Tom Scott
When Jawed Karim, one of YouTube’s co-founders, published the first video ever posted on the platform on April 23rd, 2005, it was hard to imagine that YouTube, at the time just another drop in a sea of Web 2.0 startups, would become 20 years later a media behemoth. YouTube enabled a new generation of “influencers” to turn any conceivable subject into a social phenomenon. This month’s Vidéothèque movie is from one of the most beloved of those new stars: Tom Scott.
In 2006, Time Magazine chose “You” as their “Person of the Year”. Newsstand copies of the magazine featured a reflective mirror-like surface on the cover, which would show the image of the reader holding the magazine. Below the image of a computer (a white 2006 flat screen iMac, sign of the times) the legend said:
Yes, you.
You control the Information Age.
Welcome to your world.
Leaving aside the uneasy feeling left by reading those words in our dystopian future of 2024, it is fascinating to learn that some of those YouTube celebrities have followership numbers much bigger than the most popular TV soap opera actors from the 1980s or 1990s.
Rick Beato, one of those new celebrities with 4.5 million subscribers on his main YouTube channel, explained this phenomenon a week before the publication of this article:
YouTube is crushing traditional media. (…)
My Sting interview for example got 3.6 million views two years ago; if you go to Sting on Jimmy Fallon, 547'000 views, five years ago. (…)
So what’s the difference between Sting being on my channel and Sting being on Jimmy Fallon, Steven Colbert, or Jimmy Kimmel?\
YouTubers are able to dispense from the needs, style, and mechanisms of traditional media, focusing on a specific niche or talent, and exploiting to the maximum. In the case of Beato, pop and rock music. The end result is a never-ending production of content catering to otherwise underserved audiences, interested in pretty much any imaginable subject. The audience numbers mentioned by Rick Beato match what is now a vox populi notion; that younger audiences are flocking out of traditional media by the hundreds of millions.
The same phenomenon applies to Marques Brownlee, aka MKBHD (with almost 20 million subscribers), whose reviews of technology can make or break a company (Humane, anyone?); Justine Ezarik, aka iJustine (7 million), whose “300-page iPhone bill” video still resonates 17 years later; or Lewis George Hilsenteger, who single-handedly triggered the “Bendgate” affair in 2014, by posting a video on his YouTube channel, currently featuring a staggering 25 million subscribers watching every episode.
Among the thousands of channels that a nerdy mind like me would appreciate on YouTube, Tom Scott, (with over 6 million subscribers) has always had a very special place on my watch list. (Tom is not to be confused with another massively popular YouTuber named Joe Scott who I also happen to follow.)
Tom Scott is one of the great science communicators of our time. In the videos of his YouTube channel, even the silliest of questions had not just an answer, but a wonderful explanation comparable to those provided by Carl Sagan, wrapped in a video with a level of production that never ceased to amaze and delight his viewers. His enthusiasm and outstanding production quality are very close to those of Cleo Abram (4 million subscribers), another favorite of mine, also an awesome explainer of tech and science to the rest of us.
(Would you like more YouTube channel recommendations around science? Here they go: Sabine Hossenfelder, Kurzgesagt, and Veritasium. Let us not forget Jay Foreman, and that I had previously recommended Fireship, Google TechTalks, The Computer Chronicles, and Nemean on the pages of this magazine.)
Back to Tom Scott. He had an ongoing (and totally understandable) infatuation with Switzerland, and many videos in his channel explained uncanny features of my little country: the nature of holes in cheese, highways crossing military air base runways, monorails, shooting ranges overlooking roads, falling rock signs near villages, or even ETH Zurich students building high-speed cars.
But of course, much more interesting to the readers of this magazine are Tom’s videos related to computer science, of which there are quite a few to point to: about progress bars, the web, artificial intelligence, the pronunciation of the word “GIF”, Huffman coding, binary search, two-factor authentication, threading, ethics, sorting algorithms, electronic voting machines, data types, Turing machines, …and even why you cannot name a file CON in Windows.
But today, faithful to the subject of this month’s edition, we are going to watch “Floating Point Numbers”, a short video by Tom Scott on another popular YouTube channel called Computerphile (with 2.5 million subscribers). In this video, Tom takes the most analogic possible approach to explain the nature and raison d’être of floating-point arithmetic in computers, reducing it to the simplest possible explanation: floating point arithmetic is just scientific notation, but in binary.
Using just pen and paper (there is not a single computer in sight for the whole duration of the video), Tom explains the advantages of the IEEE 754 standard: speed of calculation, and efficiency of storage. He also dives into the major issue of floating-point arithmetic: rounding errors, and how this affects the representation of money, a very sensitive type of data that is usually represented as numbers.
After a decade of hits, Tom decided to stop making videos (albeit temporarily, or so we would like to believe) in January 2024, and this author for sure hopes that he will come back soon.
Before wrapping this article, a personal message for Tom: many thanks for all of your production, and I would love to meet you in person the next time you are in Switzerland! Let me recommend you, for example, our great computer museums, our obsession with the Helvetica font, or the first web server, a NeXT computer on display at CERN in Geneva.
Watch this month’s Vidéothèque video, “Floating Point Numbers”, by Tom Scott on the Computerphile channel, on YouTube.
Cover snapshot chosen by the author.