A very high diving board, and I remember to fill in the 'next week' section.

21st November 2022

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Hello!

Well, I messed up last week's newsletter, didn't I? A missing link, a typo, and a completely missing "Next week" section. There are advantages to making this newsletter email-only, but it also means that if I forget to do my usual routine of proofreading a few hours after writing, there's no way I correct things other than to wait a week.

So with that in mind: first up, here's the link to the "Death of the Key Change" article that was missed last week!

With that done, here are my projects for this week:

I'm still in Quebec for this week's video, and for the third week in a row, talking about something wet. Why build a diving board twice the Olympic height? This was a really nice video to film: Lysanne, the cliff diver who took me up to the board, was lovely to interview.
And over at lateralcast.com, there's a new episode of Lateral in all your podcast players, as Trace Dominguez, Nahre Sol and Jordan Harrod face questions about profitable collisions, familiar flags, and knotty problems. (The collision question is one of my favourites of this entire recording block.)

What else has been going on in the world of video? Well, while researching (and while slacking off) this week, I've found:

Real Engineering have moved out of their usual wheelhouse of "big aircraft and spaceships" and made a really compelling, short video about how seatbelts work. It's worth a watch.
Spanish magician Dani DaOrtiz performs close-up card magic for Penn and Teller, and it's one of the best routines I've ever seen. After a series of incredible moves, he pulls off what I'm fairly sure is an "any card at any number", one of the legendary tricks of card magic.
Geerling Engineering explores a 1,000,000 watt radio tower.
I linked to an AJR music video earlier this year, and I'm doing it again: The DJ Is Crying For Help uses one simple visual effect deployed perfectly. Sure, it's "just" rotoscoping and camera matchmoving, but the composition must have been painstaking, and the handling of motion blur and movement is so well. It must have taken the VFX artists so long to get this right. (Occasional strong language in the lyrics.)

And around the rest of the web:

New SI prefixes! The Earth now weighs about six "ronnagrams". (Apparently 'hellagrams' wasn't possible because the abbreviation for 'hella' would clash with the existing 'hecto'.)
There's an old joke about two fish in a tank; one asks the other "do you know how to drive this thing?" Well, it turns out the answer to that — as translated from a dry paper into a fun comic — is sort-of, because scientists have taught goldfish to drive little carts. (The original paper is linked at the end.)
An Airbus A320 has got stuck under a bridge, and this news article about it starts with "Not again" because apparently this keeps happening.

And finally, here's a little puzzle box for you. The first part of it is the puzzle itself (some of it gets a bit tedious, so there are full solutions in the notes below if it's a bit slow). But the second part is a puzzle entirely for people with web design and development experience: how on earth is that possible using nothing but CSS?

Next week: I will remember to fill in the 'next week' section. And there'll be yet another wet video.

All the best,

— Tom

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