Ten of my Favourites

Ten videos from 2013 (from my channels - there were plenty of good ones by other people too!).

(Not necessarily the most popular videos - just some I enjoyed making.)

After following him for years, James Clewett was in the hot seat for his PhD viva (and we had cameras in the room).



A bit of fun on Numberphile, calculating Pie with Pies.



Testing the boiling point of water at different altitudes during a trek to Everest Base Camp.



A "Friday Afternoon Experiment" with the physics guys.



On an amazing trip to the Very Large Telescope in Chile, we witnessed the elusive Green Flash.



Something different - a music video filmed at the Large Hadron Collider.



Our chemistry channel - periodicvideos - marked its 500th film.



With a new camera, we saw the Barking Dog like never before.



Since starting Deep Sky Videos, I had always wanted to see Charles Messier’s grave in Paris.



Comparing science videos to football matches.

Thoughts on science videos

I was recently a guest on a panel discussing "Making Science Public".

Among my numerous rambles, I explained why science communication could learn something from football..  maybe?

Here is what I said:



Extended footage from the panel here.

The fun never ends...

So the "excitement" of Berzelius Day is over - posting 24 short videos of chemical reactions in 24 hours.

Was chuffed to see it even rated a brief mention on the homepage of YouTube (right).

It was a fun day for my chemistry channel - periodicvideos.

But life moves on and other channels need tending to.

Three new videos have popped up today and I thought I'd share them here.

First, here's a new video for the occasional series My Favourite Scientist.

In an unusual choice, it features the fictional scientist Mr Spock!



A new Numberphile video has been uploaded - here we have a card trick with a numbery streak.



And finally Deep Sky Videos is continuing its journey through the Messier Catalogue with a new video on M76 - the Little Dumbbell Nebula.

Some Football Stuff

Fans of football (or soccer, as some may say) may be aware the European Championships has begun.

Here are some football-related videos from my back catalogue (let me know if I have forgotten any!).

Steve Bennett designing a football computer game - here is a day in his life!



The physics of a football... (from Sixty Symbols)



The Professor famously analyses the World Cup trophy! (from Periodic Table of Videos)



Some football philosophy (from PhilosophyFile)



The shape of the ball... (from Numberphile)



A scientific penalty shoot-out (extra footage from the football physics film above).



Birthday probability... you'll never watch the game the same way again!? (from Numberphile)



More philosophy!



About the annoying vuvuzelas which appeared at the South Africa-hosted World Cup.

An odd mix of videos

After a filming expedition away from home last week, I'm madly editing through my backlog before Christmas.

This has resulted in an odd mix of videos posted over the last 36 hours - from a Vortex Nitron to the Shawshank Redemption!

From Krispy Kreme doughnuts to "romantic" numbers!

More on those QR codes

Interest continues in our quirky periodic table of QR codes.

Professor Poliakoff visited the EPSRC (a big science funding agency) this week and gave them a copy of the table.


The EPSRC has previously supported our molecular videos series and, by all accounts, liked the table. They may hang a few in their offices!

I've also had photos from people who've made their own print-outs.


A few bloggers, tweeters and educational websites have also been kind and spread the word (like this one and this one).

And I've had some interest in printing them for wider distribution... Hopefully more news on that soon!?

Of course, you can just print out your own.

Here are some hi-res versions of the table:
With symbols
Without symbols

And here's a video I made explaining what it's all about:

Chemical Rap and the Croatian Connection

Earlier today I blogged about periodicvideos reaching its 50,000th subscriber.

I now have two new pieces of news.

First, we've posted a video to mark the milestone.

It's a song by rapper and science communicator Oort Kuiper (aka Jon Chase) - but using some of our own video clips.

Check it out:



Also, I sent a message to the 50,000th subscriber - and heard back from him.

Initially he thought my message was a hoax (I don't blame him with the amount of spam flying around YouTube!)

The chap - who would prefer to remain nameless - is originally from the town of Zadar in Croatia.

He wrote: "I had no idea this was going to be the 50,000th subscription, and I wanted to subscribe long time ago, but never really cared about the whole concept of subscription because I periodically watch the channels I like, like periodicvideos.

"Well, this is a rather great honour for a Youtuber, especially because your channel is one of the best ones around.

"Though I'm not too active on Youtube cause there's not much time for making the videos I'd like, it's been more than 5 years that I run a blog (endimion17.blog.hr), mainly discussing pseudoscience from a healthy critical thinking point of view, presenting the local web population with some cool things from amateur astronomy and chemistry, and occasionally a rant or two on criminal."

I can't vouch for the blog as I don't understand the language, but here it is.

Our mysterious number 50,000 also had plenty of suggestions for future videos.

He wrote: "It would be great to make few videos of really rare sights, like solid oxygen, solid and liquid ozone (yeah, I know it's dangerous), glowing of condensed radon, the glow of metallic radium, etc.

"We've all been reading about stuff like that from the textbooks, but there are no photos or videos around."