Lateral with Tom Scott 60: The world's longest ship
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Dec 1, 2023 Topics include injecting fillers and tattoos for advertising, nostalgia tastes and the correlation between COVID and the inability to smell Yankee candles, creating custom smells with Scratch and Sif cards, limitations of Roman numerals, the ethics of psychology experiments, and the effects of costume incentives on motivation.
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Alter Signals To Improve Outcomes
- Use targeted cosmetic interventions to change social signals that affect earnings.
- Dr Jack Birdie offered Botox to poker players to reduce tells and potentially improve winnings.
Gas Company Sent Scratch‑And‑Sniff Cards
- A Canadian gas company mailed scratch-and-sniff cards to households to teach the smell of natural gas.
- Tom Scott explains the stunt aimed to help people detect gas leaks in rural areas.
Legacy Formats Create Strange Limits
- Historical design choices can create absurd modern constraints.
- The AKC limits identical dog names to 37 because their registry used a narrow Roman-numeral field that couldn't fit 'XXXVIII'.