Over nearly ten years of making weekly videos for this channel,
I've made some mistakes.
When they're significant,
I will pin a comment to the video, I'll add a card,
and I'll make a note on the corrections page on my web site.
But not many people will see those compared to the original video.
So with only a few weeks left until I stop posting regular Monday videos,
I figure it's time to officially look back
at all the things I got wrong in the last ten years.
And all these mistakes are sponsored by NordVPN!
Which I have no regrets about using and whose Black Friday sale is now on.
So: what counts as a significant mistake for this video? Well,
it has to affect the truth of what I said.
An editing glitch, or a typo in a caption,
or a mispronunciation: they don't count.
They're still going to haunt me for the rest of my days,
but they happen.
And it has to be a regular Monday video that's live on this channel:
if it's a mistake in another show, it doesn't count.
I am sure some of the facts on Lateral, the podcast I run,
will turn out to be wrong in future,
despite the question writers' best efforts, but here,
we're dealing with this series and this channel.
You should go and listen to Lateral after, though.
I hated writing this new script, by the way.
I despise anything I've made in the past,
this was not pleasant to look back on,
particularly my early stuff.
But that's where we start.
2014, when my research usually involved typing a couple of things into Google
to check that I'd remembered them properly.
"The UK has four Trident-class nuclear submarines."
Yes, I looked younger ten years ago.
Never mind, it'll happen to you as well.
And the alternative's worse.
Anyway. Trident is the nuclear missile:
the submarines are Vanguard-class.
This is where I should have learned
to check every little fact in the video,
not just the big one,
but I still screw that up sometimes.
I hate that video. I nearly pulled it entirely.
"...tachycardia, which is irregular heartbeat."
Nope, tachycardia is an accelerated heartbeat.
Again, I thought I knew a word,
and so I didn't check it.
Also, hold the phone further from your face!
"What these have is a bi-metallic strip."
Modern toasters don't use bi-metallic strips,
they either use variable resistors charged by capacitors,
or specialised silicon.
Alec over at Technology Connections has a great video about them.
Ironically, my video was meant to correct the internet,
and I got a big detail in it wrong.
Now, in 2015,
I went to Svalbard, and I talked about
the 24-hour sundial. There are several places
I went to early in "Things You Might Not Know"
and I wish I'd saved them for later.
And that's definitely one of those places.
Anyway, I said...
"It is the summer equinox today, as I record this."
I said summer equinox. It's the summer solstice.
The equinox is in spring and autumn,
when the days and nights are almost equal length.
It's in the name?! "Equi nox", "equal night"
Yes, I know it's more technical than that...
I don't care!
Later that year, I was talking about Concorde.
Again, not a good video, but...
That's a really subtle mistake, and it's in the timing.
The words are correct,
but I basically moved a comma in my head,
and then in the subtitles.
The crash was in 2000,
the airlines decommissioned Concorde in 2003.
I should have said:
"after one of the planes crashed...
"...in 2003 the airlines decided".
Actually, I should have just rewritten the whole section.
Next video, about tracking nuclear explosions from Cold War bunkers.
"...ground bursts that produce local fallout,
"air bursts that spread it much wider?"
Wrong way round!
Ground bursts from nuclear explosions spread more fallout than air bursts,
and they spread it wider, which makes sense,
given they're blowing up the ground and not the air.
Next up, the St Francis Dam near Los Angeles.
"More than 50 metres high, holding back 100,000 tonnes of water."
The St Francis dam actually held back not 100,000,
but 47 million tons of water.
I mistook the volume of the physical dam
for the volume of the reservoir it held back.
In my defence, volume calculations are really unintuitive.
2016, then. The year with the most errors.
And we start with a great one:
"In the original version of the video game, Civilisation, Gandhi was a dick."
Just to be clear, I am talking about
the virtual representation of Gandhi in a fictional video game!
That story was meant to be true at the time,
you could find loads of articles
testifying that a bug in the game Civilisation
meant that the virtual Gandhi's score for aggression
could go negative and then loop round to being massive.
But years after I put that video out:
turns out it was some giant collective false memory.
That bug does not exist.
I'd never actually played the game.
Now, I also had a whole video
called "Why you should write down your goals".
Might be the worst video I've ever done,
and I say "had", because I decided to move it to being unlisted
after watching it back for this. It's just a confusing mess,
tacked onto a weird story about television
and based on one or two research papers.
And this was before the replication crisis, too,
when psychology was still flush with astonishing results
about how people could be subconsciously influenced and affected by things.
A lot of those studies have not survived attempts to recreate them.
Thomas Frank made a great video arguing the counterpoint.
I'm not sure I'd agree with that either, though?
And I suspect the answer to whether you should write down your goals is:
eh, I dunno. Depends on you.
Now, there was the time that me, and my friends Matt and Paul,
drove along a road that goes through Russia for about one kilometre,
and as long as you don't stop, you don't technically enter Russia,
you don't need a visa.
2016, wouldn't do that video now.
But as we're approaching, Matt says:
"That pole..." "Yes?"
"Is where they're spying from." "Ah!" "Oh, you're right!"
Yeah, no, it was just a cell tower.
Or at least, that's what they want us to think!
there is no evidence for it being any more than that.
That's my responsibility to check before putting it in the video.
Matt had just noticed a thing, and said it,
and because it felt more like a vlog,
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"
No, they spin thousands of times per minute, not per second. Obviously!
If your giant electricity turbine
is spinning several thousand times a second, something is very wrong,
and probably on fire. I just said the wrong word.
Probably because I was kinda stressed from being on top of a wind turbine.
Next up, the first time that I have to correct a mistake from an interviewee.
I'm not going to play the actual clip back,
it doesn't feel fair to point out
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,
about their personal rapid transit system, the PRT,
and he said the "PRT never shuts down".
Yes it does!
At night. On Sundays. Outside term times. Regularly when there are mechanical failures.
Like, that shouldn't have made the edit.
I guess it was said aspirationally or metaphorically,
but another word for that would be... wrong.
And to be clear, that's on me.
It's my job to make sure that the people I interview
don't end up saying something silly in the final video.
Right. 2017! Things start getting a little better here,
I start finding my style, we're three years into making these videos
and I'm actually starting to fact-check things properly.
Only one error that whole year, but it's a doozy.
From the zero-gravity drop tower in Bremen, Germany:
"In the first second after release, the drop capsule goes 10 metres.
"Next second, 20, next second, 30,
"Next second, forty... and then we've used up
"pretty much all the height there is."
That is wrong. Yes, the speed increases by 10 metres per second, per second.
I know it's actually 9.8 something, but, like,
10 metres per second is close enough for this.
But that doesn't mean it travels 10 metres in the first second,
'cos it's starting at zero and speeding up.
It'd travel 5 metres in the first second, then 15, then 25, and so on.
Two separate physicists fact-checked that script!
Zero gravity is really confusing.
2018, then. One error:
"in the 20th century, more than 200,000 tons of gold
"were extracted from the rock underneath here."
Giant Mine in Canada produced 200,000 kilos of gold. Not tonnes.
They also produced 200,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust,
which is the problem they now have.
You can see how I got confused with those numbers.
200,000 tonnes of gold would be roughly the same amount
that the entire world has mined throughout history,
so, you know, just slightly out there.
2019. Two weird mistakes in the same computer-science script.
"If I want to run it on a completely different type of computer,
"a Mac instead of a PC, I can compile it for that CPU instead."
Nope, I meant "phone" instead of a PC.
Although given the recent switch to Apple Silicon,
that's probably now true?
"And we're counting upwards by one on every sixth clock cycle"
That's every ninth cycle, it's obvious from the graphics.
And I just said the wrong words and didn't notice during the edit.
2020. I know that I said typos in on-screen graphics don't count,
but when you get the speed of light wrong
because you copied-and-pasted a 1 into the wrong place,
yeah, it counts.
The other error is more interesting, though.
I was talking about the rules
on where British programmes can break for adverts.
"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."
That was true...
back 20+ years ago when the original version of Millionaire came out.
But in 2008, the rules were changed,
and it's now ambiguous whether that's allowed.
The old broadcasting code was still on the regulator's site,
it wasn't flagged as being replaced,
and I just didn't spot that I was using the old version in my script.
2021. Skipping over the 18th-century firefighters video that I did a
long correction for last year, we have two blunders:
"Even the big lithium-ion setup in Australia that's only caught on fire once so far."
Just like that line years earlier about Trident-class submarines,
I just thought I knew what I was talking about and I didn't double-check it.
The graphics are wrong,
Hornsdale Power Reserve didn't catch fire!
It was the newer Victorian Big Battery, near Geelong.
Complete blunder on my part, sorry to the Hornsdale team.
Your battery did not catch on fire!
And then a translation mistake: "Schusswaffen", firearms,
was mistakenly transcribed as "Schutzwaffen", defensive weapons.
My transcriber and translator was German...
...but not Swiss German, and that's a pretty easy mistake to make.
Honestly I'm not sure I got it the right way round in this video.
2022. No errors that are still online,
but in this video about a chainmail box surrounding a house,
I did originally suggest that the chainmail was all hand-linked.
The sheets were hand-linked, but those sheets were made by machine.
The correction's still up, but for once it was a very brief line
that could be easily and cleanly cropped out using YouTube's editor,
so I just did that.
And then, this year, at least this year so far!
Jan Antonín Baťa’s birth year is 1898, not 1989.
You can see exactly how that happened.
And the recent video from the British library said that...
"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
"from your local or university library."
Apparently the formal interview requirement for a reader pass,
which I had to go through a few years ago,
has now been dropped.
There will no doubt be more mistakes. There's probably one in this video,
because that would be ironic, and it's probably going to happen.
And when that happens, please: remember Hanlon's Razor,
which says, in short: "cock-up before conspiracy",
you should never attribute to malice what can be adequately explained by stupidity.
As for what has been useful for my research?
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