When we started talking about making an episode related to the impending US election, we realized that we didn't understand, at a fundamental level, how they work. So Adam spent a few weeks immersed in court transcripts and cybersecurity studies, talking to election workers and security experts - to find out if he could steal an election.
2024-10-25 12:48:32 +0000 UTC
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Three things I know about Finland:
They call their country "Suomi."
It is the home of Angry Birds.
And it's been named the World's Happiest Country 7 years in a row.
Our video out today takes a closer look at "The happiness contest Finland keeps winning" (15:18). We explore how "happiness" is defined in the report that produces the rankings. Change the defini...
2024-09-26 12:00:12 +0000 UTC View PostIf you've ever taken one of those consumer DNA tests, it might have informed you that you have a little bit of DNA inherited from Neanderthals. In our latest episode, we explore how scientists figured that out. The final chapter of the video showcases one of my favorite methods ever; archeologists managed to discover the very first evidence of a Neanderthal-Sapiens encounter by examining fossilized smoke.
<... 2024-09-16 13:00:13 +0000 UTC View Post0:58 What's an antifascist fountain?
4:16 Adam's visit to Barcelona
7:28 The liquid mirror telescope
11:10 Bigger and bigger mirrors
16:15 What's the point of a telescope that only points up?
20:32 What's the most surprising thing about going independent?
24:00 Our goals when launching Howtown
30:20 YouTube channels we watch
37:33 Our polarizing choices
2024-09-05 12:00:03 +0000 UTC View Post
Just a little song about the Spilhaus map projection. This map projection, which creates a seamless ocean by drastically distorting the continents, was created in the 1970s by oceanographer and polymath Athelstan Spilhaus. Here's the full audio version -- video version available for our $8 subscribers and up!
2024-08-27 12:00:06 +0000 UTC View PostFive big news items from Howtown!
1. Here's your link to watch our new video on: The "crappy" math behind the Calorie labels (15:15). I tried to figure out who was measuring the Calories for all the Nutrition Facts we see, and discovered that they're not measuring them at all. Instead, I found a very dedicated chemist who spent a lot of time around the turn of the century sifting through poop and pe...
2024-08-15 17:16:57 +0000 UTC View Post
The day after the shooting at Trump's rally, Joss texted Adam.
"What if we teamed up on something this week about the unraveling shared reality," she wrote. "Absolute explosion of conspiracy theories and just general distrust across my feeds."
Normally, we make videos about how scientists try to figure out the truth - but this week, we scrambled to tell the story of journalists doing the same t...
2024-07-26 12:00:16 +0000 UTC View PostHi pals - now that we're a couple months into this project, we'd love to know which of these options you prefer for the main perk at our $8+ tiers:
2024-07-16 13:53:34 +0000 UTC View Post
I'm sharing a high-resolution file of the family tree from this week's video on invertebrate sentience, along with the sketch that I made and the references I was working from.
My goal was to emphasize that we are much more closely related to frogs, fish, and rays than we are to crustaceans or cephalopods. But there are lots of different ways to map these relationships at different scales. I decided to choose the nine most populous phyla (out of the 35 total) and then expand out the mol...
2024-07-12 18:19:57 +0000 UTC View PostHello to the friends of Howtown,
Joss here, writing to let you know that I've got a new feature up on our channel, "How do they know which animals are sentient?" [12:08]
I decided to tackle this topic after rea...
2024-07-11 17:40:22 +0000 UTC View PostHi friends - You're invited to a video call for our paying members this Wednesday night at 8:00-8:30pm EST!
Video call link: https://meet.google.com/qbp-uhca-szy
Since we have a nice small group of about 100 founding supporters, we thought we'd take the chance to get to know you, answer any questions you might have about Howtown, and solicit your input on how we can make our Patre...
2024-07-01 14:57:26 +0000 UTC View Post
This week we answer a question from our friend Simone Giertz: "How do we know the circumference of the Earth?"
By coincidence, Joss and Adam live 4,000 km away from each other in almost a perfectly north-south line ... and that allowed us to recreate Eratosthenes' ancient experiment to measure the size of the Earth. He probab...
2024-06-28 15:32:41 +0000 UTC View PostHi folks! Just dropping in to let you know that our second video is live on Youtube - check it out at your leisure if you're interested in what's behind the Covid death counts.
This question came to us from Hank Green, ...
2024-06-13 19:23:41 +0000 UTC View Post
People of Howtown,
We're very excited to bring you our first episode: How do they know dogs are colorblind?
This is one of the most googled "how do they know that" questions on the Internet, so we were already planning...
2024-05-31 13:00:14 +0000 UTC View PostWhich of these questions are you most interested in? (You can choose multiple)
2024-05-29 15:05:32 +0000 UTC View Post
I bet you can guess what it's about.
2024-05-28 17:33:03 +0000 UTC View PostHear our goals for the channel, and what you'll get from different tiers
2024-05-22 17:50:09 +0000 UTC View Post