Listening for Nuclear Tests at the Top of the World 

I could listen to him for hours

It sounds like a very typical Danish person speaking English

I may be 4 years late, but I scrolled down just to see if anyone else noticed how sick his voice is

His speaking made my ears very happy, that's all I'm going to say publicly.

Well that's a tiny bit disappointing. But still, sounds like something that was very interesting to be a part of

Oh, too bad. Would've loved to see your performance in another episode!

funny.... the nuclear detonation ban, yet we buy new nuclear weapons we cannot test to see if they work... and is a deterrent.... and we can only see if they work if it all goes belly up... be funny if then, the government realise it was a big con and someone is sitting pretty with loads of money all this time...

Remember the inclusive "we"?

That where some crikey old computah's there... dot matrix printers and all. Saw a book on Windows 95 and NT Resource/development kit Those where obsolete even before the year 2000...

colinfurze omg how am I the only one to reply to you

I swear all "big?" RU-vidrs watch tom Scott

Hello colin

Colin colin HI

I’m not sure but I think they both worked together once.

We made mecha-jedi before actual jedi.

Lockirby2 this is not the tom you're looking for

I guess Obi Wan wasn't available

_I sense a-dammit, America!_

Kill me

I hope you showed him within these 4 years.

Me too

Me too!

I'm indebted to Elmo - she tracked down Svend Erik while I was hiking off trying to find the listening station on my own! I've given her a link in the comments - I'm looking forward to the results of the half-hour interview she did with him, when it's published. (And yes: let's get the Generator team back together soon...)

Can't wait for that interview either (along with Simone's photos!).

Miss you too, baby :(

Yup, all the latest technology right there....

Also those chieftec dragon chassis... I had one like these when I was a kid... I'm 32 now.

And the nixitubes and that sick looking retro electrontube screen

Hey, if it's cheap and works for what you need, why upgrade?

+WhackyJ in AK indeed. I study IT but this old stuff is really intresthing.

I would have thought a nuclear test listening station would be a reasonably important thing. You'd normally upgrade as a precautionary measure as equipment has a finite life. If that 486 or whatever it is failed today, finding spare parts would be difficult, unless they happen to have their own stash. Once that stash runs out though...

Never change a winning team.

3hoursago Well, when the 486's start to all die off and run out migrating to something else cheap and easy like a of the shelf ARM Processor DEV kit. For example, one could implement something like the CHIP Project or Raspberry/Banana/Orange Pi, etc. Super numerous, and of a very common and cheap architecture, also a significant step up from the 486. The Arduino (Atmel ATMega) and STM series ARM controllers are a bit too weak for the data collection, but they could serve as a dedicated interface controller between the custom hardware to one of the above mentioned ARM systems. I's also not too hard to use a Floppy Drive any of those either with a controller implemented in software (quite a few exist already) or a USB Floppy bridge. Could be done just to migrate, or to still use them as normal till the need to upgrade the storage system is unavoidable. Best part is, ARM based dev kits, although they keep improving over time, use pretty much the same dev enviroment regardless. The STM series is near universally Arduino compatable, the Pi boards can run a full Desktop OS, as well as the CHIP can run a full Desktop OS too. In fact, the QEMU virtual machine program could run Windows 95 by translating instructions from i386/i486 to ARM32/64 in realtime, to keep compatibility while the new system is being programmed. Mark my words, when they upgrade, it'l likely be to a *NIX based system like Linux/BSD running on some easy to replace ARM based embedded computer system. It's just cheaper to implement special hardware like that on systems with very low level hardware access. That basically means outdated i386/i486 hardware or modern embedded systems.

the textures are also lacking... but playermodels are rendered beautifully

Right. We need a Greenland Graphics Extender to have distant land rendered instead of all the fog the devs put in to hide that the view distance only extended one cell into each direction.

+Nik Butler +

+varana312 +

No long distance rendering is premium content and can you get it by paying for the dlc - EA customer support.

And the power supplies brimming with Molex connectors.

Why not Windows 95? Just because Windows 10 is out does not stop these machines doing what they were designed for.

Looks more like the Windows95 (and NT) Resource Kit books, the good old days when you looked up fixes and tricks in a book :)

+Jango Bobafett Ignorance must be such a bliss for you!

***** Call me Oog! I've never been stuck in Windows of whatever vintage. In my cave we only run Unix.

They are Numitron tubes, not Nixies.

@@williephuger Thanks! I was wondering what tubes those are.

I noticed them too

Slight correction: Those are numitron tubes. They work like a 7-segment display, but use filaments like those in an incandescent lamp. Still pretty cool, though.

Vacuum fluorescent display?

I've been completely away from the news for three weeks, so I had to look up why that was -- if I'd known, I'd probably have tweaked my script a bit!

Have I missed something or are you referring to 9/11?

Yesterday or so South Korea unveiled plans to raze North Koreas capital in the case of any nuclear aggression from them. Edit: Also North Korean nuclear tests. I need to brush up my world-news-fu it seems.

North Korea did a nuclear test a few days ago.

www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-asia-37331852

Also a professor at my University

Where is your University?

University of Waterloo He started there fall of 2014, immediately after I graduated unfortunately

I searched it and I it was like near Toronto and London, I was tottaly confused. But now I get it Canadians have a city called London.

I remember meeting him at the Newark Space Centre (Newark UK not USA), what an amazing man, you Canadians should be proud of him

I've just had a reply from the folks at the Preparatory Commission, after sending them this video -- they're still collating all the data as I write this comment, but at least 25 of their stations around the world have shown it so far, so there's a good chance.

Boy this video had great/awefull timing depending on your perspective.

Ah right on, was wondering about this myself.

+Tom Scott how many stations are there worldwide?

I hate to nit pick but "would have shown" is not "have shown". Do you know if they picked up North Korean testing? Since we know they were testing, that would be a great way to know that the network works.

The shirt must be on the outside, in site, or there will be dislike....(s)

*in sight

Holly Boreham I mean, in the...Er...Site the video is? (I can totally get my way out of this)

+That Guy Hidden in plain web site :P

0:06 THERE, the guy in the background!

That's weird. I could understand if it misheard it and thought he said 1999 or something else that sounds similar, but where did the 6 come from?

Oh, never mind, according to this it was signed in 1996. I guess he said it wrong and he can correct the subtitles himself? en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comprehensive_Nuclear-Test-Ban_Treaty

And occasionally (usually), the subtitles are just plain hideous.

+Alex Knauth yep. also, unless the subtitles say "auto generated" the subtitles were written by a real meat popsicle. Except in the rare case (I have seen it before for some reason) whereby someone manually copies the auto generated subtitles to the human transcribed ones. also, if it has little to no punctuation it's likely machine transcribed. ergo, +Tom Scott needed to correct a mistake. he should probably do that via an annotation and a correction in the description as well.

They know both say 1989

You're not the only one ;)

Shipping anything out to a place that's so remote is incredibly expensive -- so if it works, and they've got spare parts for it, then it makes a lot more sense to keep what's there and well-tested!

Floppy disks are more secure and harder to hack.

they're*

In some cases they actually ARE more secure. They are physically larger and carry far far less data, making walking out of anywhere with stolen data more difficult. Transferring data off them is also a relatively slow process. I've had the 'pleasure' of working with a few government systems over the years that haven't been upgraded because the security evaluation on newer systems came with too many risks of breach and loss. They're also reasonably robust, and 'good enough' to do the job in many cases. The cost of designing, building, and TESTING a replacement system often far outweighs just buying a few extra spares and carrying on for another few decades.

Floppies can be incredibly durable. I've got Commodore 64 games on 5.25" disks and Amiga games on 3.5" disks that still read fine today. The floppies of the late 90s and early 2000s were much less reliable than older ones, and you can buy archive-grade diskettes today that are just as reliable as the older ones from the 80s

Uhh no that’s not a good joke

I was thinking the same

This year mate its cursed

It probably did

One dislike so far...must be from kim jong un.

Like to dislike ratio is now 4435:12. I wonder how well that correlates with the "oops-I-pressed-the-wrong-button" factor.

Underappreciated joke

Because Chris Hadfield was a Canadian astronaut and was 'above the world' on the ISS, rather than just on 'top' of the world.

Yes, I do believe that seismic sensors have detected large under explosion in North Korea

There is no need to detect North Korea - it's already been found, so you can just look it up on Google Earth. :-)

Benny Löfgren​ Are you sure? I thought "North Korea" was a myth, like New Jersey!

I doubt it. This only detects atmospheric nuclear explosions. I'm pretty sure NK does theirs underground -- there's less fallout that way. In which case seismometers have the underground scene well and truly covered.

sion8 North Korea is more of a black hole - everybody knows they're out there, nobody knows what it's like in there and once you get too close you can't leave.

+Aephaxia Where is his Grotto ?

He's wearing one beneath the coat; I have x-ray vision.

Nathan Berrigan How would X-Ray vision show that?

I'm sure he meant infra-red.

On the shelf

I wouldn't be surprised if some of those computer still ran it. After all, the programs managing that installation have probably been made to run on it and I doubt most of them have been updated since then.

Also a bit of Unix and Linux manuals too. One for Debian if my eyes are good enough to make it out.

"If it ain't broke, don't fix it."

Windows 95 resource kit book, and Windows NT resource kit book. If those cases runs something old still it's probably NT4. Was I the only one noticing the Sperry binders on top of the shelves? That's pre-1986.

I'm hoping for the sake of folks my age your kidding. If not, it's a floppy disk. Think like a USB key but with 1.4Mb of storage.

1.4Mb? you mean 1.4Gb right?

floppy disks are like jesus, they died to become the symbol of saving

It's a 3d printout of a save icon.

+YeahGoAhead oh god no. Back when these were major, 1gb would have been a huge hard drive on your PC. And a multicore processor was something that major server racks had - "no one would ever need that much power"

If you know about it, they detected it.

Kind of them to set that up while he was down there.

It's also the world's most northern palindrome, according to the expedition team on our ship!

That is the most interesting but sadly useless information I have heard in a long time! I just have to thank Monthy Python that I actually know what a palindrome is. Because I would have never guessed that, since my native language is not English or anything similar ;)