You’ve perhaps, if not probably, seen videos of what happens when Mentos candies are dropped into bottles of diet cola. The reaction is due to the carbonation, and diet soda is better because it isn’t sticky. There’s now a Geyser Tube™ kit you can buy that will make it possible to waste some Mentos and a bottle of soda from a safe distance for ten seconds of excitement. Eric and his cousins Sarah, who pulled the string, and Kate, who complained the demonstration wasn’t very exciting, demonstrate.
I’m glad Eric took the video in front of the garage. This gives me a chance to tell you that Glenn, our contractor, is visiting again, but there’s no big project like last year, when he remodeled the porch. In a few days the bit of vinyl that’s above the garage door will be gone, replaced with cedar shingle, and that chimney will be removed. It belonged to a wood stove that was gone long before we bought the house ten years ago.
Having been, in a relatively small way, in both the broadcast and print media, I’m fascinated by the blurring effects the Internet has had between these industries. Newspapers have been hit the hardest, and they’re doing what they can to adapt, mostly by taking advantage of the Web.
One innovation is to use blogging software, so letters to the editor can now be comment threads. Another approach is to add video. The suburban paper here, The Metrowest Daily News, posts videos on YouTube that are relatively rough, but servicable. Some are interviews, while others capture events, such as this suspicious truck fire at a Bose (the Wave Music System) Corporation parking lot.
Larger newspapers, such as The Boston Globe, are now posting slickly-produced videos to complement their feature stories. The video below goes with the story at this link, and I think it does a good job of helping to get the writer’s point across. Note to Globe: Get the Flash player fixed, so the dimensions can be properly resized, instead of cropped.
By the way, as I’ve pointed out before, the newspaper business had decades of warning that changes were coming. The very thing that was a great burden and expense, the printing and distribution of paper, was also a primary reason (along with literacy) for the success of newspapers, because it gave them control over access.
Papers liked to promote the idea that a single copy would be read by more than one person, but of course they preferred that not too much of that went on. Readership is only a guess, while circulation is a known number, and it’s always better to sell more copies.
You’ve perhaps, if not probably, seen videos of what happens when Mentos candies are dropped into bottles of diet cola. The reaction is due to the carbonation, and diet soda is better because it isn’t sticky. There’s now a Geyser Tube™ kit you can buy that will make it possible to waste some Mentos and a bottle of soda from a safe distance for ten seconds of excitement. Eric and his cousins Sarah, who pulled the string, and Kate, who complained the demonstration wasn’t very exciting, demonstrate.