Every Mistake I've Made Since 2014

[00:00] I've made some mistakes. I will pin a comment to the video, I'll add a card, But not many people will see those compared to the original video.

[00:14] So with only a few weeks left until I stop posting regular Monday videos, at all the things I got wrong in the last ten years. Which I have no regrets about using and whose Black Friday sale is now on.

[00:32] So: what counts as a significant mistake for this video? Well, An editing glitch, or a typo in a caption, They're still going to haunt me for the rest of my days,

[00:45] And it has to be a regular Monday video that's live on this channel: I am sure some of the facts on Lateral, the podcast I run, despite the question writers' best efforts, but here,

[01:00] You should go and listen to Lateral after, though. I despise anything I've made in the past, But that's where we start.

[01:15] 2014, when my research usually involved typing a couple of things into Google "The UK has four Trident-class nuclear submarines." Never mind, it'll happen to you as well.

[01:29] the submarines are Vanguard-class. not just the big one, I hate that video. I nearly pulled it entirely.

[01:42] Nope, tachycardia is an accelerated heartbeat. Also, hold the phone further from your face! Modern toasters don't use bi-metallic strips,

[01:58] or specialised silicon. Alec over at Technology Connections has a great video about them. and I got a big detail in it wrong.

[02:11] the 24-hour sundial. There are several places and I wish I'd saved them for later. "It is the summer equinox today, as I record this."

[02:27] The equinox is in spring and autumn, It's in the name?! "Equi nox", "equal night" Later that year, I was talking about Concorde.

[02:42] Again, not a good video, but... The words are correct,

[02:55] The crash was in 2000, I should have said: "...in 2003 the airlines decided".

[03:08] Next video, about tracking nuclear explosions from Cold War bunkers. "air bursts that spread it much wider?" Ground bursts from nuclear explosions spread more fallout than air bursts,

[03:22] given they're blowing up the ground and not the air. "More than 50 metres high, holding back 100,000 tonnes of water." but 47 million tons of water.

[03:39] for the volume of the reservoir it held back. 2016, then. The year with the most errors. "In the original version of the video game, Civilisation, Gandhi was a dick."

[03:55] the virtual representation of Gandhi in a fictional video game! testifying that a bug in the game Civilisation could go negative and then loop round to being massive.

[04:12] turns out it was some giant collective false memory. Now, I also had a whole video Might be the worst video I've ever done,

[04:27] after watching it back for this. It's just a confusing mess, And this was before the replication crisis, too, when psychology was still flush with astonishing results

[04:42] A lot of those studies have not survived attempts to recreate them. I'm not sure I'd agree with that either, though?

[04:55] eh, I dunno. Depends on you. drove along a road that goes through Russia for about one kilometre,

[05:07] you don't need a visa. But as we're approaching, Matt says: "Is where they're spying from." "Ah!" "Oh, you're right!"

[05:20] there is no evidence for it being any more than that. Matt had just noticed a thing, and said it,

[05:32] I kept it in. My fault, not his. Next one: I was talking about turbines in thermal power plants. "hundreds of tonnes of steel, rotating thousands of times a second"

[05:44] No, they spin thousands of times per minute, not per second. Obviously! is spinning several thousand times a second, something is very wrong, Probably because I was kinda stressed from being on top of a wind turbine.

[05:59] I'm not going to play the actual clip back, someone who was kind enough to give an interview many years ago, but: I was talking to one of the administrators of West Virginia University,

[06:13] and he said the "PRT never shuts down". At night. On Sundays. Outside term times. Regularly when there are mechanical failures.

[06:25] I guess it was said aspirationally or metaphorically, And to be clear, that's on me. don't end up saying something silly in the final video.

[06:39] I start finding my style, we're three years into making these videos Only one error that whole year, but it's a doozy. "In the first second after release, the drop capsule goes 10 metres.

[06:57] "Next second, forty... and then we've used up That is wrong. Yes, the speed increases by 10 metres per second, per second.

[07:09] 10 metres per second is close enough for this. But that doesn't mean it travels 10 metres in the first second, It'd travel 5 metres in the first second, then 15, then 25, and so on.

[07:24] Zero gravity is really confusing. "in the 20th century, more than 200,000 tons of gold Giant Mine in Canada produced 200,000 kilos of gold. Not tonnes.

[07:41] which is the problem they now have. 200,000 tonnes of gold would be roughly the same amount so, you know, just slightly out there.

[07:55] 2019. Two weird mistakes in the same computer-science script. "a Mac instead of a PC, I can compile it for that CPU instead."

[08:07] Although given the recent switch to Apple Silicon, "And we're counting upwards by one on every sixth clock cycle" And I just said the wrong words and didn't notice during the edit.

[08:23] 2020. I know that I said typos in on-screen graphics don't count, because you copied-and-pasted a 1 into the wrong place, I was talking about the rules

[08:36] "And the host says..." "Time for a break." "Like, it's really clear that's not allowed, there's no other way to read that sentence." back 20+ years ago when the original version of Millionaire came out.

[08:52] and it's now ambiguous whether that's allowed. it wasn't flagged as being replaced, and I just didn't spot that I was using the old version in my script.

[09:04] 2021. Skipping over the 18th-century firefighters video that I did a "Even the big lithium-ion setup in Australia that's only caught on fire once so far."

[09:17] I just thought I knew what I was talking about and I didn't double-check it. Hornsdale Power Reserve didn't catch fire! It was the newer Victorian Big Battery, near Geelong.

[09:31] Your battery did not catch on fire! was mistakenly transcribed as "Schutzwaffen", defensive weapons. ...but not Swiss German, and that's a pretty easy mistake to make.

[09:47] 2022. No errors that are still online, I did originally suggest that the chainmail was all hand-linked. The sheets were hand-linked, but those sheets were made by machine.

[10:02] that could be easily and cleanly cropped out using YouTube's editor, And then, this year, at least this year so far! You can see exactly how that happened.

[10:18] "if you want to get a library card here, there will be a short interview "about your research and why you can't just pull the books or material you want Apparently the formal interview requirement for a reader pass,

[10:33] has now been dropped. because that would be ironic, and it's probably going to happen. which says, in short: "cock-up before conspiracy",

[10:49] you should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity. Well, NordVPN’s Black Friday deal is on! because being able to tap NordVPN’s magic button

[11:03] are in any one of around 60 countries is really useful. which is unhelpful! just check the terms of service first.

[11:18] my computer appears to be back in the UK. across Mac, Windows, Linux, Android, and iOS,

[11:30] So if you're not sure it's for you, try it anyway. I'm happy to keep endorsing them because I really do use them. whenever you go to nordvpn.com/tomscott,

[11:43] you'll still get the best deal they're currently offering. But if you're on the fence? Now's the time to try.