Howtown

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Howtown posts

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New Video: Adam attempts voter fraud

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.As part of his research he spoke to a poll watcher from the 2024 Venezuelan election - and we made a litt...

New video: Is Finland really the happiest country?

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.Ourvideo 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 definition of happiness, and you get a different set of countries ...

New Video: Your Neanderthal DNA

If 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.For our Howtown Heroes, Council Member...

Howtown Hall #7: Viral shorts and our goals for Howtown

0:58 What's an antifascist fountain?4:16 Adam's visit to Barcelona7:28 The liquid mirror telescope11:10 Bigger and bigger mirrors16:15 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 Howtown30:20 YouTube channels we watch37:33 Our polarizing choices

The Map Projection Song (audio only)

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!

New Video! How they actually calculate Calories

Five 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 pee. If that's not of interest, ...

New video! How news breaks

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 thing over a very compressed timelin...

Would you rather......?

Hi 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:

The family tree

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 (...

New video! with "Sentience" pronounced the American way (sorry, truly)

Hello 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 reading about a new UK lawrecognizing sentience in cephalopod mollusks (octopus, squid, cuttlefish) and decapod crustaceans (crabs, lobsters, shrimp). It sent me on a deep dive into the emerging science of invertebrate sentience. F...

Meet & greet this Wednesday 🤠

Hi 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-szySince 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 Patreon offerings engaging and useful.We understand that with time...

Earth is a potato, Ötzi was bald

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 probably used an obelisk, we used Pringles cans. But one big issue complicated our calculations: the Earth isn't a...

New video! How do they count Covid deaths?

Hi folks! Just dropping in to let you know that oursecond 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, and I wanted to take the opportunity to look back on the pandemic, now that dozens of studies have been published. I was hoping to see more clearly how many lives the virus took from us, and I came out with more confidence in ...

Dog rainbows and T. rex lips

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 on tackling it -- and then our friend Cleo Abrambrought it to us independently.But we don't stop at color: this episode talks about other aspects of dog vision, including the all-important connection between vision an...