Mastodawn

I'm finding the recent Veritasium videos are a bit weird... they mention a recent "thing 1", then do a super-deep historical dive into a somewhat related "thing 2" (presenting it as "the origins of thing 1").

This one [1] is "The Secret Spy Tech Inside Every Credit Card", where they briefly poke at NFC and then wind back to talk about the Soviet's listening device, gifted to the US Ambassador in 1945 [2].

They explain in some detail how the device works, showing it as what many woud recognise as Frequency Modulation, before calling it Amplitude Modulation(?!)

... the Wiki page states "the membrane and the post formed a variable capacitor acting as a condenser microphone and providing amplitude modulation (AM), with parasitic frequency modulation (FM) for the re-radiated signal", which is... I mean... okay, I guess... but isn't any FM broadcast actually AM too by this definition?

1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YSJY3DvnybE

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Thing_(listening_device)

Show thread

Eric Brombaugh

@attie Veritasium's content has been kinda clickbaity for a while. That one a few years back where they looked at an electrical circuit as long as the distance to the moon was a good example of an explanation which was physically correct but presented in a way that attempted to make even educated viewers feel dumb. It caused a lot of controversy in the EE blogosphere, which I suspect got them a lot of hate-views.

Show thread

Graham Sutherland / Polynomial 5d ago

@emeb @attie that one was actually very poorly explained, imo, and it led to no end of other well known EE youtubers trying to explain it but with various levels of actual understanding, including some who just authoritatively explained it wrong. the saga was exhausting.

the most annoying part is that it is really quite a simple phenomenon to explain.