cartoon #video about the history of technological development, claiming that Çatal Höyük (#Catalhoyuk) got rich selling its #obsidian. Incorrectly claims that chalcolithic axes (and chisels, knives, saws, drills, etc.) were cast, and incorrectly claims that chalcolithic copper was entirely smelted from ore, when in fact we know that native copper is common even today. Incorrectly claims that the first bronze was a tin-copper alloy, rather than arsenical bronze. Incorrectly claims that bronze can take harder hits than copper. Presumably there are more major errors in the rest of the video I didn’t watch. #Plonk to "The Grainbound" for unforgivable levels of sloppiness about historical truth.
on 02026-08-25#video by "Dr. Roger Billings" about the #history of TMS 1802 #microcontrollers that’s 100% talking-head filler and stock photos. #plonk
on 02026-03-15#video of a fake air conditioner for #cooling. The author pretends to use a 12-volt air pump connected to transparent push-on PVC tubes as a compressor to condense isobutane! #Fraud. By "The Liberty Engine Project". #Plonk.
on 02026-01-10#ChubbyEmu #video full of authoritative minor scientific errors. Almost entirely stock photos and talking-head filler. #Plonk.
on 02026-01-06more #video about #cements #materials which falls pretty far short of including enough information for reproducibility, talking about “bast” fiber without specifying what plant, confusing caliche with clay, misstatements (“portland has clay in it”, “those [lime and portland bound concretes] need oxygen to cure”), etc. He’s also very confused about #geopolymers. I’m amazed how many factual errors he was able to fit into a single 21-minute video. Where it’s not wrong, it’s super unclear. Also I thought this was going to be about MgO cements, because that’s what it says in the title, but he doesn’t say anything specific about MgO, except that I think he’s confusing it with Al₂O₃. #Plonk to "mrglasecki".
on 02025-11-11#video where "Anastasi in tech" touts ternary computers like SETUN as a “huge breakthrough” that failed because transistors and vacuum tubes were binary, citing a new Huawei patent and the potential of carbon nanotube semiconductors. #plonk
on 02025-11-04#video on #Ukraine’s HUR spy agency attacking Pokrovsk today with troops that hopped out of a troop transport helicopter just above the ground, denying FPV drone operators line-of-sight as well as denying SAMs radar lock. But the video is just a bunch of stock photos, in fact the same stock photos over and over again. #Plonk to “J&J’s military report”.
on 02025-11-04#video from "Economics Explained" on #Milei consisting almost entirely of stock-footage filler with a relatively #vapid voiceover outlining #Argentina’s past with error-filled subtitles. #Plonk.
on 02024-12-10#video on an overview of a 4-year electrical engineering curriculum in 26 minutes. But basically it’s some guy talking to a camera while we watch him look up images on Google Image Search. #Plonk to “Ali the Dazzling”. I am not dazzled.
on 02024-10-09#video about #optics microlens arrays as a “key to our sci-fi future”. Nanometer-sized pillars on a silicon wafer; company is Metalenz. Video (by "Freethink") is pretty clueless and gives no real information about #metamaterials except that they can do polarization imaging. Lots of talking-head filler. #Plonk
on 02024-09-17#video on making a #wire bender with a nut and a bolt. The thumbnail shows slotting the bolt, stepping the nut, and welding a handle to it, but in the video he cuts a step in the bolt and then a slot in the bolt (with an angle grinder). Then he does MIG-weld a handle onto the nut. Horrific elevator music. Then he cuts a step in the nut. This seems like a terrible design: it relies on the thread to locate the two bending parts, which are a non-adjustable distance apart, and then restricts bends to 90° or less. #Plonk to "Relietron".
on 02024-09-03#video about the demise of the 60-meter-long La Serenísima blimp, which was shot several times with a .45 by someone in Fuerte Apache, and then several more times with a FAL rifle in Córdoba, but continued flying until destroyed by a storm in General Rodríguez near Rosario. 95% fake by "Real 3D". #Plonk #Argentina
on 02024-06-24#video #Amish computer of 100% talking-head and stock image filler, largely about the US$798 “Classic Word Processor” from 02005 which ran Linux. #Plonk to "Techquickie."
on 02024-06-15#bushcraft 14 months in the forest #video. He starts with a pickaxe and bedroll and dog and shovel and stuff, though. Saw, bowl, backpack, rope, bread, aluminum cooking pot, lanterns, sleeping bag, pliers, axe head, nylon line, etc. So he cuts a sapling as a handle for the axe, digs a 2-meter-deep hole in a clearing (breaking the pickaxe), and lines it with polyethylene sheeting and baling wire using fencing pliers, and pegs the polyethylene to the walls; I suspect this is a cistern. He delimbs more saplings with a machete, cuts them to length with the saw, and lashes them together with the wire into a lattice lid for the cistern. Then he hangs a second polyethylene sheet over it on four poles perforating its center so it will collect water for the cistern, weighting the center with a rock. Bandages the dog’s injured foot with a strip cut from his T-shirt with the machete, bifurcating the end of the strip to permit tying it tight. He clears a square on a slope with the shovel and uses some chalk from a dry wash to lay out a door on it; at this point I am getting skeptical about night not having fallen! Then he begins to dig terraces out of the rocky forest soil there with the pickaxe and shovel, uncovering a long-buried terra-cotta pot with gold chains, coins, and a ring in it. Poor pickaxe technique. As it begins to rain, he seeks out fragments of quartzite from the streambed, striking sparks from them. The camera cuts from him crushing one of them on a rock with the back of the axe in the middle of a cotton ball to a shot of striking already-ignited and charred cotton in the same way with the axe, a clear indication of #fraud, so I’m not going to watch the other 35 minutes of this video. In the comments he explains that he charged his phone with solar panels, which are never seen in the first 12 minutes of the video. There may be some interesting ideas here, but because of the fraud I have to say #plonk to “Ramiz in the wild”.
on 02024-05-10fast well digging by hand #video. Looks like northern Mexico. Three barefoot guys with shovels hit water about five meters down, but have to start breaking rocks with sledgehammers. Galvanized buckets on pulleys remove rocks and some of the mud once it’s inconvenient to throw it all the way out of the hole. Square wooden posts support a shade tarp and the pulleys. Audio is in Spanish and has had its pitch shifted, perhaps to evade copyright-infringement-detection algorithms. Once the water starts slumping the walls, they begin casing the well with mortared bricks. An old woman watches from the rim of the well, arms akimbo. A scaffolding built from scrap wood inside the well permits extending the masonry to the surface. Rebar is bent and tied to form a permanent support structure over the well, cement mixed from bags in a heap on the ground and carried in the buckets to slop in around the masonry. Centring constructed from dry-stacked bricks supports a circular reinforced concrete arch over the well, perhaps poured in forms we don’t see. A permanent pulley is affixed to the arch.
Then we cut to what looks like a similar well-digging operation in Pakistan, aided by a tractor engine powering a windlass hoisting apparatus through the power take-off; in this case a tripod over the nascent well supports a pulley but no shade tarp, and spoil is hauled up from the bottom of the well by the engine in a large cloth bag rather than by hand in a steel bucket. This time the well is 10 meters deep, and the digging implements look sort of like an adze or a huge hoe than a shovel. Again the well casing is built from fired-clay bricks joined with mortar, starting from the bottom, but the foundation is thoroughly mortared over, hiding the bricks. The final casing has two layers of bricks, and a steel ladder set into the brick side.
Then the real well drilling begins, lowering steel pipe segments of perhaps 200mm diameter into the bottom of the well, guided by barefoot workers in beige kurtas. It’s unclear how they are penetrating the floor, but it seems like spoil is being hauled up through the pipe with a sort of two-meter-long bucket, making space for the pipe to slide downwards. To screw pipe segments together to reach the top of the well, a strap wrench is improvised from a tree branch and a few wraps of rope. Finally the pipe is fitted with a flange which is bolted to an elbow and another flanged pipe running horizontally, presumably to carry off the well water.
Very poor quality video from "Machinery Magazine", omitting many crucial steps. #Plonk!
Are they the stupid motherfuckers, or is the guy who watched the video the stupid motherfucker?
on 02024-04-06Arduino #hardware vs. Pico #video, but it seems to be talking-head filler mixed with stock images, and the guy ("Gary Explains") seems to be pretty fucking clueless: “Now the Arduino IDE provides a language, they call it the Arduino Language, which is based on the syntax of C and C++, and by syntax I mean, you need the semicolon at the end, where the equal sign goes is the same as in C, curly brackets, all that kind of thing.” Of course actually the Arduino IDE lightly preprocesses your sketch and compiles it with the G++ compiler for C++. #Plonk.
on 02024-04-06are Chinese motorcycles taking over? #video consisting apparently entirely of stock footage with a voiceover. #Plonk to "bart".
on 02024-04-04