I’m a bit late, but Jay Smooth has returned to Youtube after a near 6 year absence to cover the beef between Kendrick and Drake of all things.
My own take on the feud is that Drake was never in the same league as Kendrick, so the “win” doesn’t carry too much weight with me.
I love this tiny house designed by Japanese artist Zajirogh and his wife. The house is centred around a courtyard which can open to the sky. Extra points for showing the house without being staged like in an architecture magazine.
Built in the 1950s to test a rather ambitious plan to build a series of dams across large parts of San Francisco Bay, the Bay Model is an impressive, multi-acre scale model of most of the lower part of watershed. The model found that the plan was extremely flawed, and would likely cause extensive flash floods, but it lived on as laboratory to study the movement of water in the region until the early 2000s, when computer modelling became feasible.
The model was built with three different scales, with the vertical depth being exaggerated in order to improve the accuracy of depth measurements, and the scale of time on the model condensing the tide cycle down to under 15 minutes.
We unfortunately visited it when the water was not flowing, but there is a great little summary by Tom Scott:
I am terrible at chess, but I also love it. I also love these kind of intense deep-dives into esoteric subjects.
Until the age of about 14 I was certain I wanted to do movie special effects when I got old enough. Plans changed, but I still enjoy watching how special effects are done. In this case, a small studio resurrected a decades-old technique for making a “green screen” effect using sodium vapour lighting and prisms. Neat!
This video, cheekily titled ‘Is English just badly pronounced French?‘ (spoiler: it’s not) goes into depth into all the ways that French has impacted English. Particularly mind-blowing is the fact that ‘warranty’ and ‘guarantee’ originated from different pronunciations of the same French word.
Speaking of XKCD, Randall Munroe also just launched a short video about the technical limits of using the Hubble Space Telescope to take pictures of the earth.
YouTube channel Digging the Greats has a very good breakdown of how Daft Punk’s farewell album was made. See also his recent breakdown of the creation of their previous album Discovery.