dawson City, a small mining town in the Yukon, sits the Downtown Hotel. Inside there is a tradition that tourists have been trying out for decades: the Sourtoe Cocktail. Thanks to everyone at the Downtown Hotel! More about them: https://dawsoncity.ca/attraction/sourtoe-cocktail-club/ Edited by Michelle Martin (@mrsmmartin) I’m at http://tomscott.com on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tomscott on Facebook

It sounds ridiculous, but it’s true. At the Cooper Union Foundation Building in New York, there’s the world’s first elevator shaft: constructed four years before the safety elevator was invented. • Thanks to Prof. O’Donnell and all the team at the Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art: you can find out more

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – I was walking through Kings Cross, spotted Platform 9¾, and thought I’d share something you might not know: thanks to redevelopment of the station, right now it’s in the wrong place. It won’t be for long, though.

The Chicago and Sanitary Ship Canal is the path that invasive carp would take to reach the Great Lakes. So to stop them, the US Army Corps of Engineers has installed an electric barrier. Although for obvious reasons, I didn’t get to see it close up. [The interviewee is project manager Jeff Zuercher, whose name

In a small town with an unfortunate name, let’s talk about filtering and innuendo. And use it as an excuse for as many visual jokes as possible. I’m at https://www.tomscott.com on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tomscott on Facebook at http://facebook.com/tomscott and on Instagram as @tomscottgo (Thanks to James Paulsen for prompting me to do this video!)

On Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, there’s a summer tradition: “mail jumping”. It’s a bit dangerous, a bit ridiculous, and would never be allowed to start today. But it’s a tradition. ■ Thanks to the Lake Geneva Cruise Line: https://www.cruiselakegeneva.com/ Edited by Michelle Martin https://twitter.com/mrsmmartin I’m at https://tomscott.com on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott on Facebook at https://facebook.com/tomscott and

The Hudson River Special Flight Rules Area is an incredible thing: unrestricted airspace right next to Manhattan. We flew it. ■ Thanks to John De Groot, and to Century Air (who mostly provide pilot training, so I’m grateful that they took the time to arrange this!): http://centuryair.com/ – this is not sponsored, I paid for

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – A brief introduction to password hashing for the uninitiated — and why you should never trust a site that emails your password back to you!

At the Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, keyers process 1.2 billion images of mail every year. It’s a more difficult job than I thought. Edited by Michelle Martin: https://twitter.com/mrsmmartin Thanks to Zack from JerryRigEverything for being the camera op: https://youtube.com/jerryrigeverything I’m at https://tomscott.com on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott on Facebook at https://facebook.com/tomscott and on

In the URL of each YouTube video is the 11-character video ID, unique for each video. Can they ever run out? Just how many videos can YouTube handle? To work it out, we need to talk about counting systems, and about something called Base 64. Want to know how the single camera shot was done?

Crash Safari dot com — and no, I’m deliberately not linking to it! — crashes your phone. Or your browser. Pretty much instantly. How? And after several months of obscurity, why did it go viral so fast today? And yes, I did have to put this video together really quickly. Thank you SO MUCH to

If you’re in Canada, you need good winter boots. But how do you know whether they’re actually safe, or whether you’ll fall over the first time you step on ice? This is WinterLab, part of the Challenging Environment Assessment Laboratories at the Toronto Rehabilitation Institute, where they’re testing winter shoes with science. More about the

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – In every Hollywood movie where someone dials a phone number, it starts with 555. Turns out Britain’s got a similar system, and it’s one of the few good decisions Ofcom’s ever made.

http://tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – Under the Elbe river in Hamburg, Germany, lies the Old Elbe Tunnel in St Pauli. Like early 20th century tunnels around the world, it has lifts or stairs to take you down and under the river. But this is on a whole different scale to those you might have seen elsewhere…

http://tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – This weekend, the Royal Navy was offering public tours of HMS Defender, one of their new-generation Type 45 destroyers. It’s an astonishing ship: about 8,000 tonnes of steel and high-tech equipment designed to defend an entire fleet against air and missile attack. There’s another type of attack it’s more vulnerable against,

Victor Gruen is, according to history, the man who invented the shopping mall… but that wasn’t quite what he was aiming for. And it seemed like an appropriate day to do a video about suburban sprawl — happy Independence Day, America! I’m at http://tomscott.com on Facebook at http://facebook.com/tomscott on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tomscott and on Instagram

In Wuppertal, Germany, there’s the Schwebebahn: a suspended monorail that carries 80,000 people a day above the streets of the city, and above the river Wupper. It’s a wonderful thing: but it wasn’t the future of travel, and here’s why. INSTAGRAM: tomscottgo FACEBOOK: http://facebook.com/tomscott TWITTER: http://twitter.com/tomscott or on the web at https://tomscott.com

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – Remember the “dumbest dot-com”, AllAdvantage? They paid you to surf the web, at least for a while. And one day, they announced that they were incredibly popular in rich Beverly Hills, California. The reason connects them to the US Postal Service… and Jason Priestley.

http://www.tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – I was walking through New York and found a couple of seemingly-abandoned liquid nitrogen tanks on the street. Except they weren’t abandoned: they were full, making a very quiet hissing noise, and plumbed into… somewhere. I did a bit of research, and found out why they’re really there. Thanks to David

I feel like there are other YouTube channels that would take a different approach here. ▪ With thanks to Professor Brian Kalt: his original article is here: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=691642 — any inaccuracies that have slipped in are mine alone, and this is, obviously, not legal advice! To save you doing the research, my location while recording

http://tomscott.com – http://twitter.com/tomscott – Welcome to Svalbard, a group of islands in the High Arctic, north of Norway; the one place on the planet where carrying a gun is a legal requirement, and for a very good reason.

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – If a GPS goes over 1200mph or 60,000 feet, it’ll shut down. And the reason why is linked to here, at the Kennedy Space Centre, and the Cold War.

http://www.tomscott.com – Jedi! Are you bored since the fall of the Empire? Well, the Coruscant Juggling Club wants you. Featuring Robin, Anna and Tim juggling lightsabers; Jess on lightsaber devilstick; Sam attacking; and Nic’s balls.

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – There were a lot of embarrassing things on TV in the 1990s, and Andy Crane in a baseball cap was just one of them.

There are only a few working Link Trainers left in the world: but before microprocessors, before display screnes, half a million pilots learned the basics of instrument flying inside one. More: https://www.most.org/explore/link-flight-trainer/ Edited by Michelle Martin, https://twitter.com/mrsmmartin I’m at https://tomscott.com on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott on Facebook at https://facebook.com/tomscott and on Instagram as tomscottgo

Torpenhow Hill, in the Lake District in the north-west of England, is the only place in the world whose name has the same word four different times. That’s the story, anyway. The truth is a bit more complex. Filmed safely: https://www.tomscott.com/safe/ REFERENCES: The Debunking of Torpenhow Hill: http://digitalcommons.butler.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=4733&context=wordways Etymology from the Oxford English Dictionary https://oed.com

It’s been all over the British news today: developer Paul Price found a bug in photo-crap-maker Moonpig’s site, one that might have exposed three million users’ personal information. Paul’s got a great technical post about it at https://www.darkport.co.uk/blog/moonpig-vulnerability/ — but there’s no decent non-techie explanation except for the one-paragraph summaries in newspapers. It was a

At the headquarters of Cloudflare, in San Francisco, there’s a wall of lava lamps: the Entropy Wall. They’re used to generate random numbers and keep a good bit of the internet secure: here’s how. Thanks to the team at Cloudflare – this is not a sponsored video, they just had interesting lava lamps! There’s a

At the Computer History Museum, in Mountain View, California, there sits a small teapot. It’s the world’s most famous teapot, after a computer graphics researcher called Martin Newell digitised it. You’ve probably seen it: here’s its story. And thanks to the Computer History Museum in Mountain View, California: you can visit them online here: http://www.computerhistory.org/

El Caminito del Rey, the King’s Little Pathway, is now a tourist attraction near Malaga, in southern Spain. But once, it brought adrenaline junkies here – sometimes fatally. Now it’s safe: but the internet doesn’t really know that yet… I’m at http://tomscott.com on Facebook at http://facebook.com/tomscott on Twitter at http://twitter.com/tomscott and on Snapchat and Instagram

Monte Kaolino, in Bavaria, Germany, is 35 million tonnes of quartz sand, piled up over the years from a nearby kaolin mine. In the 1960s, one guy just turned up with skis, and now half a century later it’s a theme-park destination for sandboarders and skiiers. ■ More: https://www.montekaolino.eu/ Location camera: Moritz Janisch Producer: Marcel

Next to Amsterdam Schiphol Airport is the Buitenschot Land Art Park, a giant set of ridges and furrows cut into the landscape. Yes, it’s art: but it also stops some local residents from being exposed to jet noise. More about the park: https://www.schiphol.nl/en/schiphol-as-a-neighbour/page/landscape-design-plan-to-combat-noise-nuisance/ I’m at https://tomscott.com on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott on Facebook at https://facebook.com/tomscott and

The Wasserspiele of Bergpark Wilhelmshöhe are 300 years old, powered entirely by gravity, and entertaining tourists. As legacies for rich people go, there are far worse ones. ■ More about the Bergpark: https://museum-kassel.de/en/museums-parks-palaces/unesco-world-heritage-site-of-bergpark-wilhelmshoehe Location camera: Moritz Janisch Producer: Marcel Fenchel https://www.fenchel-janisch.com/ Editor: Michelle Martin https://twitter.com/mrsmmartin

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – Are you tired? Stiff? Feeling a bit peaky? Try Yorkshire Yoga. Written with Liam Butler – http://angryflatcap.com – @liammakesstuff and directed by Matt Gray – http://mattg.co.uk – @unnamedculprit

The “accelerated pavement testing facility” in Nantes can simulate decades of road traffic in a few months. Here’s how. ■ More information: https://lames.univ-gustave-eiffel.fr/en/equipments/the-pavement-fatigue-carrousel Editor: Dave Stevenson http://davestevenson.co.uk Camera: Guillaume Juin https://www.guillaumejuin.fr Producer: Axel Zeiliger at Block8 https://block8production.com Thanks to Jérémie Chabot for the suggestion I’m at https://tomscott.com on Twitter at https://twitter.com/tomscott on Facebook at https://facebook.com/tomscott

http://tomscott.com – @tomscott – As complaints about Apple’s new Maps continue to pile in, team leader Jackson Seepage explains why it isn’t quite working as planned. Music based on “Resignation” by Kevin MacLeod released under Creative Commons CC by 3.0 • http://incompetech.com iPhone 5 mockup by Zach Vega released under Creative Commons CC by-sa 3.0