There's a real skill in explaining something technical clearly, while maintaining the audience's interest but not coming across as patronising. I'm in my 30s and I'm really enjoying watching these Curiosity Show clips and am learning a lot! I wish this was on when I was young.
Ah ha! Finally, someone has explained to me how the video tunnel effect is made! Since everyone uses computers for all video effects now, it’s hard to even search for how special effects were done before that. Thank you! 😊
During the mid to late 70's when I was in elementary school in the US we had a treat. We got to see some of these shows. Every kid loved them and wanted more. Watching these videos brought back the memory.
@@CuriosityShow The videos that were shown at school came from the department of education and they said they were thinking about getting more of the shows. From what I remember, we only got to see two shows. Every kid wrote a letter to the board of education and we heard it was the same at other schools that got to see the shows. The shows were brain food for hungry kids.
I love the hint dropped by the inclusion of the ruler as an amplifier. We can also say a lever is like an amplifier. It also works the other way around, if the fulcrum is near the other end, reducing big movements to tiny ones, like looking through a telescope in the 'wrong' direction. A pair of calipers does the same thing, letting us make big movements to register a small distance precisely. Knobs on potentiometers let us do this in a rotary way: when we want to turn the knob half a degree, the great radius of the knob means we don't have to restrict our movements to such a tiny fraction of a millimeter. From the same principle we get pantographs, which let us design a coin the size of a dinner plate and then reduce the design to something that fits in our pockets.
The thing about a lever is that the input torque always equals the output torque. That means there is always a tradeoff. Yes, you can use a lever to make your movements larger; but, then you have to push the lever harder to make up the torque difference. Alternatively, you can reduce the input force at the cost of having to move the input further. Amplification, however, as we use the term in electronics, is achieved through regeneration using an external power source to reproduce the input at a different magnitude of scale. A small radio signal manipulates the current of a much larger power supply using a transistor as a kind of election valve. As such, a better analog would be the control lever controlling the bucket of a tractor or the mast of a forklift. A small, light movement of a control lever opens a hydraulic valve that makes the hydraulic pump move potentially tons of material over greater distances than the swing of the lever. This analogy better suits the present subject matter. Imagine tying a string running from the bucket of a tractor to the control lever that operates it. The string represents feedback. If the lever is then moved to engage the bucket, the larger movement of the bucket will then take over and continue to pull its own lever in an unstable way, without stopping, until it has maximized its own range of travel. This is analogous to the clipping squeal of the audio amplifier reaching the limits of its a amplification.
Good thing they used a tape of their own theme song for this circa 1985, else RU-vid’s algorithm might have flagged it for copyright in 2022. (I’ve seen that happen for The Computer Chronicles.) 😅
Great segment, loved the piggy bank example. I was curious (a disease a certain tv show gave me when I was young) about the cool song at the end. Tracked it down, thanks to the Curiosity Show editors showing the single ... The Spitfires 'Rumble in the Jungle' ru-vid.com/video/%D0%B2%D0%B8%D0%B4%D0%B5%D0%BE-w9TWE6Ibsx8.html
Excellent demo, love how the concept of the amplifier stretches to other subjects like the piggy bank, never thought of piggy banks in that way till now. The visual feedback in video cameras is an absolute awesome trick and indeed looks awesome in TV rock clips of the 70s and 80s when it was extensively used. I have made many visual feedback video art clips myself using 70s/80s era tube video cameras I own and it is so much fun! :)
Wonderful video. SO glad I accidentally stumbled onto another treasure on RU-vid. This stuff may be old, but it's definitely worth more than gold 😊 The feedback loop at 4:03 reminds me of when live broadcasters share their screens and you can see a sort of weird trail of identical images on screen until it stops looping and focusses. Love the explanation with the piggy bank too. Just imagine trying to do that with banks and savings accounts nowadays, only you'd have to try and hack their online banking to do it digitally 😆😅😝
The piggy bank was an interesting analogy. When your parents go broke do they make a dreadful squeal or maybe the piggy does. Of course, your claim that a mirror is an amplifier doesn't stand scrutiny
The video feedback seemed to be different if you used one of those old B&W cameras with a tube in it I think it was Vidicon?. I heard years ago that doing that with that kind of camera would harm the tube, most likely not, just like with audio feedback unless you turned the volume sky high.
Elementary enough for anyone having encountered feedback, but for a youthful kid of that era, the dialog covered too much ground. Using two mirrors was all that was required to give an illustration of visual feedback that anyone could immediately try for themselves. Normally, this show is excellent, but I rate this episode 5/10.
