Half as Interesting is now one year old which is amazing.
That means there are only 13 years left until the channel can get a learners driving permit
in Alaska, 14 years until it can drink in Ethiopia, and 15 years until it can get a
pilots license.
This is all assuming someone creates a sentient robot modeled after this YouTube channel which
I would love help with.
I absolutely, sincerely promise to not use it to overthrow the Tongan government in order
to create the world’s only city-state with a planned economy centered around writing
bad, awkwardly integrated jokes for the internet.
What also wasn’t in the plan, though, was making a mistake in any Half as Interesting
video and that happened so I really can’t make any promises.
You see, sometimes we make mistakes because we’re terrible, terrible people and as terrible,
terrible people we desperately want more views, subscribers, and money so we’re making this
extra special video to correct every, or rather almost every mistake we’ve ever made.
In the very first episode, we started out strong by telling you that China is the fourth
largest country in the world by land mass while it’s actually the third.
Then, in the episode about the 64 day longest flight in history we said that when the record-breaking
plane’s power generator failed they had no heat whereas, in reality, the heat in a
Cessna 172 comes from the engine which was still running so, while they had no light
or autopilot, they did have heat during their blackout.
In the video about the massive spreadsheet that runs the world’s postal system, I said,
“the UPU is made up of the CA, the POC, the IB, and the Congress but you really didn’t
need to know any of that.
I just felt we didn’t have enough acronyms in our life.”
What I really felt we didn’t have enough of were initialisms because acronyms are when
the first letters of different words make up a pronounceable word like NASA whereas
initialisms are when you say each letter separately like with the UN, an ATM, or in this case,
the CA, POC, and IB.
In the video on how fast you can circumnavigate the world on commercial flights I said that
there are eight hours in a day when you can catch a flight to Europe from the US east
coast even though the graphic clearly shows nine hours—my math just sucks.
In the same video, I pronounce Melbourne terribly by saying “Melbourne” and the animator
also decided to put Melbourne where Adelaide is.
This one’s on him.
I can berra-ly blame him though as two episodes later I pronounce Canberra as “Canberra.”
Three episodes later I angered all the Angelenos by saying that this intersection is in downtown
LA whereas downtown LA is apparently here.
I made some more blunders down under a few episodes later by referring to the state of
South Australia as Southern Australia then in the video about how there are really more
than five senses we tested one of your senses by having a just a huge audio spike in the
middle of the video.
In the next episode, a keen commenter pointed out that the image we show for the Museum
of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirksville, Missouri is not actually the Museum of Osteopathic
Medicine in Kirksville, Missouri.
For some reason, there aren’t many copyright free images of this super interesting museum.
In the next video about the longest train journey in the world, we said that Spain built
their train tracks at a different gauge than France so that France couldn’t invade by
train which is apparently a notorious myth.
In reality, they just built them at a different gauge because Spain is more mountainous and
wider tracks allow for larger, more powerful engines which can climb a steeper gradient.
We also said that on the French-Spanish border where you have to switch trains since the
track gauge is different you have to cross the bridge from Hendaye to Irun while in reality
to change trains there’s this tiny Spanish train station in the parking lot of
the French train station on the French side of the river so you don’t actually have
to cross the bridge.
In the episode about why every price ends in 99 cents for some reason, we put the cent
symbol in front of the number which just doesn’t make sense.
In the episode about the one road in the US that uses metric, we said that the Mars climate
orbiter crashed due to a conversion error but it was actually a little different.
It crashed because a computer was outputting data in pound-force seconds rather than newton-seconds.
We had more metric mess-ups in the video on the 53 second shortest flight in the world
where we said that 120 miles was 139 kilometers whereas its really 193 kilometers.
Finally, in the episode about the ghost flights at Heathrow we showed Chicago O’Hare airports
runway configuration as this.
They’ve had some recent runway constructions and closures which means that they now currently
use these runways.
The biggest mistake I ever made, though, was setting my Club Penguin password to “samthepenguinman”
because that is a classic insecure password.
It doesn’t have different cases, numbers, or special characters but remembering a password
like E5@2sizUsJ@W is tough.
If you sign up for Dashlane though, who made this special episode possible, they store
all your passwords in one super secure place and autofill them whenever you need to log
in.
You can sign up for free at https://dashlane.com/hai but if you want to upgrade to premium, you
can get 30 free days and 10% off with the code “HAI."