We challenged you to work out where we watched the eclipse from. Here's how well you did! MATT: / mattgrayyes | TOM: / tomscottgo Matt's Photos: flic.kr/s/aHsm23RCB1 (The title is serious)
woo i got a perfect score on this round of guesser, all it cost was 27 years, my wife's life to the blood god, my sanity, however much a world tour costs, and saying the metric system was worse then the customary system.
AmberAmbitions I used to sit next to a guy in my accounting class who played Geoguessr almost all the time, and one time he got dropped in the middle of the town next to ours, and we both laughed at that, since it was such a funny coincidence. The whole damn world and Geoguessr picks Arcata lmao
I can verify that Idaho is a conspiracy, I drove through it once. It was essentially a void with a small pile of potatoes, And the little keychains with names on them that you find in gift shops.
As for why the pigeons showed up - they saw mostly-stationary humans, not being overly loud or obnoxious. The typical behaviour of a human who might toss out some feed....
@@RainyFoxUwU southwest is southwest regardless of where you are though, and it doesn't require you to memorise a conversion that you probably don't use too often.
@@RainyFoxUwU I think it's just the fact that he seems to not be able to do compass directions but be very good converting numbers which most people would think is harder
Park Overlord: But how can you film a Park Bench... WITHOUT A BENCH?! HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!! Matt and Tom decide to sit on a wall instead Park Overlord: Blast, foiled again!
actually not necessarily correct, he says 2.78 and 2.75 meters away (from the right spot) and since he is measuring this radially from that spot, its possible that they were 30cm apart from each other if thats what he meant
I make this mistake all the time. I find it really hard to look at decimal meters and pick out the centimeters, and it often goes wrong. I guess it's because I'm used to dividing digits into blocks of 3, not 2.
For those asking: many public places don't allow professional filming/photography without permission and classify anything with a tripod under this. --Matt
Mittau Not just the Brits, Ireland has a few places (like the Phoenix Park for example) with the same rules, and I've heard of it in other countries too. Some don't really like any public filming at all....
Aw darn 5th place. It was a little more than just street view. I started with street view, 33 degrees ment it couldn't be Nebraska. And I figured somewhere around the longest duration of totality. Needed a paved road, east to west, telephone poles to the north and a bend if the road to the north at the front of the car. I found a similar road near Perryville airport that did have street view but the road was dashed and not two solid lines, so looked in that area and was able to narrow it down with satellite view. Fun game, and huge waste of time.
I’ve been a fan of Tom’s for years... I’m from Texas, and to realize that we were in the same small town in IL on the same day at the same time proves to me just how small the world really is.
Hmmm, an extremely short video with nothing but a corn field ,a moth and the sky and people were able to trace down to a meters distance yeah, not disturbing at all
@@Mr_Doogz I almost said I’m glad there’s no one who wants to track me down, and then I realized I’m getting checked for a clearance. DoD’s probably calling everyone up to my kindergarten teacher with how long it’s taking.
2.55492188199548397528785742572458499385835439992288527728266927818185991005492001001010034310210214320400080800530030385004006389093003002238895295759343339999995443922888843753235344 minutes actually. How precise is that again?
As someone who does a lot of night photography in London, I regularly get asked to stop using a tripod, as most places are owned by private companies. Ironically, if I had a professional camera I wouldn't need a tripod, so that rule mainly affects amateurs
Digital stabilizing is a thing these days, and many other rigs. But that is not just for pros anymore either. It is an outdated rule, but the idea is that a more typical professional outfit includes teams of people with light rigs and sound technicians etc. You do want to control those.
Professional photographer with professional camera use tripod. They help stabilize your photo and can make great photo. There this one dude who is a Des monies Iowa photographer and he does great city landscapes with a tripod
I actually do this sort of work for a living and it's surprising to me how people think they can't be found doing this. It's really quite easy once you know how to do it. Honestly, 10 people got close enough for the data to validate a drone strike.
It’s definitely not easy IMO especially not all locations but there are enough people that can do it with disturbing accuracy. You have to know AN immense amount of information about geography, climate, biology, geology, down to local laws and customs like how a certain place might make signs or line up roads. Except in the cases where you already know you’re searching in a reasonably small area like a state or not huge country then it can get super easy
@@scootergrant8683 They covered it in another Park Bench episode at one point. Tripod is sometimes seen as the grey boundary between amateur recording and professional. Professional production requires permission and payment.
Wow it was so funny I watched the Eclipse from Chester and someone said two guys from britian came through Chester. When I say the video I thought how interesting it would be if that was you two but i didn't put in a guess because I thought that their was no way it was you two.
@@GryphLane Seeing a couple of british geeks in the middle of nowhere in the US would be the most interesting thing to happen to me, if I were there. I'd probably tell someone about it, and given the solar eclipse is happening, it's likely for someone who knows tom to have also been close by. It doesn't matter if Ethan3369 was that guy, or if he made it up. It probably happened to SOMEONE, like it did to the lucky dude at walmart. Sometimes it doesn't matter whether a story is true. Lighten up.
To be fair, it was a pretty great display of unity. Some rich guy stood up and proudly took up opposition against a political leader, that simple act immediately causing division. Conversely an entire planet banded together to tell the rich guy to get off his damn soap box.
Georeferencing and determining someone's position using a single photo, with enough clues, is pretty straightforward if you have the knowledge. When you have a video, its even better, as there are many more clues and data points. Remember, people are doing this using tools available to the public and for free. I do it as a gag with friends saying "Betcha I know where this is!" and return with an answer sometime later. Its genuinely scary what we can do with today's technology.
I was surprised by what I have heard in the news/commentary. Because of the Russian-Ukrainian war, they were discussing the services providing secret information ... somone says that the open sources and commercial too are the best these days because nobody can shield them really successfully (they compared them to some more traditional ones). So social media, commercial satellites, ... and a few sources. Being able to read them successfully is the special knowledge. (Nobody says they do not obtain the info from other ones, just surprisingly a lot of it comes form these ones.)
You say that but I can't think of a lawful reason for one state to need that many potato batteries. Sure it looks legit from orbit but you could be powering one heck of a SEMP field. Dinosaurs? Aliens? A lost Amazonian tribe? Mole people? I'm on to you Idaho....
I'm in north Idaho and Yes Man is correct, Idaho doesn't actually exist. If you're looking for somewhere to relocate to from California, Oregon and Washington are lovely.
When I did a broadcast production degree one of the things I learned was that in public parks which were owned by the local authority (in Scotland) professional filming was not allowed but amateur filming was. The only way to differentiate was whether there was a tripod involved. I never really believed that (although I never tested it) until now...
Jojo Scotia Do you listen to Hello Internet? CGP Grey recently said on an episode that he and his wife wanted to take nice photos of themselves in Traflagar Square, got their v early so there wouldn't be anyone in the background (and specifically so as not to annoy anyone) but even though there was no one holding the camera, the fact that they were using a tripod was apparently enough for a security guard to ask them to leave.
Now you know what people do when they're bored and there isn't really a big reward for it. Imagine what they could do if there was an actual incentive behind it.
They actually do less. Some experiments have shown that volunteers work more and enjoy themselves more at the same task than people who are paid. Once money comes into the equation, they stop thinking of it as a fun way to pass time and start thinking of it more like a job. So then the 'is it worth it?' question comes into the equation.
Hi Tom, the 2024 eclipse passed really close by where you watched the 2017 eclipse from. We took a lot of inspiration from your video in selecting our spot. Somewhere off a rural road where traffic can easily see and avoid our cars parked off the side of the road. We parked in a shallow ditch next to a corn field where there were no trees. There were no people around so we could easily change location. We got excellent viewing weather. We got to see the change in behavior of the insects, shadow banding, temperature changes etc, and got a 4+ minute totality. It was spectacular. What I wasn't prepared for was the amount of traffic after the eclipse. What would have normally been a 6 hour trip took us nearly 10. Funnily enough, we ended up detouring through Perryville, Chester, and Sparta in a failed attempt to detour around the traffic heading to St. Louis, only to get stuck in traffic heading north to Peoria. Thanks so much for posting your challenge.
"I wouldn't know to look up the weather forecast for the previous day. I think I've tried before... And not got far" Argh, yes. This infuriated me in the UK. I couldn't look up the previous day's weather. In Australia, the Bureau of Meteorology has all weather records for the past how long easily googleable.
I was born in and currently reside within the boundaries of a space called “Idaho Falls.” I can confirm that it does not exist. Now that I’m actually having a look around, it seems to be a vast and formless void.
I'd guess he was just looking for a handout. If they said: "Look, we're not professionals, this is amateur video, and we'd appreciate it if you leave us alone for the rest of the day." (Then slipped the guy a 50.) He'd probably leave them alone.
Wow you guys were an hour away from me when I was looking up at the eclipse. Pretty cool! "Twenty One Pigeons" and "scared off by a bigger bird (when it was a helicopter)" are great tom quotes
This was a lovely trip down memory lane for me. I'm originally from Carbondale...and when I was born, my parents lived in Sparta. My friend and I who went to see the eclipse decided against Chester because it was a bit farther south *and* because they had a small town festival...so we were in Waterloo just a bit north of where you were...and we watched the eclipse from a Wal-Mart parking lot where we waited (with many others) as well. When the challenge was issued, I said, "Well, they're standing amidst piles of soy beans, so that's probably my neck of the woods"...and, lo, it was! Welcome, retroactively, to my home state of Illinois, and the nearest city to where I grew up, St. Louis! I've really enjoyed your eclipse coverage...and the creepy stalking people were able to do!
Well it was fun trying to guess it I guess. You got to learn about caterpillars, corn agriculture in the USA, how to calculate solar angles and stuff or US landscape.
We know the gravity of earth on it’s sides are ever so slightly different everywhere. Assuming that the bird fell in exactly 1.10203633 seconds, we can determine that he is either in southern Idaho, or somewhere in Delaware. Next we see how foggy it is and by looking at a hill that is 26 feet away somewhere in between the leaves of the tree, that the fog density confirms that they are just north east of Twin Falls, Idaho.
I love watching this video. I travel from st louis to carbondale frequently (my wife's from there) we travel through Chester and Sparta. This makes me happy. I do wish I could have seen this when it was aired.
If you remove the extremes (the silly ones and the ones who were genuinely accurate thanks to more than gut feeling/guesswork) do the guesses average out at approximately the correct location? Could a crowdsourced intelligent guess have given reasonable results?
Yeah, that reminds me of that talk Tom did. Due to the fact that many people had the same wrong answers, it would probably be in the middle of the country, on the path of totality.
I was in the middle of nowhere in Kentucky, near the Illinois border. I found the point directly between greatest total eclipse and longest duration. It was incredibly clear and HOT. I got sunstroke. I was so lucky that a person also calculated that point and was there as well. It was so glorious. No crowd. Just us and the sun and the moon.
I wish I'd solved it. I live in St. Louis and have relatives in Perryville. I would have stopped by and taken a picture. FYI: Belgique is pronounced "Bell Gee Queue" because people in SE Missouri and southern Illinois don't seem to care what languages their words came from. (You probably don't want to know how Cairo, Illinois is pronounced : Kay-Roe)
Don't forget Prairie du Rocher ("Prairie duh Roacher" or just "Roacher" if people can't be bothered). Home of the historic French military encampment Fort de Chartres ("Fort Charters"). I made the mistake of taking French in high school and I have since lost count of the number of St. Louis streets I've been corrected on mispronouncing because I naively assume that people may have kept the original pronunciation. I still mess up Gravois ("Grav-oy") Avenue and I don't even know how many times that's come up in conversation at this point.
weird to hear people talk about my hometown area, i actually moved away a year before the eclipse. This makes me happy to see and be reminded of where i grew up. thank you!
Awwww it would've been great if you came to Nebraska! We've got a lot of neat stuff. It actually got about that temperature, but we were actually around 85 most of the day since there was some intermittent cloud cover. Cool that you guys came to see the eclipse!
