Tom Scott
Season 4
A series of educational web videos across a range of topics.
Where to Watch Tom Scott • Season 4
96 Episodes
- How To Make An Orange Peel Flamethrower
E3How To Make An Orange Peel FlamethrowerI'm joined by Felix Cohen to learn how to make orange oil go up in flames. Add flavour, aroma, and a touch of danger to your cocktails. Personally, I don't drink, but that doesn't mean I can't learn to mix 'em. Please drink responsibly. - Why Does Nighttime Smartphone Footage Look All Flickery in Europe?
E7Why Does Nighttime Smartphone Footage Look All Flickery in Europe?When you film with an iPhone or other smartphone in Europe at night, there's often a weird rolling banding effect over your footage. The reason has to do with power grids, frequencies, and some rather American-centric smartphone makers. - British Nuclear War from Beyond the Grave: The Letter of Last Resort
E20British Nuclear War from Beyond the Grave: The Letter of Last ResortWe'll hopefully never know what's written in the letters of last resort: top secret, handwritten notes from the British Prime Minister to be opened by submarine captains in the event of nuclear war. - Why Do Reversing Trucks Not Beep Any More?
E22Why Do Reversing Trucks Not Beep Any More?Have you noticed? That reversing beeper you find on trucks has been replaced by a squelch of white noise. Today, standing on a lay-by next to a busy construction site, I explain why -- while trying not to get run over. - Einstein Wasn't The First Scientist To Talk About Relativity
E23Einstein Wasn't The First Scientist To Talk About RelativityI'm flying to the US. Ten hours on a plane is a long time, so I'm filming a video in an airplane bathroom, about something that makes sense in an airplane bathroom: relativity. "Galilean invariance" is the idea: centuries before Einstein, someone else had the idea that there's no privileged frame of reference. - The Hard Part About Getting To Orbit Isn't The Height
E27The Hard Part About Getting To Orbit Isn't The HeightFrom the flame trench of Launch Complex 39 at the Kennedy Space Centre, under the pad from which the Apollo astronauts went to the moon, here's the reason that orbit is so damn hard to get to. - Why Was AllAdvantage.com Popular In Beverly Hills?
E34Why Was AllAdvantage.com Popular In Beverly Hills?Remember the "dumbest dot-com", AllAdvantage? They paid you to surf the web, at least for a while. And one day, they announced that they were incredibly popular in rich Beverly Hills, California. The reason connects them to the US Postal Service - and Jason Priestley. - Let's Talk About Names. In Iceland.
E37Let's Talk About Names. In Iceland.If I were in Iceland, I'd have a different name: and not only that, but the Icelandic government would have made my parents pick a name from a list. But there are more lessons to learn about names, particularly for those of us from the English-speaking world. - How Does a Geyser Work?
E39How Does a Geyser Work?There aren't that many places in the world where you can find geysers: even fewer where they blow regularly. Here, amongst the volcanic landscape of Iceland, is one of them. Here you'll find the original Geysir, plus its more regular cousin Strokkur. And a lot of wind. - Why Do We Not Have A Cure For The Common Cold Yet?
E40Why Do We Not Have A Cure For The Common Cold Yet?It's a good question: with so many medical advances, how is "a cure for the common cold" still shorthand for "something that'll never exist"? Well, there's a good answer too -- and your body already knows it. - Never Call Someone "Tired and Emotional" In England
E42Never Call Someone "Tired and Emotional" In EnglandThere's a famous British euphemism: "tired and emotional". Which means drunk. But if you're being recorded, or writing down your thoughts, you might want to stay away from it - because the British legal system is terrifying. - From Missingno to Heartbleed: Buffer Exploits and Buffer Overflows
E52From Missingno to Heartbleed: Buffer Exploits and Buffer OverflowsBuffer exploits are one of the basic bugs of computer science. They're responsible for glitches in games, for all sorts of viruses and exploits, and any number of technical disasters. Here's the basics of how they work, and a non-technical breakdown of Heartbleed, this week's rather startling attack. - The Nuclear Reactor In The Middle Of London
E61The Nuclear Reactor In The Middle Of LondonWho'd be stupid enough to put an actual nuclear reactor in the middle of London? Well, the Royal Navy, for more than thirty years, at the Old Royal Naval College in Greenwich -- that place that got blown up in Thor 2. It's not quite as bad as it seems, though. - How The Self-Retweeting Tweet Worked: Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and Twitter
E63How The Self-Retweeting Tweet Worked: Cross-Site Scripting (XSS) and TwitterIt should never have happened. Defending against cross-site scripting (XSS) attacks is Web Security 101. And yet, today, there was a self-retweeting tweet that hit a heck of a lot of people - anyone using Tweetdeck, Twitter's "professional" client. How did it work? Time to break down the code. - How Do You Make Something Last 1,000 Years?
E64How Do You Make Something Last 1,000 Years?In Trinity Buoy Wharf lighthouse in London -- and a few other science museums around the world -- sits Longplayer, a musical composition designed to last a millennium. How do you keep something running for that long? - The Equation of Time: Clocks Vs Sundials
E65The Equation of Time: Clocks Vs SundialsA few centuries ago, the arbiter of "local noon" wasn't the mechanical clock, it was the sundial. The pseudoscientific-sounding "equation of time" is how you convert between the two -- and perhaps not the way you'd expect. - Why Do Flag Emoji Count As Two Characters?
E66Why Do Flag Emoji Count As Two Characters?If you've tried to tweet a national flag emoji lately -- I can't imagine why -- you'll have noticed that you can only fit 70 of them into a tweet. The reason why is buried in a bit of technical specification, and shows how your phone can lie to you. - British Plugs Are Better Than All Other Plugs, And Here's Why
E68British Plugs Are Better Than All Other Plugs, And Here's WhyYep, I'm going all patriotic again. And while I'm willing to bet that a good number of British folks know the first half of this video, there's one thing about slack in here that I only just learned myself. - What's The Longest Word In The English Language?
E70What's The Longest Word In The English Language?I'm getting a bit linguistic in this week's video, from the Welsh village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. And as often happens with linguistics, the answer depends on how you define things. What counts as a word, after all? - The Ice Bucket Challenge Lowers Your Heart Rate
E76The Ice Bucket Challenge Lowers Your Heart RateThe mammalian diving reflex is a quirk of evolution that means a shock of ice water does the unexpected: it lowers your heart rate. I demonstrate using not a bucket, but a bathtub. This was probably a bad idea. - Emojli: Behind the Scenes and Why You Should Never Build An App
E77Emojli: Behind the Scenes and Why You Should Never Build An AppEmojli, our emoji-only messenger, has launched. Today at Electromagnetic Field, the UK hacker camp, Matt Gray and I gave a talk about how it was made, why it was made, and why we never want to build anything like it again. - Ultrasonically Vaporized Vodka!
E78Ultrasonically Vaporized Vodka!A £20 ultrasonic fogger, some rum and vodka, and a lot of style: put them together and you get Toby Jackson's Marvellous Booze Fogger, part of Nottinghack's contribution to the Electromagnetic Field festival this weekend. Always drink responsibly. - Scotland is Rising and England is Sinking, Literally
E80Scotland is Rising and England is Sinking, LiterallyI was passing by the Thames Barrier today, and figured it'd be a good time to talk about Scotland -- and how it's quite literally rising up. With "post-glacial rebound" and "glacial isostatic adjustment", though, not the referendum. - The Shellshock Bug In About Four Minutes
E82The Shellshock Bug In About Four MinutesRemember Heartbleed? Well, this is probably worse. Here's a (somewhat simplified) explanation of what Shellshock actually is. Don't worry: I haven't included instructions on how to actually exploit it. The moral of the story is: keep your security patches up to date. - There's a Bit of England in New York, Literally
E86There's a Bit of England in New York, LiterallySome folks might leave their heart in San Francisco, but over at Waterside Plaza in New York, there's a much more real and physical souvenir: a part of Bristol, a port town in the south west of England, that literally makes up the foundation of a development near the East River. - The Diner Where You Microwaved Your Own Food
E87The Diner Where You Microwaved Your Own FoodOn a busy street in Manhattan, there was once a place called Tad's 30 Varieties of Meals -- or possibly Tad's 57 Varieties, or maybe just Tad's. It closed long ago, but the idea was this: diners would pick a frozen meal, take it to their own table, and put it in their new, shiny, space-age microwave oven. Needless to say, it didn't catch on: but there's more history there than you might think. - The Liquid Nitrogen Tanks of New York
E88The Liquid Nitrogen Tanks of New YorkI was walking through New York and found a couple of seemingly-abandoned liquid nitrogen tanks on the street. Except they weren't abandoned: they were full, making a very quiet hissing noise, and plumbed into... somewhere. I did a bit of research, and found out why they're really there. - The Floating Lighthouse in New York: The Lightship Ambrose
E89The Floating Lighthouse in New York: The Lightship AmbroseThese days, if you have dangerous, underwater shoals and you need a lighthouse, you build a big tower and anchor it to the seabed. But a hundred years ago, that technology wasn't there: and so you'd build a lightvessel: a floating lighthouse with a crew of twelve, who's stay out in the dangerous channel in all weathers. At the South Street Seaport Museum, Mike Weiss, the waterfront foreman, gave me a tour around the Lightship Ambrose. - Why "Four Score and Seven Years Ago"?
E90Why "Four Score and Seven Years Ago"?Lincoln's Gettysburg Address is one of the great moments of American history. There's a myth that he wrote it on the train to Gettysburg -- which isn't true -- but I want to dive into something a bit more linguistic. Those opening words: "four score and seven years ago": why do they sound so resonant? And where might you have heard something similar? - The Concrete Pillars On Top Of British Hills: Trig Points
E91The Concrete Pillars On Top Of British Hills: Trig PointsAround the United Kingdom there are odd concrete pillars on the top of hills, built to last for decades if not centuries. They've got a cryptic marking on them, and the words "Ordnance Survey Triangulation Station". What are they? (They're trig points.) Who put them there? (Brigadier Martin Hotine and thousands of people working with him.) And why? (To get an accurate map of the UK, with maths.) - Do The Numbers On Toaster Dials Mean Minutes?
E92Do The Numbers On Toaster Dials Mean Minutes?There's been a "Life Pro Tip" going around the internet lately saying that the numbers on toaster dials are actually minutes. I was so sure it was false. Oh, I was so sure. I got four toasters set to "2", and I had one take to film it all in a back room at my office. This is that one take. - The Hottest Place in Britain, and the BBC Theme Park
E93The Hottest Place in Britain, and the BBC Theme ParkOn Swanscombe Peninsula sits Gravesend Weather Station: a Met Office station that consistently records the hottest temperatures in the UK. Is it particularly warm there? Or have they put it in the wrong place? And what'll happen when they have to make room for Paramount London, the coming BBC-linked theme park? - Ley Lines and Avebury Henge, the Better Version of Stonehenge
E94Ley Lines and Avebury Henge, the Better Version of StonehengeOn the winter solstice, I trekked out to a cold and muddy Avebury Henge, out in Wiltshire, to talk about two things: first, the peculiar and mostly-British belief of ley lines, and second, the fact that it's basically a hipster version of Stonehenge: bigger, cooler, and you've probably never heard of it. - Why Doesn't Britain Have Rabies?
E96Why Doesn't Britain Have Rabies?In 1993, the New York Times called rabies a "shared national nightmare" for Britain. For younger viewers, and those outside the UK -- say anyone who doesn't remember the Channel Tunnel opening -- "rabies" may just be one of those things you hear about on the news sometimes. But there are a lot of people who are proud of Britain being free of it. Here's why.
