Howtown

Deleted scene: Adam 'splains lasers

Added 2025-04-17 12:00:19 +0000 UTC

Adam and I often talk about being haunted by the "russian dolls" in our video scripts. In each piece, we explain "how they know" some things, while other things we just assert as fact. Otherwise every video would fracture and spiral as we chase down the bottom dolls.

See, for airborne lidar to work, you need to know: 1. the speed of light, 2. the location of the plane on the planet, 3. the pitch/yaw/roll of the plane, 4. how to detect photons at nanosecond scale, and 5. how to make a beam of light that stays narrow enough to be useful. (And I won't list all the things you need to know in order to know those 5 things!)

That last one—the invention of the laser—was the one that I originally intended to include in the archaeology video. But we ended up dropping it after the rough cut because it felt long and arbitrary and would require new animations that we didn't have time for. So here it is, with the reference images that we would use to make our own motion graphics.

thanks Adam, hope you enjoyed the explainercise.