Half as Interesting is now one year old which
is amazing. That means there are only 13 years left until
the channel can get a learners driving permit in Alaska, 14 years until it can drink in
Ethiopia, and 15 years until it can get a pilots license. This is all assuming someone creates a sentient
robot modeled after this YouTube channel which I would love help with. I absolutely, sincerely promise to not use
it to overthrow the Tongan government in order to create the world’s only city-state with
a planned economy centered around writing bad, awkwardly integrated jokes for the internet. What also wasn’t in the plan, though, was
making a mistake in any Half as Interesting video and that happened so I really can’t
make any promises. You see, sometimes we make mistakes because
we’re terrible, terrible people and as terrible, terrible people we desperately want more views,
subscribers, and money so we’re making this extra special video to correct every, or rather
almost every mistake we’ve ever made. In the very first episode, we started out
strong by telling you that China is the fourth largest country in the world by land mass
while it’s actually the third. Then, in the episode about the 64 day longest
flight in history we said that when the record-breaking plane’s power generator failed they had
no heat whereas, in reality, the heat in a Cessna 172 comes from the engine which was
still running so, while they had no light or autopilot, they did have heat during their
blackout. In the video about the massive spreadsheet
that runs the world’s postal system, I said, “the UPU is made up of the CA, the POC,
the IB, and the Congress but you really didn’t need to know any of that. I just felt we didn’t have enough acronyms
in our life.” What I really felt we didn’t have enough
of were initialisms because acronyms are when the first letters of different words make
up a pronounceable word like NASA whereas initialisms are when you say each letter separately
like with the UN, an ATM, or in this case, the CA, POC, and IB. In the video on how fast you can circumnavigate
the world on commercial flights I said that there are eight hours in a day when you can
catch a flight to Europe from the US east coast even though the graphic clearly shows
nine hours—my math just sucks. In the same video, I pronounce Melbourne terribly
by saying “Melbourne” and the animator also decided to put Melbourne where Adelaide
is. This one’s on him. I can berra-ly blame him though as two episodes
later I pronounce Canberra as “Canberra.” Three episodes later I angered all the Angelenos
by saying that this intersection is in downtown LA whereas downtown LA is apparently here. I made some more blunders down under a few
episodes later by referring to the state of South Australia as Southern Australia then
in the video about how there are really more than five senses we tested one of your senses
by having a just a huge audio spike in the middle of the video. In the next episode, a keen commenter pointed
out that the image we show for the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirksville, Missouri
is not actually the Museum of Osteopathic Medicine in Kirksville, Missouri. For some reason, there aren’t many copyright
free images of this super interesting museum. In the next video about the longest train
journey in the world, we said that Spain built their train tracks at a different gauge than
France so that France couldn’t invade by train which is apparently a notorious myth. In reality, they just built them at a different
gauge because Spain is more mountainous and wider tracks allow for larger, more powerful
engines which can climb a steeper gradient. We also said that on the French-Spanish border
where you have to switch trains since the track gauge is different you have to cross
the bridge from Hendaye to Irun while in reality to change trains there’s this tiny Spanish
train station in the parking lot of the French train station on the French side
of the river so you don’t actually have to cross the bridge. In the episode about why every price ends
in 99 cents for some reason, we put the cent symbol in front of the number which just doesn’t
make sense. In the episode about the one road in the US
that uses metric, we said that the Mars climate orbiter crashed due to a conversion error
but it was actually a little different. It crashed because a computer was outputting
data in pound-force seconds rather than newton-seconds. We had more metric mess-ups in the video on
the 53 second shortest flight in the world where we said that 120 miles was 139 kilometers
whereas its really 193 kilometers. Finally, in the episode about the ghost flights
at Heathrow we showed Chicago O’Hare airports runway configuration as this. They’ve had some recent runway constructions
and closures which means that they now currently use these runways. The biggest mistake I ever made, though, was
setting my Club Penguin password to “samthepenguinman” because that is a classic insecure password. It doesn’t have different cases, numbers,
or special characters but remembering a password like E5@2sizUsJ@W is tough. If you sign up for Dashlane though, who made
this special episode possible, they store all your passwords in one super secure place
and autofill them whenever you need to log in. You can sign up for free at https://dashlane.com/hai
but if you want to upgrade to premium, you can get 30 free days and 10% off with the
code “HAI."
TIL the difference between initialism and acronyms.
Boy I hope somebody got fired for these blunders.