Destin has a knack for taking relatively mundane topics and making them interesting. I’ve had low expectations going into his videos on coast guard search patterns, center-pivot irrigators, and a film factory tour, but ended up enjoying them because of his emphasis on the little optimizations that are inherent in all human endeavors, and the people who carry them out. It’s like Dirty Jobs (which I also liked) but for engineers.
In this case I groaned a bit when I saw the title (“another Rupert’s Drop video?”), but it was fascinating to watch that team working together, and learn a bit about the process of glass blowing. I found the result a little underwhelming to be honest - at least in its attempt to capture the violence of a Rupert’s Drop exploding - though it was still a cool piece of glass. But the journey to get there kept me captivated the whole way through.
But in general I think Destin's latest videos have been a bit "trying too hard" and everything is "genius" etc
It's all "Prince Rupert's drop" or "Non-newtonian fluid" (and Oobleck is the only one they know about) or "Air cannon" or "shooting slow motion". It's the same topics going in a circle.
(But do watch the coast guard videos if you want to know how to whistle)
They always use shear-thickening fluids because they're so counterintuitive, but shear-thinning fluids are a fun example of a mixed blessing — the same property that keeps paint from dripping off a brush/roller until you apply it is also what makes it so hard to pour the right amount of ketchup.
There was a chemistry professor trying to get an idea of some testing of this property and set up an experiment for dropping a weight through ketchup and timing it followed by another one shortly after. The second one will fall through the ketchup faster.
How do you measure this? How much ketchup do you need?
The initial approach was a large cylinder holding the ketchup with the bottom clear - and then a mirror set up under that. It also was initially done with a human with a stop watch and they needed enough ketchup so that the difference would be noticeable and within the error of human reactions.
It takes a lot of ketchup to fill up a 2 meter by 20 cm cylinder. Can't make it too narrow because the edges change it.
The grad students bought all the ketchup at the local big grocery store and raised a few eyebrows at the checkout.
After proving that it worked they were able to make a clear polymer fluid that had the same properties (though was more expensive than ketchup) so that they were able to see it from the side and provide better timings... and not have to worry about spoilage... still, the grad students with 16 gallons of ketchup was something to remember.
They did a bratwurst cookout with the unused leftovers.
I think his biggest skill is 'asking the right questions', I don't think any other YT science channel does it like he does. His recent Kodak & Submarine videos showcased it very well. He kindles the enthusiasm of people he's interacting with and lets them bring their best.
Veritasium videos are good, Likely very high budget, But he prefers to build a narrative around himself - explaining things and his questions to subject matter experts are not as interesting as Destin.
In the "yet another PRD video" ... though one of the earlier ones...
The Mythbusters did a pair of videos for Corning eight years ago (and yes, they have the feel of infomercials - it isn't subtle at all... they're still neat):
The purple glasses they wear are didymium. Photographers use a less intense version of that material as a "red enhancer filter." The spectra of the glasses ( https://www.colby.edu/chemistry/CH332/laboratory/didym-spec.... ) have a very low transmission from 572 nm to 585 nm. That's a yellowish color. The sodium vapor lights (those yellow street lights) are 589 nm. For photography, if you block the yellow out of a muddy brownish-red you get a more vibrant red. For glass blowers, the yellow flame around the glass is the sodium in the material ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flame_test - look at the sodium line). By blocking that yellow light, a glass blower is able to more clearly see through the flame to glass.
> She’s one of about 650 scientific glassblowers in the U.S., one of only a dozen or so women in the field, and one of even fewer third-generation scientific glassblowers. Running Arizona State University’s Glassblowing Facility as a one-woman operation, she’s carrying on a long but unheralded tradition that goes back to the makers of Galileo’s thermometer and Thomas Edison’s light bulb.
it's funny that glassblowers still call their sodium-blocking glass 'didymium glass' 138 years after von welsbach discovered that didymium doesn't actually exist, isn't it
Cool call-out there, I hadn't realized praseodymium and neodymium are actually short for praseodidyium and neodidymium ("green" and "new" didymium, respectively). Having all three of those words multiple times writing out this comment, I totally understand why the extra "id" was eventually dropped for the elements' formal names.
As a further aside, that phoenixmag.com link appears to be a (deliberately?) misconfigured server. I send "Accept-Encoding: gzip, deflate" and it responds with "Content-Encoding: br", resulting in a page of complete rubbish.
Misconfigured to send only content encoded in a proprietary format sanctioned by the company that wants to control the Internet? That doesn't seem like an accident to me.
I am quite sure I saw #01 at $10k earlier today and it's now higher, so I suspect he found out he initially misjudged what Destin's advice of "priced not to sell" would need to mean.
But if you wanted some of what makes this particular piece special you would also have to hire a camera crew to capture the backstory and provenance and an influencer to show it to most of a million people and care about it. The best art isn't just the end result!
My comment was intended to highlight that this kind of money can change someone's life - create a whole new career for them, give them employment. Translate it into developing country terms and you could do that for ten or more people.
Or you could spend the same amount to own a lump of pretty glass that appeared in a YouTube video. Which apparently makes it special for some reason.
I think Ford Escort means something different here in the UK. They've gone up in value hugely in the last 20 years and are generally worth a lot more than Model T Fords now. (Annoyingly they're worth much more than a contemporary Porsche 944, which was much more desirable when new. Annoyingly because I own a 944 and not an Escort).
In fairness, that's the RS2000 which is definitely not a regular ford escort. An ordinary 1980 ford escort isn't worth anything like that much. Maybe 1/10th of the price if in really good condition.
My grandfather was embarrassed because his family had a Model T in the 1940s. 20 years after the end of their production they were seen as junk that only poor people drove. It was better than the buggy his family used but everyone else had nice cars.
Model T's USED to be destined for junkyards.
The few that escaped that fate are now collectibles.
The Yugo used to be what your parents bought for you (paying just a little bit more than the 286 laptop they also got for you) so that you could have something to drive when you went off to college.
My first car was a Karman Ghia that I paid $500 for in the 90s. It was seen as junk. The floor pans were rusting out and it would have cost way more than it was worth for the owner to fix it up so rain didn't spray into the cabin from underneath while driving. Looking at the prices they go for now I highly regret driving it until it thew a rod and then junking it.
Yugo: they sold for $4K new, so a 50% return on something I had to keep in the corner of the garage for 30 years is a pretty poor "investment". And that's assuming someone even wants it; just because it's for sale doesn't mean it's collectible. Model Ts are distinctly different, even in comparison to their younger brother the Model A. Yugos are just shitty versions of what you're driving now. I suspect one will find the same with Ford Escorts.
Really interesting dive on an experiment.
The part on failure has a lot of value. Everyone approach it differently but I felt like Cal has finely tuned its mindset around it.
He makes it a happy moment, which is a hard thing to do even if celebration of failure is common in startup/HN world.
Even more interesting is that he is using failure to learn, not by boringly doing a post-mortem, but by playing with the seemingly wasted ressources and time to have fun and develop his intuition.
At first, I thought this was distracting, now I totally see the value for HN (and me).
I have to find a way to dive deeper in this topic of mindset around failure.
It's still a little disappointing that the molten glass doesn't really capture the full moment of the explosion as it both dampens the movement of the fragments and the heat melts them so the drop slightly reforms.
My guess is that a suitable concentration of epoxy that's neither too runny or too viscous would probably work.
Most of them are below 3,500 USD, but damn, pretty high prices for something like that, although I guess it makes sense considering how long time they probably spent on making them and coming up with the process.
For those who didn't watch the full video: the 100,000 USD are an intentionally high price because the creator does not want to sell that specific glass block ("priced not to sell").
But kinda stuck what to do with them / check they are real.
I feel like they are too dangerous as presents for young kids to keep. Hit the tail and get glass in the eye. It'd be cool if they came in a cage for kids.
Eye and lung protection are absolutely critical when you're playing with glass (or pottery). Silicosis is incurable, so I highly recommend that you play with them indoors only if you have a great ventilation/filtration system. Otherwise, go outside and wear safety goggles.
Does it all have to be 30 minutes though? Not just him to be sure but I’m not a fan of YouTube’s crusade to incentivize long form content which just seems to have made everyone pad out every topic as much as they can. Very rare have I seen 30 minute videos that truly deserve that time commitment.
It's entertainment. People don't want to just look at the results for 10 seconds. What would they do with the next 29 minutes 50 seconds? They want to watch people and hear them talk, make jokes, work on setting up the experiment, etc. Same reason Mythbusters isn't 30 seconds per myth.
You could just read scientific papers if you're looking to condense knowledge transfer per time.
However, 30 seconds and 30 minutes are at far ends of a spectrum with a sweet spot in between. Of course there is a market for 30 minutes of content and not everything should be optimised to fit as much content in every second of video. But I definitely do not get entertained by hollow filler and senseless suspense building. Even Mythbusters did this with constant flash forwards/backwards and recaps (which especially stood out to me because TV commercials where I'm from are about once per hour and not every 5 minutes), but back then it was the only format we got.
Presumably you are able to understand that your preferences and your sweet spot is not the same as everybody else's, and would be open to considering that you might be significantly far from the middle of the spectrum. So I don't see the "however".
Smarter Every Day is one of the only channels where it doesn’t feel dragged out. I agree that unnecessarily long videos are rampant on YouTube. SED hits the sweet spot for me. YMMV.
Shorts are mostly just “here’s a weird or unexpected thing, look how weird or unexpected it is”. There’s also regular, formulaic stuff like Half as Interesting which tend to be about one paragraph of information laboriously spread out over five minutes of generic stock footage and painfully tedious jokes.
YouTube, at its best, are the videos where someone genuinely interested in a topic can show you why it’s interesting and hold your attention, allowing the content to dictate the length. CGP Grey probably being the most perfect prototypical example of this. Or it could come in the form of a Richard Feynman lecture, with absolutely no production value needed beyond reasonably intelligible audio.
This is Tom Scott for me. His videos tend to range around the 5- to 10-minute mark, but are occasionally far far longer. And yet every one of them is exactly the length it should be.
I love love love Tom Scott, but some of his recent videos are getting an eeny weeny teeny tiny bit Half as interesting-y, but with Tom’s face to camera instead of incongruous stock footage.
If I recall correctly there's a certain length videos need to be to get adverts or to be monetised - something like ~10 minutes. So while this one is a little bit played out (maybe this happens to get an extra set of ads in the middle) the worst are when you have 2-3 minutes of information streeeeeetched out to 10 minutes.
The creator himself has spoken out against YouTube's incentives, he said that he likes to produce longer than is optimum and does not want his videos to be influenced by the algorithm. YT pushes towards 8-15 min as sweet spot, I subscribe to a few who used to do 20+ min vids, and now they do around 10 min. LTT and their shorts for one.
I have literally watched a 5 hour plus video essay (NOT just a stream VOD, an actual video essay without much filler) recently but I concur that a lot of times a shorter video would suffice to get the point across.
I guess there's room for a happy middle ground between traditional TikTok and modern long-form YouTube.
I have rewatched, over and over and over, a 3 and a half hour long video essay on a video game I've never played, in a video game series I actively dislike.
Honestly a long form video essay on youtube has gotten to the point, by most talented creators, that it is basically just a high quality book.
In this case I groaned a bit when I saw the title (“another Rupert’s Drop video?”), but it was fascinating to watch that team working together, and learn a bit about the process of glass blowing. I found the result a little underwhelming to be honest - at least in its attempt to capture the violence of a Rupert’s Drop exploding - though it was still a cool piece of glass. But the journey to get there kept me captivated the whole way through.