I’m taking a break from the depressing state of the world to offer up some fun science videos for your entertainment. I don’t have an actual YouTube account, even though I spend a lot of time on YouTube. My guess is that if I sign up for an account, YouTube will double down on its attempts to track everything I watch, so no account for me. That means that my time on YouTube is much more random than it needs to be.

The great thing about random offerings is that I find surprises in their suggestions that might not show up if I were directing YT to send me in the direction of “my personal silo.” One of the best surprises recently was videos by Sabine Hossenfelder. She has degrees in physics, but now spends a lot of her time as a “science communicator.” That wasn’t an option when I was wondering what to do with my life many decades ago, but I think I would have enjoyed being a science communicator. 

In any event, Sabine has a YT channel with programs on a wide array of topics. A recent one was a about climate change in which she wondered why her videos about climate change get the most thumbs down votes of all the work she does. Watch it and see what you think. 

Oh, and by the way, I just learned today that we can minimize the tracking that YouTube does on us by viewing everything through “Duck Player” from DuckDuckGo. Clever, no? Yes, DDG started out as a search engine that minimized tracking, but now it’s its own browser and video player. Give it a try.

For more free science, try Knowable Magazine. Lots of articles on a wide variety of topics, and did I say it’s free? Yes, they’d love your donations, but they’re not required. 

In any event, it’s all a pleasant relief from fretting about Congress, about the 2024 elections, about Ukraine, about Israel. And about all the other troubles in the world that get very little press.