Pass The Pepper: Social Distancing is Nothing to Sneeze At

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You’ve seen a few Rube Goldberg-style machines before. You watched that OK Go music video twice. But this… this is something else.

(Everything else on his channel is gold, of course, too: if you’re looking for a jumping-off point, try his dinner-productivity machine.)

Here’s What a Googol-to-One Gear Ratio Looks Like

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To celebrate being alive for a billion seconds, Daniel Bruin built a machine with 100 gears with a 10-to-1 gear ratio…meaning that the overall gear ratio is a googol-to-one. (A googol is 1 with 100 zeros.)

To turn the last gear in this train one full revolution, you’d need to turn the first gear 10,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000,​000 times.

By my estimation, that’s enough gearing to allow you to winch the entire solar system, by hand, with ease. Assuming you can find a tow hitch on it somewhere.

Dutch PM Mark Rutte Tells Public Not to Shake Hands Over Coronavirus and Then Shakes With Colleague

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Love this video: the Dutch PM reminds everybody not to shake hands with one another… then turns and shakes somebody’s hand. Then realises his mistake and initiates even more bodily contact by way of apology.

A Trip Through New York City in 1911

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With help from a neural network, Denis takes original cinematography of New York City in 1911 and uploads it as an cleaned, upscaled, high-framerate, colourised YouTube video. It’s pretty remarkable: compare it to the source video to see how much of a difference it makes: side-by-side, the smoothness of the frame rate alone is remarkable. It’s a shame that nothing can be done about the underexposed bits of the film where contrast detail is lacking: I wonder if additional analysis of the original print itself might be able to extract some extra information from these areas and them improve them using the same kinds of techniques.

In any event, a really interesting window-to-history!

BingO Bakery

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Don’t understand why Web accessibility is important? Need a quick and easily-digestible guide to the top things you should be looking into in order to make your web applications screenreader ready? Try this fun, video-game-themed 5 minute video from Microsoft.

There’s a lot more to accessibility than is covered here, and it’s perhaps a little over-focussed on screenreaders, but it’s still a pretty awesome introduction.

Where Do New Viruses Come From?

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A fun and lightweight 10-minute (very basic, but highly-accessible) primer into the mechanisms by which new viruses appear to emerge via spillover infection and viral evolution. I was pleased by the accuracy of the animations including efforts to show relative scale of microorganisms and the (correct) illustration of RNA as the genetic material of a coronavirus (many illustrators draw all viruses as carrying a double-stranded DNA payload).

The Neighbors’ Window

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This beautifully-shot short film won Best Live Action Short Film at the Oscars last month, and if you haven’t seen it you owe it to yourself to do so. Over the course of 20 artfully-crafted minutes it tells two distinct stories, and before long you realise that what you’re really watching is the third story that emerges, Rubin vase-style, from the mind of the watcher and in the gaps between the two. Official website. Probably NSFW.

Dating App Writers Room

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Ashley’s back! (Do Brian and Nick know any girls’ names that aren’t Ashley?)

But more-importantly, there’s a new BriTANicK, which is a rare enough treat these days that I feel the need to share it with you.