Tom Scott

When I was a teenager, I wrote some terrible code. Here's why.

The brain is a mass of neurons, but some areas are more important than others. How can surgeons navigate inside the brain? How do they know exactly where to operate, and what to do? Alex from Brainbook explains.

"12kg of Martian soil simulant" is a pretty good guest video pitch. This week, Tom from Aspect Science tries to grow a salad in Martian soil.

Schengen is a small town in Luxembourg, on the borders with France and Germany. But one of those borders is a little more complicated: the Mosel (or Moselle) river is a condominium, it belongs to both countries at the same time. And thus, so the bridges above it.

INT, BOOLEAN, STRING and FLOAT: these are the things that data is made of.

About once a year, on the Oosterscheldekering barrier in the south of the Netherlands, there is NK Tegenwindfietsen: a bicycle race cycling into a headwind. This year it was 120km/h: this is why it's so difficult, and also why it's so brilliant.

The Winograd schema is a language test for intelligent computers. So far, they're not doing well.

From March 1st 2020, Luxembourg will have free public transit throughout the country: you'll be able to travel on buses, trains, trams, and that one funicular railway without a ticket. It sounds like a good idea: but is it?

Lasers travel at the speed of light. You can't stop one in mid-air like Kylo Ren. Except: we just did. Here's how.

Coca-Cola's brand of bottled water, Dasani, was a flop in the UK after the public realised it was just filtered tap water. But the story's a bit more complicated than it might seem.

Zwentendorf Nuclear Power Plant, in Austria, was ready to go: it just needed starting up. But that never happened, and forty years later, it still sits mothballed. Here's why.

No copyright infringement intended.

Dark scenes in television, YouTube, and streaming platforms all look pixelated and blocky. Here's why.

The title of this video should change with the times. But nothing lasts forever: here's the story of how I made it work, why it used to be easier to make that work, and how it all ties in to the White Cliffs of Dover and the end of the universe.

There are rules in the English language that you've probably never been taught, but you know anyway: how to split apart words with "infixes". But you've never been taught it because some of those infixes are words you probably shouldn't use in front of your high school English teachers...

The short answer is "backwards compatibility". The long answer is... well, it's the rest of this video.

UPDATE: The crossroads has now been fixed! Ipley Cross, in the middle of the New Forest, is one of the most dangerous road junctions in Britain. Why?

Gricean Maxims are a vital part of how we understand each other: a set of... well, maybe "rules" is a bit strong. They're guidelines that we follow without realising it. And it's the reason that "asbestos-free cereal" sounds suspicious.

All about Hilbert's Decision Problem, Turing's solution, and a machine that vanishes in a puff of logic.

This isn't "the way they were meant to be seen".

"Schwa" is the most common vowel in English. Every English speaker uses it, all the time, but most people have never heard of it.

When 'undo' won't do.

[UPDATE: This video has an important update! As of February 2022, the deadline for paths has been cancelled. The mapping still continues, and there's still a plan to have a definitive map, but old rights of way will no longer be wiped The Icknield Way, in south-east England, is a road and footpath that's been part of the landscape for millennia. But if parts of it hadn't been legally marked down, then those parts would have become private land, gone forever. Who has the right to walk where?

In the Abbey Gardens of Bury St Edmunds, in a quiet corner of a park, sits the World's First Internet Bench. Well, sort of. It's been nearly twenty years, and it's arguable whether it ever did the job in the first place...

Thanks to Jack from Jacksfilms on piano: / jacksfilms • And thanks to everyone who answered! Sources and a data download are in the description.

Green screen looks terrible sometimes. Here's why.

Old Sarum, in Wiltshire, is a now-desolate hillfort run by English Heritage. But it was once one of the most important sites in southern England: so important that it had two members of Parliament. Then, it became a "rotten borough": and a warning about power.

There are lots of ways to compare a million to a billion, but most of them use volume. And I think that's a mistake, because volume just isn't something the human brain is great at. So instead, here's the difference between a million and a billion, in a more one-dimensional way: distance.

Linby is a small village in Nottinghamshire, England. It wouldn't have much strategic value... unless some commander didn't read their map properly. Here's a local legend, with a few questions about it.

In 1834, Parliament burned down, and the Standards of Measurement were melted or destroyed. So when there's no agreed-upon standard for length: how do you fix it? Also: how you can still publicly check the length of your sandwich.

The short answer is: "because it'll make things more secure". The long answer involves Ronald Reagan.

Cornwall rises and falls by a few centimetres, twice a day. I didn't believe that when I read it. In this video: "ocean tide loading": why, how, and does it actually matter?

I invited Jaiden, Ellen and Hank to play a trivia quiz! The sort of quiz where you can get away with wrong answers... if nobody spots them. And since they couldn't be there in person, I've got a massive virtual set. Too many wrong answers, and our players will be Disconnected.

Kolbeinsey is the most northern part of Iceland, a tiny island that, according to Wikipedia, is due to disappear due to wave erosion "probably around the year 2020". Which raised an obvious question: is it still there?

Alec, Sally and Arun join me at the top of the virtual tower for a game where it doesn't matter if you're wrong... as long as no-one calls you on it.

Sooner or later, I was going to get around to this: it's one of the most famous experiments in linguistics. • Written with Molly Ruhl and Gretchen McCulloch.

Vanessa, Kati and Jarvis are the final three players on the broadcast tower, playing a quiz where if you bluff well enough, you don't even need to know the answers.

Silfra, in Þingvellir National Park in Iceland, is where the Eurasian and North American continental plates are dividing. It's a crack in the earth where you can snorkel or dive between the continents. Well, sort of. As ever, it's a bit more complicated than that.

The three players who've already won come back to the tower for one final battle. One of them will leave the Champion of Champions: and two will be Disconnected.

Sometimes, you regret asking a question.

Normally, the answer would be no. But in these very limited circumstances, at Iceland's Blue Lagoon, you can swim in geothermal power plant wastewater, and it's even healthy: although the marketing material doesn't usually mention it. Here's a story about geothermal energy, cheap heat, and how to keep some ducks warm.

The Roadmachines Mono-Rail may have been the only truly useful, fit-for-purpose monorail in the world. Of the hundreds that were built, most were never meant for passengers. But they did carry a couple of famous people in their time, including a certain secret agent...

Featuring binary versus linear search, and non-clustered indexes. Uh, indices. However you want to say it.

Happy October. Thanks to Daniel, Tom, and Chloe, their channels are below!

Wunderland Kalkar, near the German-Dutch border, is a family amusement park... inside a nuclear power plant that was never turned on.

Is there a "right" way to pronounce it? And why is it so complicated? • Written with Molly Ruhl and Gretchen McCulloch.

If you want to sell alcohol in England, you need a license. But the Licensing Act 2003 has some unusual exceptions.

The Ruhr Valley, in north-west Germany, is an industrial coal-mining area. And because of that kilometre-deep mining, parts of it have sunk, the drainage patterns have changed: and now, if the pumps of Emschergenossenschaft ever stop, quite a few towns and cities will end up flooded.

Pull down this description for information on all the shows I mention, plus all my references, and some advice if you're looking to subtitle your videos!

Gravity Industries make jetpacks. They're not practical. They're not meant for mass use. But they are a lot of fun. They asked if I wanted to try flying one.

Tim Berners-Lee envisioned a "universal information system". What went wrong?

The Broomway is surrounded on both sides by quicksand and deep, sucking mud. It has no markers and no guideposts. And if you mistime your walk, you won't outrun the tide. Oh, and it's in the middle of a Ministry of Defence firing range. But most of the time, if you want to visit Foulness Island, it's the only way.

The answer is, of course, a bit more complicated than you might think. • Written with Molly Ruhl and Gretchen McCulloch.

There are lots of disused and never-used roads and bridges in the world. But the Road to Nowhere in Yate, in south-west England, does still sometimes have traffic driving on it. And crashing on it.

This is a story about a television title sequence, and about me, as a child, watching it. It’s also a warning about how YouTube won’t last forever, and it's the reason I'm climbing one particular hill in the Lake District. Merry Christmas, Denis Norden.

I asked my audience six questions: some sensible, some ridiculous. I compared their results to the public. And the results were... interesting.