The video has also went missing in action on the YouTube subscriber feeds. UPDATE: The YouTube technical boffins have 'fessed up that their subscription system messed up for several hours... I was unlucky to be affected three times... It's now fixed but the videos will feed in lower on the subscription feeds! :(
Hi periodic table videos, I started watching your videos at GCSE and this year I've started my A-levels (one of which is Chemistry), and I still really enjoy them! Thanks for fueling my interest in Chemistry! My younger brother, who is 13, drew a picture of the professor and Neil, so I thought I'd send it to you.
All the best, David
Last week I travelled to San Francisco for a YouTube EDU summit.
It was basically a get-together arranged by YouTube to discuss online education - especially videos.
Loads of cool people were there, including quite a few who I'd met earlier this year at BrainSTEM and Vidcon... I won't bother listing them all again. You'll see some of them in the pictures below.
Excitingly, a bunch of them also gave me quick interviews for an upcoming Numberphile film. Stay tuned for that one!
While I was nearby, I also took the opportunity to visit Berkeley for periodicvideos because so many elements were created there. Videos from that are coming soon too.
In the meantime, here are some photos... And some links to secret "unlisted videos".
Coming in to land, the closest I got to the Golden Gate bridge!
Brady on the main stage (during a lunch break when everyone was gone!)
I did get to talk briefly during a panel - but here no-one seems to be looking at me! (video)
If you like the video and want to help us right this technological wrong, please share the video with your like-minded friends via email, Facebook, Twitter, Google-Plus or whatever else you use!?
Brought to you by the not-really-too-much-time-department - it's a bit rough but functional =). My apologies to Profs Stockman, Walsh; Moses - I'll add them in due course but perhaps will start with some caricatures first - lets see where my mood takes me, I recon Prof Moriarty + guitar + rocking pose is an epic picture waiting to happen =). I haven't watched *any* TV for the last three weeks but rather have your Youtube videos running - and given the number of them (started with periodic videos but I am more of a physics-kinda-guy) I doubt I'll be stopping soon. Thanks also to Ed Copeland for being the first person to explain the extra-dimensional universe to me using a cadbury creme egg in a way that I (kind of) got - the result being that I have started watching Stanford's Quantum mechanics course on iTunes U. A bit of a meta-note but the reason all of this works so well is that these guys are human, Ed Copeland's amazement seeing the particle detector at CERN was real, obviously real. James' dismay about his Phd funding was heart-wrenching and the video conveyed that. So in some ways you manage not only to educate, which I guess is your primary goal, but also to ground your characters - which is your achievement as the journalist - well played. Whatever the university is paying (if anything) I wouldn't hesitate to say it's not enough. For your viewer statistics - 39 year old Norwegian living in Sydney =)
And I've also been intrigued to note the disproportionate number of viewers who seem to have rolled all 5s.
One viewer produced the following tally of which number has been most common.
1s - 7 times 2s - 11 times 3s - 11 times 4s - 9 times 5s - 19 times 6s - 9 times
(Reminder: A Yahtzee is five matching dice of any number - so on 19 occasions the five dice all came up as a 5)
Anyway, onto the real reason for today's blog post.
It is simply to share another nice Yahtzee related email from the Numberphile inbox.
This one is from a chap named Simon and it goes as follows:
Hey Brady, I just have to tell you a story. During the last three weeks I was on
a cycling trip with two friends of mine. To kill some time in the
evenings we played Yahtzee almost every day. On one day we invented the
rule that if someone throws a yahtzee in a single roll, they would have
to stand up not saying a word and just walk away... then they would win
the game. We invented this rule pretty much for fun as we were pretty
sure this was never going to happen.
On the last day of the trip when we were at the airport we decided to
play some final rounds. In total we played three rounds and in the
second round one friend of mine actually threw a Yahtzee in one roll. Unfortunately we wasn't aware of the rule anymore and forgot to walk
away in silence. So we finished the round to play the final third on Two throws into the third round I jokingly said to my friend how
unnecessary it is to throw a Yahtzee in one roll when I lifted up the
cup to see Yahtzee of 6's. I stood up not saying a word and just walked
off to win the game. I left a photo in the attachment that my friends
took while I was walking away in triumph ;) I think it's just unbelievable that not only we got a one roll Yahtzee during our trip but also got a second one just a few throws
later. And to crown it all this all happened on the two last rounds we
played during our entire trip. Crazy, right? Keep it rolling,
Simon
Blog goes behind the scenes with video journalist Brady Haran.
Brady's working on various projects, including the successful Periodic Table of Videos, Sixty Symbols and Numberphile.
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