Habit can be good things.  Brushing one’s teeth twice a day, eating healthfully at each meal, changing the oil in you car every 5000 miles, getting a physical checkup once a year these are all good things.  Smoking two packs a day, texting while driving, and compulsively gambling are not.  Increasingly, it looks like obsessing over social media is also a bad habit.  And while that may be particularly true for Facebook and Twitter it is also, sadly true for YouTube.  The reason it is sad is that off of the beaten track of political polemics, social justice virtue signaling, and excessive outrage one can find a wealth of material to enjoy, to stimulate, and to learn from.

There is a whole group of content providers who fill YouTube with more than rants and vitriol.  They provide great material that helps build rather than tear down.  Some of them are reasonably well known, some lesser still.  Some of our favorites are:

  • The Mathologer
  • Three Blue One Brown
  • Louis Rossman Repair

But even these are fairly well known.  Even further off the beaten track one can find out of print audiobooks and comedy specials from years gone by which can never air on conventional television.  So our advice for each of our readers is to turn your back on the well-traversed paths and meander into the back streets and less-visited streets of YouTube.  You never know what gem you might find.

Speaking of gems, let’s move now onto the posts.

On several of those back streets of YouTube, one might just come across some audiobooks read not by a human being but by a ‘read aloud’ application that may have originated with Kindle or some other type of service.  Putting aside the legality as to whether this material belongs on YouTube, the fact that it is there opened up a door of contemplation.  English is hard for organic beings with wetware and years of training.  How hard is it for an auto-reader programed into silicon, steel, and plastic?   Aristotle To Digital considers this question by taking a linguistic stroll through some of the more befuddling aspects of the English language.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you are aware of the issues with Boeing’s 737 MAX 8 aircraft and the automation software that seems linked to two fatal crashes in last five or six months.  While the technical details are interesting (and a bit scary) the economic questions are no less important and interesting, especially given the fact that Boeing is essentially a part of the a monopolistic market dominated by it and Airbus.  This month Common Cents begins a multipart analysis of how monopolies work by posing the practical question: what actions, if any should the federal government take?

We’ve all seen those cool videos where a mixture of corn starch and water behaves in bizarre ways.  A person can run across a tub filled with the stuff without sinking but stopping for a moment at the halfway point to consider ones next move spells disaster and a trip to the bottom.  Why does this fluid do the things it does.  Why do water and air do the things they do?   This month Under The Hood makes a broad survey of the possible fluid behaviors and goes on to present the stress-strain relationship for the Newtonian class of fluids.

Enjoy!