High Speed Fun and a Fly Responding to a Blast Wave | Smarter Every Day 55

Hey it's me Destin, welcome back to Smarter Every Day. So I am in the middle of the California desert and the sun is setting, and it's beautiful, so I'll just let you see that while I set this video up for you.

So a guy named Jeff, he's taofledermaus on YouTube, which is German for bat, which is flying mammal. Anyway, he asked me if I would participate in an international high-speed video collaboration in an effort to promote a lot of smaller channels that study things with high-speed video cameras, which I love so, of course I'm gonna do that.

So what the common theme was was destroying snack foods, because we could all get our hands on snack foods and we all like to destroy things, so it was an easy one. My thought going in was, oh great I can just have fun with high-speed video and I don't have to worry about trying to educate or learn something, but I was wrong because I learned something.

So here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna show you the video that me and Trevor, my neighbour, made, just goofing off trying to destroy snack foods and then all of a sudden, bam, I learned something. So I hope you learn it with me. Ahh, well I'll just let you watch. Check this out.

(Destin) If you grew up in the south, you know what a Zebco 33 is. Alright, so doughnut.. High-speed camera.. Ooh! Sprinkles! And, a bow.

(Trevor) I'll get it sitting perfectly.

(Destin) By the way we also have another camera here, on the bow.

(Trevor) Ready to rock.

Arrgh.. We've decided we're gonna shoot the side of a sprinkle doughnut if Trevor would quit eating the doughnuts. Mountain Dew.

(Trevor) Here's Dew in your eye.

(Destin) It did a helicopter thing. So what do you think we should call this video?

(Trevor) Well this one's gonna be mountain spew.

[gunshot]

[slowed down gunshot]

Don't worry. I don't waste food. Little bit of lead in it though. OK so now's the part where I learn something. Right before I fired this P22 pistol at this doughnut, this fly started buzzing around the doughnut, and I decided you know it'd be cool if I waited until he was at the correct depth of field and I would fire and let the blast wave propagate over his wings and see how he handles it in his flight, and he handled it quite well.

So what he did is the blast wave came over his wings and it tucked and rolled him just a little bit but instead of trying to compensate he just stops, and he waits, and when he waits he's letting his centre of gravity overcome the flow of air over his centre of pressure and then he paddles to the side just a little bit and once he does that he regains control authority and then he just takes back off. And all this happens in an instant. It was marvellous, it was pretty amazing.

So anyway, watch the footage, and after you see the footage, I will put the link to the playlist for the high-speed collaboration video so you can see things that are pretty cool like, I don't know, how to shoot a slingshot with one hand. Anyway, enjoy this video. I learned something.

[gunshot]

[slowed down gunshot]

[slowed down gunshot]

[music]

[Captions by Andrew Jackson] Captioning in different languages welcome. Please contact Destin if you can help.