Well... I've been at it for 3 months now....and I'm thoroughly convinced that catching up on the back content on all of Simon's channels will be a lifetime commitment...and I can live with that.
As Simon got moving on his rant about the youtube algorithm I couldn't help myself thinking "Hold on, has nobody ever suggested the UA-cam monitoring algorithm as a megaproject? (Or more broadly, similiar automated systems of screening)"? Given the absolutely central position those algorithms hold in our society it seems like an really interesting video/set of videos.
Because it'd be impossible. the algorithm will literally change by what you view and it constantly changes based on what is put in it. Not even people who look at the code fully understand the algorithm because it's had so many people working on it and so many tweaks and again, it's constantly getting new information. It's just not possible.
The term "Unfavorable Semicircle" is an old nickname for an archer's bow. The fact that the symbol for Sagitarius accompanies it is probably also another reference to archery. What that means I have no idea, but people at the time did make the connection between the placing of the dots and important locations on the world map.
I've never heard of that term but I really really like how it describes the use of the bow as a weapon. Very unfavorable indeed for those on the other end.
Kevin is my favorite writer you have, Simon. Keep this guy's basement extra stacked with rations, and even crack the window for a few seconds of light each day. He has earned it.
@@TheSoftestGirlYouKnow I now cannot read it as anything but. THANKS. Poor sentence structure strikes again. Hey it was like 4 am and I was binge watching Simon, so I am not a very smart person. (jk jk I am cracking a joke at Simon in his own way of kicking himself even though he is a smart guy)
The circle with the plus sign inside is also a symbol of Earth, as used in both astronomy and astrology. I only know this because I'm a long-time amateur astronomer and my opinion of astrology mirrors Simon's. Once dated a guy who told me that astronomy and astrology were the same thing, and if I believed otherwise I was deluded. He didn't last long.
@@Miss_Claire I appreciate that, I'll have to go through some of Simon's work and find one sponsored by Audible. Music is great but it becomes monotonous. And my job has me working on call quite a bit.
@@matthewmartin1862 Audible will become your new best friend at work, I promise lol. They have tons of free content, and you get one free book per month, any book. I've gotten the entire HP series for free, tons of educational content, and pretty much anything else you might be interested in, is there. I like the educational/historical stuff most, because I feel like if I'm spending countless hours listening to stuff, I might as well be learning something while I'm at it haha.
Jen’s mom Beth here. All of this is related and makes sense to me. I don’t have social media and I am older so I use my daughters phone. I do read though. Everything. I started with encyclopedias in the early 1960’s. I’m also a musician and started college for music at a young age. I am sure there are others who understand this too. You have weaved this all together so well that I believe you know exactly what this is. I enjoy your content on UA-cam, wherever I find you.
I thought 3301 was freaky but this seems like it's on another level. You think about people about in the world, what they're potentially doing right now. Billions of us doing billions of things all at once. At any given moment, among people all over the world, if you can think of any action being carried out, someone, somewhere, is doing it. Somewhere there's a little girl drawing a picture for her dad, or a boy eating a bug, someone washing their car, making dinner, repairing a toaster...but there's also the darker things, someone being murdered, someone being tortured, and many other...unspeakable things. Then for some reason I think about what's happening on the internet at any given time and it somehow feels a whole lot creepier. And that's just the open internet, without even touching the dark web or deep web...it's just...stunning and shocking and amazing and appalling all at once.
This is the first time I've met my thoughts on the matter reflected. Not specifically about the Internet, but how all and every possible event is happening with a good chance right now, and possibly at all times 24/7. It really brings home the concept of how large humanity is. I agree with the Internet remark, although the whole oh humanity isn't even accessing it, but the nature of it makes it more tolerable for shady corners. Very interesting.
It's not just that there's billions of people all doing different things all at once. That's fine. The spooky part is that is that some of them are wildly, incomprehensibly smart. I know those people tend to be loners, but surely *some* of them are working together. What's uncertain is, what are they doing?
Some people are so smart that it's scary. When I worked on a submarine there were nuclear engineers that could do complex maths in their head. But they were really weird to hang out with
When i worked for IBM, I spent some time based at the R&D labs in Winchester (UK). I met some of the big brains working on quantum computing and the stereotype of men with long beards, wearing kaftans and sandals is absolutely true. They may have brains the size of a planet, but they just don't bother with the whole getting dressed in the morning thing.
@@damenwhelan3236, I do trigonometry all day in my head told my shrink today she was in shock, she asked if we had software to do our calculations I stared blankly for a while and then said yeah we do it in our head it's just trigonometry. *Holy crap I should have proof read this before just letting talk to text go to town 🙄edited to fix all of those words,,
In all fairness, both points are right. They do have the right to remove anything they want, they're a private company, they can remove for any reason, including none. But it is a terrifying thing if this is how you make your living.
@@TakeltEZ so a company can have thousands of employees and just say screw you. If it were any other company that said. I'm firing you because I feel like it. They would be shredded in the news and in lawsuits.
@@stephenpetersen354 But that's not true- 49/50 states are what are called "at will" states which means that you can quit at any time and employers can fire you at any time with quite literally no reason. It happens all the time, and it's not a big deal because legally, that's how it works in the US.
@@TakeltEZ Wouldn't UA-cam arbitrarily banning channels they don't agree with that have not violated the law or TOS be considered a form of editorializing content and cause them to lose their Safe Harbor status? I am also a bit shaky on how minutely the TOS can be written with regards to what content can be uploaded. For instance, as Simon used in his example, videos disproving ghosts would probably not be able to be specifically targeted since that would be overly editorializing content. That said, there have to be some common sense rules, such as no depictions of illegal activities and extreme violence, but where the line is drawn seems a bit ill defined which is possibly intentional. I don't know though and if you have any insights into this I would love to hear it.
@@TakeltEZ Starbucks hasn't been scrutinized for union busting? Amazon hasn't been derided for it's poor treatment of it's employees? UA-cam gets a pass on just nuking employment why? I'm not sure I buy the "are will" but too. Especially if you are upper level talent wrongful terminations are still a thing.
New theory: Unfavorable Semicircle was one of Simon's earliest UA-cam channels, intended to generate buzz so that many years later, he could produce a podcast episode about it. This theory is slightly more likely than aliens or ghosts.
My best guess is that it's some artist or group who have been responsible for various ARGs in the past, who are using the platform to test out various different methods for encoding information. Testing not only the clarity and resolution of data after passing through however many stages of lossy conversion processes but also how obvious or apparent it is, and how quickly and easily people manage to discover and decode the hidden message. That would explain why it seems to be such a mishmash of different things but with no apparently cohesive message or meaning and the few puzzles that have been "solved" seem to be disparate and arbitrary. None of it means anything except for being recognisable when decoded.
It seems they evolved into making lunatic videos about Musk and Toyota inventing faster than light warp drives and get millions of views with a dozen likes or comments
This here may be even more reasonable than my explanation that it very well as easily could be a test bed for an actual modern signal stations and a psy op of sorts to test the abilities of the common person to decipher decode and hence how long it would take and how much time there is to reach the intended recipients vs those whom they intend to keep the message from until it's purpose has been fulfilled..
I watch so many of Simon’s channels that I hadn’t realized I wasn’t actually subscribed to this one. Thanks to the whole team for another excellent video!
It's kinda sad that we don't know our own rights properly in the US... If you scream fire in a crowded area, you're going to get in trouble, it's common sense
Yeah, the people who don't understand don't realise it was only ever intended to prevent the government from silencing the press or interfering from things like public criticism of the government or protest. What most people mean when they start screaming 'muh freedom of speech' it's more that they want to say whatever they want without consequences or criticism.
@@ponypetedmAwww. We're not boring. We're British! :D Now make sure you have that stiff upper lip ready because I'm going to pass you a monocle and a cup of tea a.s.a.p if you r.s.v.p.
Thank you Simon. I've been watching your videos for years now back when top tenz was still fairly new and I just wanted to let you know that you've helped make my life more informed, knowledgeable and happier. You have truly made my life brighter and I just thought suddenly that you might like to know you've literally changed the life of some guy in Perth Australia for the better. I am grateful for you. Have a great day mate
How the NSA recruits is actually literally "just websites and you apply." Same for basically every non-military federal government job, from janitors to Librarians of Congress. The central website and application process sucks, as one might expect.
@@grilledleeks6514 They have an internal application process of course. But they do just put up regular job postings. What about the job posting for the IRS they took down recently seeking an agent willing to kill?
I'm actually surprised that nobody seems to have considered that it could be an AI that has been given some random task, perhaps one thing or another from the other theories, as a test parameter. It seems like something they would do to test out the lengths that a new AI would go to. I know there was an article about some AIs set to do things like determine what the most popular internet interests are (or something to that regard) and the scientists came back some time later and the AI was sitting there looking at pictures and videos of cats. To me, this whole thing sounds like the inner thought processes of an AI, though.
if you watch some of the videos, you can hear that they are man made, recording of actual music and voices, it also appears to be really old film footage that was digitized.
My dad is an engineer and works a lot with audio and video. The spoken numbers and letters are similar (if not the same) as randomly produced sounds used to test speakers. One time he told me he spent hours with a voice on repeat and by the time it was done, he couldn't recognize the words as actual words anymore. But it's a control to test the quality of audio output, usually for speakers in development or redesign phase.
Yes!! Yet another great internet mystery from Kevin! These are some of my favorite episodes, and Kevin has been watching Dr Daves eps, and Im here for it!! Would love Kevin and Dave to get a channel for just them, lol, though Im very gratified that Kev is writing for TSoSF regularly! Edit to add that while not a believer in tarot, the Death card tends to imply change, not actual death, lol.
Another possibility: the creator was attempting to use UA-cam itself as a temporary data storage and transfer service. The music and imagery was just a red herring for the countless amounts of apparent “noise” that actually encodes files. Someone else, or the creators themselves could then retrieve these videos and the data within at any point, anywhere on the planet, at relatively high speed, for free. All they would need would be a decoder program that consumed videos rather than creating them, reversing the process. They could have been made public and mysterious in an effort to delay UA-cam shutting them down, it’s just an “art project”, after all.
As an artist myself, I can actually see this being the work of one person. In my case, I have been drawing art since I was about 5, but I didn't choose to publically share my works until I was 31. When I first started uploading my works online, I had a massive backlog of works to share, and I was uploading up to about 15 in a day, as much as my shitty internet would allow. If this is someone who has a massive backlog of say, test videos/snippets they've accumulated from their younger years as they were testing out new computer tech they're learning, then uploading a crap ton of videos that are only a few seconds long each makes sense. It reminds me of an artist that shares all of their work online, even their "trash doodles" they do on napkins or random notes and whatnot. Not all of the work shared is award winning quality, but it is still part of their growth as an artist, so they share it anyway. Maybe this is someone who was messing around with video editing, art/color theory, music, encoded messages, etc., for most of their life, and they just kept all of it saved until UA-cam came around, offering them the perfect, free, place to upload. Perhaps they also had an automatic uploading set up like Simon. This could have been someone who is older and this is decades of accumulated stuff. Doesn't mean all of it is relevant, but if it is someone's life work, finding a singular meaning in it is going to be pretty impossible. You can't really sum up someone's life experiences into a singular explanation, in my opinion. My theory is it's someone who just shared all of this stuff they had accumulated over their life and/or career, even if it has no meaning to anyone else. I think everyone has a bit of a desire to show the world our personal interests and hobbies, even if other people don't understand them. I could be totally wrong and this is a really badly funded and operated numbers station or something, but if it's the "boring answer" of it being someone's art projects, it makes sense to me. I think about all of the famous historical artists we know of, and how we only focus on a handful of their best works, but they sometimes have hundreds or thousands of test works or incomplete works that are ignored because they aren't as refined and "perfect". The differences in the uploading regularity makes me think that they may have been uploading stuff that is all over the place time-wise, they may not be uploaded in the order they were recorded/created. When the upload frequency is higher, it's possible that they found another folder of old content, so there is just more to upload. The channel being just a dumping ground of someone's random works over their life makes some sense, doesn't explain everything, like the channel reset, but it's just my random theory so far. I hope someone proves me wrong and it's actually a really cool explanation.
2015 puts this after several years of YT being around, and this mystery arose after the acquisition of YT by google, so either they were uploading for years before that event, or they missed the original upload site by multiple years.
@@RufusWolf the acquisition of youtube by google made youtube more wider known and brought it into the mainstream, so it is possible that the person didn't know of it before or was using a local competitor to youtube before. My country had its own versions of youtube before it got huge
@@betaich That is what I said, but related to pre-google youtube videos being unavailable. Also, youtube got popular without goog, they bought a proven growing service that was winning on it's own merits ..
Kevin you wonderful person. Thank you for blessing us with a script that had our Blaze Boi going for nearly an hour. Due to the adderall drought in my state, I'm without my adhd medicine and Decoding The Unknown, Brain Blaze and Casual Criminalist episodes are basically the only things that are keeping me from losing my mind at work. Praise be to the Blazement Bois and YT premium for giving me content to listen to surreptitiously while working. You are such a great writer and this is one of my favorite episodes so far, but each episode is better than the last so that list is ever evolving. Much love from Florida.
I've listened to BROTHER 31, (hope it was the video). I must admit, I felt something in my left ear too. I misheard that it was supposed to happen around 1:30, and it did. I returned to the video and noticed, that Kevin mentioned that it was about 3:00. I think, it was nocebo effect. If you just sit and try to concentrate to feel something at a specific moment, you might just feel it. Though I must admit, my cat paid the audio more attention, than she usually does. May be it's a channel for cats, not for humans.
I got dizzy during Simon's video.. that's before I even knew that it's connected to Havana syndrome. It could be I started feeling off for some other reason.. i will say that I am listening to it with noise canceling headphones. How weird.
As an official representative of the United States of America (TM), I hereby permit Simon Cornelius Whistler to continue using the term "inside baseball" at his leisure.
I love that Kevin (Simon's writer) and his friends are into Magic: the Gathering!! ❤️ As a #wotcstaff, it always makes me happy to hear people like hanging out over a game or two 🤩
“The Apex Twins song The Windowlicker” 💀 But this whole thing, from a technical perspective, does kind of feel like something Aphex Twin would create, or that would be inspired by him 😄
The people I know who are really into aphex twin are totally the same type of people who would go thru that much trouble to make this sort of ambiguously spooky nerd thing
The recruitment test can't just be ignored because there are no rules or announcements for it. Maybe the instructions are written down for people in person, something like; "Thank you for coming to this test, please log to this UA-cam channel and turn to page 2" I mean, it is as complex as Cicada, but without the helpful instructions, as is said at the end...but that just assumes the instructions would gave to be linked to the videos. The instructions could be printed out or on another website. There is no reason to believe this test is for everyone rather than just for people who have been pre-selected and given instructions.
23:30 this is how the SETI Arecibo message in 1974 was made. It's 1679 bits which has the prime factors 23 and 79. When the bits is arranged as 79 lines and 23 columns, an image appears. With that video, if it was made in a sensible way, it would have a number of frames that's the product of 2 primes. Each frame is the color of a pixel and by factoring the frame count you would know the dimensions. Otherwise you would have to check all the possible line widths individually. When you get close to a multiple you would start to see a pattern though. E.g. at 1/2 the correct width it would look like 2 stretched and superimposed images. At +/- a few pixels it would look skewed, etc.
Damn. I was unemployed and on UA-cam a lot when this channel first started up, and this video is the first I'm hearing about it. I'll definitely be following this mystery and looking for updates on its solution.
@@Sniperboy5551 I agree. I was hoping for something a bit more substantial... but then, considering the lack of substance in our society these days, I shouldn't be surprised; finding meaning in capitalism is like finding water in the desert.
@@ThatWriterKevin Seems like unlucky timing to me. "Hey guys! Check out this wild, unsolved mystery!" *mystery gets solved while video uploads "Well, damn." Oh well, guess it proves that these mysteries aren't all just static enigmas that will always be there to tease your brain, sometimes the opportunity to be baffled is finite.
I think the creepy composite image looks a bit like an ultrasound. Not saying that's what it's supposed to be but that's what popped into my head first
The pixel image they first came up with (23:30) reminds me of some old paintings that don't look like much of anything until you set a reflective tube in the center. "Anamorphosis" is what the painting style is called. If I had some mylar to roll into a tube I'd try it, but I don't.
I remember signing up for Google+, getting an invite a few months later and realizing it was a ghost town because none of my friends were on there. What were they thinking? A walled garden social network??🤦♂️
@@HallsteinI it was walled only during beta testing - later it was literally forced onto Gmail and UA-cam users with the option to repost UA-cam comments onto it to fill empty home feed
Thank you Kevin. This was amazing. Love your research and your dedication to the scrips story. I also enjoy every episode of brain blaze where you wrote the script. Just wanna say this is awesome. You are awesome. We want more awesome
The death card in tarot cards doesn’t mean that you or somebody will die but that something like a habit or plans to do something or your tv phone or computer could stop working
Well, a semi-circle is half of something. So, as the name suggests, you can’t get in without knowing the other half. And, well, other than that… aliens!
For people that don't believe an artist would put this much effort, time and dedication into something, there are real known examples out there of artists that have dedicated inordinate amounts of energy to an abstract project before, like the performance artist Tehching Hsieh
This is an old video but only just watched it. I've only watched this and know nothing else of this mystery but it definitely feels like a Richard James (Aphex Twin) project or maybe Paul Wolinski of 65daysofstatic. It's got a vibe of one of them.
I think this is quite possibly an early attempt of an (maybe artistic) AI. If you've ever listened to music or read stories by earlier AI's, you'd recognise a series of nonsense not unsimilar to these uploads. AI would explain the not quite right images and odd choices in music, it would explain how so many videos were being uploaded so quickly, and possibly why the channels were being shut down as it wasn't a human creator and would have been identified as a 'bot'. The name 'Unfavourable Semicircle' could also be referencing a non human and underdeveloped brain, as a human brain is roughly the shape of a semicircle but this basic AI attempt lacks the same functionality and is therefore Unfavourable in comparison. The reference to Sagittarius could have been to make it seem more human, and 'Delock' is actually the name of an IT Hardware company which seems to be fairly common through Europe 🤔 Would be interested to hear others thoughts on this 😊
This was my thought as well. I'd expect that the name could perhaps be generated by the AI as well though, and is just as meaningless as the video's content. It might also be limited to using public domain assets so as to avoid copyright strikes. Perhaps it's end goal has something to do with YT's infamous algorithm, either exposing it, or learning to game it.
@@IvanTheVandal I kinda get the feeling it's a practise run for things. Like feeling out what it can and can't do, areas for improvement, and people just kinda got suckered along for the ride hahs
I don't think it's an art project. I got my degree in fine arts and have spent more than my fair share of time around other artists. There is no way any of them would have kept quiet about a project this large. If there is one things I've noticed, the larger and more intellectually abstract the piece the more narcissistically pretentious they are. They crave attention and discourse.
Since you brought up number stations and intelligence agents, the reference to a wiki page made me think of book codes. Yes, wiki pages can be edited, but past editions can still be viewed on the page's history. And part of the 'noise' in the images could be the numerical or spatial reference to specific words and letters on that page.
I bet this is Richard D. James (aka Aphex Twin) art.. After all, he started to make music (or sounds someone might say) inspired by old tech loading screen, made loads by mainly tweeking his own equipment of mismash computrons and samplers, has a weird history of titles in his tracks and is an overall eccentric.
I have to give you major Kudos for the bit about YT being a private entity. People truly forget YT isn't some global initiative or something it's a company with its own rules and culture. Yes, we can push back and complain, but at the end of the day it's their house, therefore their rules.
For me it was a different way around, I knew a little about Astrology and found a book on star-charts while working in a store. It was a beautiful book and I really want to know where it has gone, because it explained how to calculate the positions of every major and minor known body in the solar system, as to any date and position on the globe. It also contained some information on how to read these things, but for me I was fascinated by just how much work goes in to doing Astrology properly. That is when I realized something very important, something that made me walk away from the whole thing: Not one person who has claimed to follow Astrological signs knew what these charts where.... Let alone could do the complex math found within in order to figure out where Mercury was in the night sky, on the 2nd of May 2012, viewed from Cairns, QLD. Every single time you will find they throwing together some ********** 'quick chart' that barely works to mark the Sun and the Moon during that particular quarter. One that doesn't even know how to take location into account, and thus removes the entire point of the exercise in the first place... for if the chart doesn't even line up with the sky your claiming will tell you the future, how can it be telling the future? The people who claim faith in Astrology... do not follow Astrology!
Love this comment! It's so great to see reason prevail within people. The world needs more people like you (and me, I hope, but it's always hard to judge oneself).
Sounds like you only knew certain kinds of people. A lot but certainly not all the people I know do the actual work with the ephemeris and do the math. I only look at astrology casually. But I do double check if it's someone who actually understands charting.
@@theConquerersMama does the astrological math determine Earth's _actual_ historical location w regard to the constellations & the sun? or does it determine Earth's location within 1 of 12 zodiac signs/ constellations that are nearly equally spaced from each other?
It's simply not true to say that "not one" person who does astrology knows what these charts are. I know a couple of people who do star charts. I'm not saying they can tell the future, but they certainly can do the math and they know what star charts are.
i love around 15 minutes in when we get to see Simon reading with interest. furrowed brow, inquisitive, it's sinking in; almost as if Simon forgot the audience for a moment. kewel writing!
also, American spies get recruited the old-fashioned way: nepotism. be smart and make good marks in school also, but if you have a few generations of no such agency family behind you, it helps. a good example, with publicly available records (a rarity, even among those living near no such agency), is e. snowden.
exit the highway before or after no such agency (the NSA exit itself is akin to platform 9 & 3/4) and you can be at the airport fence on a picnic blanket, on a patch of grass beside the road. heaven. watch the planes fly just above your nose and make your infant and toddler children giggle, every time. also very close to a place that never existed, is a seafood distributor for the East Coast. one morning per week, for the fee of $1, after waiting in line amongst the 18-wheelers, they permitted a minivan with a mom and a baby or two to enter the premises, and purchase the seafood that just came off the boats. i hope they still do. NSA. when people tell you there's no such agency, just remember there's a community of kind, hardworking Americans living nowhere in order to work nowhere.
I suspect it's some long project by one or more artists with an interest in cryptography and encoding. The audio sample from Aphex Twin's Windowlicker is interesting, and I think people with those interests are more likely to be into Aphex Twin or similar musicians. At the very end of the Windowlicker song, there are some tones going up and down in pitch. If you put the audio through a spectrogram to create an image, you see the tones create a perfectly round spiral. Aphex Twin put an even more startling eater egg in the end of his song [Equation]. (The real title of the song is a long and complicated mathematical equation). When the song ends, you hear some strange electronic squealing sounds. When run through a spectrogram, the noises create a creepy distorted image of Aphex Twin's face, smiling creepily at you. I don't think these easter eggs have any direct connection to the whole mystery here, but I think it shows an interest in hiding encoded messages and/or images.
I remember coming across this mystery years ago and lurking on the subreddit. I remember making a post about how I thought a lot of the "grating noises" reminding me of gamma or x-ray bursts from stellar objects being transformed into an audio waveform. I think it might have been right around the start of the stitching of video frames together.
21:47 I now feel slightly targeted by the fact that I use various pheromones to ‘talk’ to ants in order to understand their social structure and the use of pheromones within their ‘hive’ mind (I don’t like that phrase, but it’s one that’s now entered the popular lexicon).
'Inside Baseball' is a bit of a mouthful. I've only ever heard it referred to as 'Shop-Talk'. Example: 'Hey, can we talk shop/Shop-Talk for a minute?' or 'Save the Shop-Talk for the office' or 'No talking shop at the table' etc. First time I ever heard 'Inside Baseball' is when Simon said it. 🙂
A bit of a spoiler, but-- -- -- -- -- -- This was solved very recently! The art theory is true - the twitter account linked to the Google + basically confirmed it, and did a Q&A answering some questions. Still one of my favourite internet mysteries for sure, and I'm interested to see what the artist goes on to create. But yeah, sorry to break the mystique •~•
Not to be /that guy/, but I'm gonna be /that guy/ for one sec. In tarot (which simply comes from middle ages playing cards), the Death card doesnt mean someone is going to die. The Death card represents major change. It represents the concept of ending one chapter to begin another - the life, death, rebirth sort of idea. It isnt necessarily negative, and it isnt particularly foreboding. Mostly because tarot isnt a future/fortune telling device, but simply a narrative device developed by people to learn and communicate ideas about common themes in life, and to aid in self reflection and analysis via story telling and symbolism (like any other kind of storytelling we humans have done for millennia). Astrology is something entirely different, and is based on complex calculations of planet and star positions and a whole bunch of math I'm not willing to do. But both are used as narrative tools to convey complex concepts using symbols and analogies to explain human behavior and major life themes. Im also not saying that some people dont take it too seriously or go way overboard on the woo-woo. But I think its incredibly silly to say that something definitely isnt real or is complete nonsense yet know absolutely nothing about it. If you gave it one earnest look into what it actually consists of, being as judgmental as you want to be, you could learn something that may or may not change your perspective on what it actually is or about the people who do actually give it weight, whether that changes your mind in the woowoo factor or veracity of any of these things or not is irrelevant and besides my point. I just think you may think it's something it's not simply because you havent looked at it at all. I believe things exist that we do not understand, and there are things we can perceive but not explain, and that doesnt mean they dont exist. It just means we havent yet found the data or the words to interpret/communicate that data
Simon freedom of speech needs to apply to all monopolies not just the ones who monopolize violence. And many people think youtube monopolizes video distribution.
Monopolies are private companies though, and free speech only pertains to the government. The NFL is a monopoly and they had no problem shutting down free speech, to mixed reviews.
@@ThatWriterKevin I'm not saying what the first amendment applies to but what free speech should apply to. Monopolies should be allowed total control of anything including speech.
Theres 1 thing that hasnt been suggested, an AI for content creating learning through sounds and visuals and the pixel images just an early attempt of an AI trying create something from nothing or perhaps it was given a prompt word like watch, as in a video, but it came back with a wristwatch shape and if your programmer i would imagine you have an interest in science in general an atom would be one of my first things id want to see if an AI could create.
Simon never seems to allow for the possibility of the equivalent of a weirdo entomologist alien who's obsessed with insignificant humans much to the amusement and confusion of their colleagues.
There are plenty of humans that are very interested in studying ants, and spend their entire lives doing so So even if we are like ants to the aliens, at least some of them should be interested in us, the way some humans are interested in ants
Yeah, human study is considered very vital to the Galactic Bureau of Pest Control, but the benefits package is dirt... I mean, only one cycle in the Pleides vacation time bubble?.. What a ripoff!
There's also the fact that, as far as we can tell, the phenomenon of life is relatively uncommon in the universe, if not very rare. Any advanced alien species capable of interstellar flight is likely to be interested in science to at least some degree and studying the life that evolves on other planets would be extremely interesting in terms of scientific study and would provide invaluable insights into evolutionary biology. In all likelihood, aliens would be more likely to view humanity as a more primitive, albeit biologically and culturally advanced, species, similar to how people today view early human civilizations. Even considering that we have only one planet that we know of that life evolved on, making it difficult to speculate on the probability of that event occurring, we do know that it took several billion years for a species to evolve the advanced communication and cognitive capacity necessary for the scientific knowledge that we have today. Traits such as those are likely to be relatively rare, easily identifiable by any advanced civilization, and of significant scientific interest.
@@aleksandr6691 I totally see your angle and tend to agree but just to play steel man... What if the idea was reversed. We can stick with ants. In one sense you could say they are better coordinated and superior in social systems. Given billions of years, could a centralized "hive mind" become superior to human intelligence? I think we tend to view human intellect as the only form of intelligence and may underestimate even other animals on this planet and their form of intelligence. We could be viewed as a self destructive, low intelligence species destroying our environment and killing each other fighting for resources. In some sense you could consider some of the less destructive and more cooperative species as more cooperative and intelligent over a longer period of time than humans. I pretty much agree with your original post being the more reasonable conclusion aliens would come to considering we are smart enough to have made weapons that could practically destroy our rock in space that we happen to live on, but fun to poke ideas.
Hello Decoding the Unkown Team, the video just startet but you already earned my thumbs up, because you two mentioned Magic as a evening/meeting activety. I am very pleased. ^^ And hoping - and expecting - the rest of the video to be good too. Greetings Juy Juka
32:11 Kind of famous, yeah. Greek myth (which is where all the common astrological constellations are taken from) is still a major influence on all of Western culture.
Google made pretty big changes to their algorithm around the time that this channel started uploading. My bet is there was a small team of people who were fans of math, digital communication and algorithm interaction. The videos were filled with content in different states to see how sophisticated it was and if it would flag embedded copyrighted and non-copyrighted material. They were likely hired by a larger company that holds copyrighted material.
Hey Simon, you ought to make a “Decoding the unknown” backstage series, and talk with people like Lore Podcaster Aaron Mankie. (Spelling? Idk how his name is properly spelled…) just having candid conversations with people who either believe in or tell stories about strange, “mystical” things. That would be really interesting to listen to your side on those thing!
According to the Unfavorable Semicircle wiki this one was recently resolved. Very recently, June 2022. Spoiler Alert.... It was mostly just some guy stringing us along. He didn't even have all of the answers anymore himself.
I love numbers stations. It’s such a fascinating phenomenon, and interesting that the first official confirmation of their existence came about as a way to prosecute a group of Cuban spies. But a UA-cam version? That’s clever.
Simon, the idea that private companies shouldn't be bound by the Constitutions of the nations they operate in is deeply problematic. We should not be allowing private corporations to determine what Rights we have access too. Besides if you take that line of thinking to its logical extreme you end up at the idea that private citizens also don't have to respect your Rights, which means nobody has any Rights anymore. If a company whats or needs a public space to operate they should not have any more control over that space than any other member of the public. That applies to social media as much as resturaunts. And before anyone disagrees with me, do you think street vendors and buskers should have more control of the sidewalk around them than anyone else?
Private companies are bound by the laws of the countries they operate in. That’s why every website has that annoying cookie notification now. The US constitution does not guarantee any sort of right to be published or uncensored. It strictly prevents the government from making laws against speech, and even that has limits. Otherwise, taken to the logical extreme, I could force you to let me graffiti your house.
This episode reiterates why I never thought the takeover by Elon Musk even made sense. Twitter is a company and if they choose not to post what you want to say that's their right.. Simon hit the nail on the head when he said free speech isn't what everybody thinks it is. Yes we have it but if you're using a private company platform to post your thoughts they have the right to take them down. Edit: Another great video nonetheless
The thing is, that's where they are a Publisher not a Platform. Thats where the issue lies. If they can decide what gets published, that is a publisher. A Platform has legal protections a publisher does not have. A Publisher can be sued for what they publish, a Platform cannot be sued for the content on it.
@@justinlast2lastharder749 exactly what I came here to say. Publishers have that legal right to dictate what is or isn't said on their platforms but that's because they take legal responsibility for anything on it. UA-cam and Twitter aren't publishers though and therefore people can post things on their platform without UA-cam and Twitter themselves taking responsibility for every message posted and therefore silencing speech that isn't illegal is in fact a violation of freedom of speech. What UA-cam and Twitter want though is a mixture: they don't want to take responsibility for what's posted but they want to control what's being said and that's a big no no. Or well, it should be anyway.
24:30 that 'watch' looks exsactly like a cartoon i remeber from my childhood. i dont remeber what the name of the show or what's about would have been but i remeber seeing that face hug a kid in a cartoon. i think it was purple?
Well... I've been at it for 3 months now....and I'm thoroughly convinced that catching up on the back content on all of Simon's channels will be a lifetime commitment...and I can live with that.
It took me about a month to get through all the Brain Blaze videos👀
I've successfully done 7 or so channels already I can be done
@@mbathroom1 doesn't help that I watch each video 2 or 3 times 😂...
Check out beardless Simon when you get to the old top tenz videos. He looks much better with the beard.
I have only just started trying to watch them. So apparently I have a way to go.
As Simon got moving on his rant about the youtube algorithm I couldn't help myself thinking "Hold on, has nobody ever suggested the UA-cam monitoring algorithm as a megaproject? (Or more broadly, similiar automated systems of screening)"? Given the absolutely central position those algorithms hold in our society it seems like an really interesting video/set of videos.
👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻
This is an underrated comment
you could probably doa huge study into its inner workings with test videos and statistics but it also cahnges all the time
Because it'd be impossible. the algorithm will literally change by what you view and it constantly changes based on what is put in it. Not even people who look at the code fully understand the algorithm because it's had so many people working on it and so many tweaks and again, it's constantly getting new information. It's just not possible.
The term "Unfavorable Semicircle" is an old nickname for an archer's bow.
The fact that the symbol for Sagitarius accompanies it is probably also another reference to archery.
What that means I have no idea,
but people at the time did make the connection between the placing of the dots and important locations on the world map.
You could argue that the way astrologists read star charts could be applied to how the videos are intended to be interpreted and “read.”
Where did you find that as a reference to a bow? Is that a medieval term or something?
@@grilledleeks6514 Probably.
I've never heard of that term but I really really like how it describes the use of the bow as a weapon. Very unfavorable indeed for those on the other end.
What's the formula for an arch again?
Kevin is my favorite writer you have, Simon. Keep this guy's basement extra stacked with rations, and even crack the window for a few seconds of light each day. He has earned it.
Kevin stop making fake accounts! Back to work!
@@banme2784 but but but....
I initially read this as "..extra stacked with rations, and even crack"
@@TheSoftestGirlYouKnow I now cannot read it as anything but. THANKS. Poor sentence structure strikes again. Hey it was like 4 am and I was binge watching Simon, so I am not a very smart person. (jk jk I am cracking a joke at Simon in his own way of kicking himself even though he is a smart guy)
I read your comment as you wrote it crack the window gor a few seconds didnt even misread must be other person thats tired when reading it
I'm an American and I learned the term "Insider Baseball" from a British man living in the Czech Republic.
hahaha same here, never heard it before except in Simon’s vids
Right? I’ve never heard that in my life.
So you were outside baseball.
same here
Same ⚾️
The circle with the plus sign inside is also a symbol of Earth, as used in both astronomy and astrology. I only know this because I'm a long-time amateur astronomer and my opinion of astrology mirrors Simon's. Once dated a guy who told me that astronomy and astrology were the same thing, and if I believed otherwise I was deluded. He didn't last long.
Good on abandoning the loser.
Aren't the zodiac signs constellations, too?
"I'm not silly! Everyone else is delusional!" Omg so glad you left him behind! Lol! Sigh, airheads[/bimbos/himbos/mimbos/dimbos...]
P.S. Also, OP, would you please share a fun fact related to astronomy? Literally anything would make me happy! ‧·･•⋆★
@@mookinbabysealfurmittens The Earth orbits the sun.
Hey Simon, Tow Truck driver from America. Big fan. Thanks for making enough content to fill my workdays!
if you find yourself all caught up, I cannot recommend Audible enough for work. Harry potter alone can carry you through weeks of work lol.
@@Miss_Claire I appreciate that, I'll have to go through some of Simon's work and find one sponsored by Audible. Music is great but it becomes monotonous. And my job has me working on call quite a bit.
@@matthewmartin1862 Audible will become your new best friend at work, I promise lol. They have tons of free content, and you get one free book per month, any book. I've gotten the entire HP series for free, tons of educational content, and pretty much anything else you might be interested in, is there. I like the educational/historical stuff most, because I feel like if I'm spending countless hours listening to stuff, I might as well be learning something while I'm at it haha.
Call it a truckload of content
Jen’s mom Beth here. All of this is related and makes sense to me. I don’t have social media and I am older so I use my daughters phone. I do read though. Everything. I started with encyclopedias in the early 1960’s. I’m also a musician and started college for music at a young age. I am sure there are others who understand this too. You have weaved this all together so well that I believe you know exactly what this is. I enjoy your content on UA-cam, wherever I find you.
Sounds like you’re old enough to remember albums. The pic reminds me of an album.
I thought 3301 was freaky but this seems like it's on another level.
You think about people about in the world, what they're potentially doing right now. Billions of us doing billions of things all at once. At any given moment, among people all over the world, if you can think of any action being carried out, someone, somewhere, is doing it. Somewhere there's a little girl drawing a picture for her dad, or a boy eating a bug, someone washing their car, making dinner, repairing a toaster...but there's also the darker things, someone being murdered, someone being tortured, and many other...unspeakable things.
Then for some reason I think about what's happening on the internet at any given time and it somehow feels a whole lot creepier. And that's just the open internet, without even touching the dark web or deep web...it's just...stunning and shocking and amazing and appalling all at once.
This is the first time I've met my thoughts on the matter reflected. Not specifically about the Internet, but how all and every possible event is happening with a good chance right now, and possibly at all times 24/7. It really brings home the concept of how large humanity is.
I agree with the Internet remark, although the whole oh humanity isn't even accessing it, but the nature of it makes it more tolerable for shady corners.
Very interesting.
I agree. But, I never finished the Ciccada 3301 video.🙄🥱😁
It's not just that there's billions of people all doing different things all at once. That's fine.
The spooky part is that is that some of them are wildly, incomprehensibly smart.
I know those people tend to be loners, but surely *some* of them are working together. What's uncertain is, what are they doing?
@@Notanothercrayon look up DARPA and the Jason Scientists, and the writer Annie Jacobsen
@@Notanothercrayon Probably doing things that are good for humanity, they're smart, so they know not to do bad things right?
Some people are so smart that it's scary. When I worked on a submarine there were nuclear engineers that could do complex maths in their head. But they were really weird to hang out with
@@Salmanul_ The maths I couldnt do..
@@keirangrant1607 lol. good answer
I've never met anyone who can preform complicated math in their head what wasn't described as interesting.
Weird... but interesting.
When i worked for IBM, I spent some time based at the R&D labs in Winchester (UK). I met some of the big brains working on quantum computing and the stereotype of men with long beards, wearing kaftans and sandals is absolutely true. They may have brains the size of a planet, but they just don't bother with the whole getting dressed in the morning thing.
@@damenwhelan3236, I do trigonometry all day in my head told my shrink today she was in shock, she asked if we had software to do our calculations I stared blankly for a while and then said yeah we do it in our head it's just trigonometry.
*Holy crap I should have proof read this before just letting talk to text go to town 🙄edited to fix all of those words,,
Simon, "UA-cam should be able to completely remove someone's lively hood with no review."
Also Simon: "that is completely terrifying."
In all fairness, both points are right. They do have the right to remove anything they want, they're a private company, they can remove for any reason, including none. But it is a terrifying thing if this is how you make your living.
@@TakeltEZ so a company can have thousands of employees and just say screw you. If it were any other company that said. I'm firing you because I feel like it. They would be shredded in the news and in lawsuits.
@@stephenpetersen354 But that's not true- 49/50 states are what are called "at will" states which means that you can quit at any time and employers can fire you at any time with quite literally no reason. It happens all the time, and it's not a big deal because legally, that's how it works in the US.
@@TakeltEZ Wouldn't UA-cam arbitrarily banning channels they don't agree with that have not violated the law or TOS be considered a form of editorializing content and cause them to lose their Safe Harbor status? I am also a bit shaky on how minutely the TOS can be written with regards to what content can be uploaded. For instance, as Simon used in his example, videos disproving ghosts would probably not be able to be specifically targeted since that would be overly editorializing content. That said, there have to be some common sense rules, such as no depictions of illegal activities and extreme violence, but where the line is drawn seems a bit ill defined which is possibly intentional. I don't know though and if you have any insights into this I would love to hear it.
@@TakeltEZ Starbucks hasn't been scrutinized for union busting? Amazon hasn't been derided for it's poor treatment of it's employees? UA-cam gets a pass on just nuking employment why? I'm not sure I buy the "are will" but too. Especially if you are upper level talent wrongful terminations are still a thing.
New theory: Unfavorable Semicircle was one of Simon's earliest UA-cam channels, intended to generate buzz so that many years later, he could produce a podcast episode about it.
This theory is slightly more likely than aliens or ghosts.
Would that make this video the big hint?
Formulated when he only had one or two nameless big brains in his basement because that's all he had time for back then. I can see it.
My best guess is that it's some artist or group who have been responsible for various ARGs in the past, who are using the platform to test out various different methods for encoding information. Testing not only the clarity and resolution of data after passing through however many stages of lossy conversion processes but also how obvious or apparent it is, and how quickly and easily people manage to discover and decode the hidden message. That would explain why it seems to be such a mishmash of different things but with no apparently cohesive message or meaning and the few puzzles that have been "solved" seem to be disparate and arbitrary. None of it means anything except for being recognisable when decoded.
I reckon you’re spot on with this. It really does seem like a test channel for ARG stuff.
You ARE correct
Sounds like a very reasonable explanation.
It seems they evolved into making lunatic videos about Musk and Toyota inventing faster than light warp drives and get millions of views with a dozen likes or comments
This here may be even more reasonable than my explanation that it very well as easily could be a test bed for an actual modern signal stations and a psy op of sorts to test the abilities of the common person to decipher decode and hence how long it would take and how much time there is to reach the intended recipients vs those whom they intend to keep the message from until it's purpose has been fulfilled..
I watch so many of Simon’s channels that I hadn’t realized I wasn’t actually subscribed to this one. Thanks to the whole team for another excellent video!
5:35 - Chapter 1 - The 1st UA-cam channel
10:45 - Chapter 2 - Real life sharing rethought for the web
12:50 - Chapter 3 - The strange reset
16:05 - Chapter 4 - Seasons & series
17:45 - Chapter 5 - Lock & Delock
24:55 - Chapter 6 - Composites images
30:35 - Chapter 7 - Astrology
36:35 - Chapter 8 - Theories galore
40:00 - Chapter 9 - Numbers station
44:45 - Chapter 10 - Penetration test
48:35 - Chapter 11 - Havanna syndrome
51:35 - Chapter 12 - The eye of the beholder
53:20 - Chapter 13 - Tinker, tailor, soldier spy
55:35 - Wrap up
Ignition is a legend.
doing the good work, thanks!
☺
I love when your writers talk to you through their text, it's almost like they know you or something 😂
I love that a British man in central Europe understands American free speech laws better than a lot of Americans.
It's kinda sad that we don't know our own rights properly in the US... If you scream fire in a crowded area, you're going to get in trouble, it's common sense
@@gyrozeppeli4862 This is so true. Like the things people like fox news say are dangerous to vulnerable folks so free speech doesn't apply to them.
Yeah, the people who don't understand don't realise it was only ever intended to prevent the government from silencing the press or interfering from things like public criticism of the government or protest.
What most people mean when they start screaming 'muh freedom of speech' it's more that they want to say whatever they want without consequences or criticism.
He understands it better than PragerU.
@@jokermage lol. I don't think Prager understands anything, including the BS they spew.
Lol, a lot of times I think these puzzle mysteries are really just cryptographers trolling the internet while testing their skills out.
Wouldn’t the British equivalent of “Inside Baseball” be “Within Cricket”?
That, Sir, has to be the most British comment on this entire channel. 😂
Inside snooker
“Without Cricket” please as it’s fkn boring.
@@ponypetedmAwww. We're not boring. We're British! :D Now make sure you have that stiff upper lip ready because I'm going to pass you a monocle and a cup of tea a.s.a.p if you r.s.v.p.
@Cottonheaded Ninnymuggins beautiful
Thank you Simon. I've been watching your videos for years now back when top tenz was still fairly new and I just wanted to let you know that you've helped make my life more informed, knowledgeable and happier. You have truly made my life brighter and I just thought suddenly that you might like to know you've literally changed the life of some guy in Perth Australia for the better. I am grateful for you. Have a great day mate
Same goes for me in Tasmania
How the NSA recruits is actually literally "just websites and you apply." Same for basically every non-military federal government job, from janitors to Librarians of Congress. The central website and application process sucks, as one might expect.
Imagine if every government employee had to crack a code like this.
There would be a lot of subcontracting.
Yeah? Show me the application for spy.
@@grilledleeks6514 They have an internal application process of course. But they do just put up regular job postings. What about the job posting for the IRS they took down recently seeking an agent willing to kill?
@@dickJohnsonpeter You do know the IRS has to deal with organized crime, right?
@@truckerdave8465 Sure, from an office. Not very dangerous work that.
Kevin has quickly become one of my favorite writers. Keep it up guys, great stuff!
Thanks!
@@ThatWriterKevin honestly, great work! You manage to keep me interested with your writing style and you do such great research 👍🏼
@@OncleClara Thanks!
Yeah all of his scripts are 🔥
I'm actually surprised that nobody seems to have considered that it could be an AI that has been given some random task, perhaps one thing or another from the other theories, as a test parameter. It seems like something they would do to test out the lengths that a new AI would go to. I know there was an article about some AIs set to do things like determine what the most popular internet interests are (or something to that regard) and the scientists came back some time later and the AI was sitting there looking at pictures and videos of cats.
To me, this whole thing sounds like the inner thought processes of an AI, though.
I was looking in the comments to see if anyone else had this idea!
AI stuff is relatively popular nowadays, run on GPUs and stuff, but back then?
if you watch some of the videos, you can hear that they are man made, recording of actual music and voices, it also appears to be really old film footage that was digitized.
I know it was just performing its assigned task but I do find the AI looking at cats really cute hahaha.
An ad about healing frequencies of tibetan bowls while Simon argue against it...
Priceless!
Cookies are dumb that way...
My dad is an engineer and works a lot with audio and video. The spoken numbers and letters are similar (if not the same) as randomly produced sounds used to test speakers. One time he told me he spent hours with a voice on repeat and by the time it was done, he couldn't recognize the words as actual words anymore. But it's a control to test the quality of audio output, usually for speakers in development or redesign phase.
Yes!! Yet another great internet mystery from Kevin! These are some of my favorite episodes, and Kevin has been watching Dr Daves eps, and Im here for it!! Would love Kevin and Dave to get a channel for just them, lol, though Im very gratified that Kev is writing for TSoSF regularly! Edit to add that while not a believer in tarot, the Death card tends to imply change, not actual death, lol.
Thanks as always!
@@ThatWriterKevin oh my god! You’re Kevin! Loved the episode, you’re one hell of a writer man.
@@bryangibson6211 Thanks!
Haha yes I also don’t believe in tarot but wanted to say that too.
Also a huge fan of Kevin’s internet mystery videos. So much fun!
Yep. It's not as if it's The Tower.
Another possibility: the creator was attempting to use UA-cam itself as a temporary data storage and transfer service. The music and imagery was just a red herring for the countless amounts of apparent “noise” that actually encodes files. Someone else, or the creators themselves could then retrieve these videos and the data within at any point, anywhere on the planet, at relatively high speed, for free. All they would need would be a decoder program that consumed videos rather than creating them, reversing the process. They could have been made public and mysterious in an effort to delay UA-cam shutting them down, it’s just an “art project”, after all.
As an artist myself, I can actually see this being the work of one person. In my case, I have been drawing art since I was about 5, but I didn't choose to publically share my works until I was 31. When I first started uploading my works online, I had a massive backlog of works to share, and I was uploading up to about 15 in a day, as much as my shitty internet would allow. If this is someone who has a massive backlog of say, test videos/snippets they've accumulated from their younger years as they were testing out new computer tech they're learning, then uploading a crap ton of videos that are only a few seconds long each makes sense. It reminds me of an artist that shares all of their work online, even their "trash doodles" they do on napkins or random notes and whatnot. Not all of the work shared is award winning quality, but it is still part of their growth as an artist, so they share it anyway. Maybe this is someone who was messing around with video editing, art/color theory, music, encoded messages, etc., for most of their life, and they just kept all of it saved until UA-cam came around, offering them the perfect, free, place to upload. Perhaps they also had an automatic uploading set up like Simon. This could have been someone who is older and this is decades of accumulated stuff. Doesn't mean all of it is relevant, but if it is someone's life work, finding a singular meaning in it is going to be pretty impossible. You can't really sum up someone's life experiences into a singular explanation, in my opinion. My theory is it's someone who just shared all of this stuff they had accumulated over their life and/or career, even if it has no meaning to anyone else. I think everyone has a bit of a desire to show the world our personal interests and hobbies, even if other people don't understand them. I could be totally wrong and this is a really badly funded and operated numbers station or something, but if it's the "boring answer" of it being someone's art projects, it makes sense to me. I think about all of the famous historical artists we know of, and how we only focus on a handful of their best works, but they sometimes have hundreds or thousands of test works or incomplete works that are ignored because they aren't as refined and "perfect". The differences in the uploading regularity makes me think that they may have been uploading stuff that is all over the place time-wise, they may not be uploaded in the order they were recorded/created. When the upload frequency is higher, it's possible that they found another folder of old content, so there is just more to upload. The channel being just a dumping ground of someone's random works over their life makes some sense, doesn't explain everything, like the channel reset, but it's just my random theory so far. I hope someone proves me wrong and it's actually a really cool explanation.
You may want to consider condensing in the future.
2015 puts this after several years of YT being around, and this mystery arose after the acquisition of YT by google, so either they were uploading for years before that event, or they missed the original upload site by multiple years.
@@RufusWolf the acquisition of youtube by google made youtube more wider known and brought it into the mainstream, so it is possible that the person didn't know of it before or was using a local competitor to youtube before. My country had its own versions of youtube before it got huge
@@betaich That is what I said, but related to pre-google youtube videos being unavailable. Also, youtube got popular without goog, they bought a proven growing service that was winning on it's own merits
..
@@wingerding 👀
Kevin you wonderful person. Thank you for blessing us with a script that had our Blaze Boi going for nearly an hour. Due to the adderall drought in my state, I'm without my adhd medicine and Decoding The Unknown, Brain Blaze and Casual Criminalist episodes are basically the only things that are keeping me from losing my mind at work. Praise be to the Blazement Bois and YT premium for giving me content to listen to surreptitiously while working. You are such a great writer and this is one of my favorite episodes so far, but each episode is better than the last so that list is ever evolving. Much love from Florida.
The 500 hours per minute stat is from 2019, too. Before covid. Let that sink in.
I've listened to BROTHER 31, (hope it was the video). I must admit, I felt something in my left ear too. I misheard that it was supposed to happen around 1:30, and it did. I returned to the video and noticed, that Kevin mentioned that it was about 3:00. I think, it was nocebo effect.
If you just sit and try to concentrate to feel something at a specific moment, you might just feel it.
Though I must admit, my cat paid the audio more attention, than she usually does. May be it's a channel for cats, not for humans.
Try playing David Teie's Cat Music for your cat. Its actually really lovely to listen to as a human as well, but is specifically composed for cats 😺👍
I got dizzy during Simon's video.. that's before I even knew that it's connected to Havana syndrome. It could be I started feeling off for some other reason.. i will say that I am listening to it with noise canceling headphones. How weird.
What if that is a channel run by cats uploading videos for cats and that is how the feline shadow government communicates.
As an official representative of the United States of America (TM), I hereby permit Simon Cornelius Whistler to continue using the term "inside baseball" at his leisure.
As the Official spokescryptid of Florida, I second this motion. All in favor, say "aye". All those opposed, nobody asked.
@@SkunkApe407 Simon doesn't believe in you, but I do
@@fancyultrafresh3264 thanks to skeptics like Fact Boi, I've been World Hide and Seek Champion for the past 200 years.
@@SkunkApe407 I do believe the Boggy Creek Monster would strenuously object to this disinformation!!
Ha. Cornelius.
Would you consider doing a full video on Havana syndrome? I think that would be such an interesting topic for a decoding the unknown episode
He has.
@@aimee-lynndonovan6077 really? Could you link it? I can't find it
The syndrome certainly can be described as an unfavorable semicircle, as it messes with the semicircular canals in your ears.
Excellent video as always Simon. Now having watched, I'm definitely going to have a look at some of these weird videos.
I've seen a few dozen unfavorable semicircle videos and this was still a fresh take. Great job Kevin!!!
Thanks!
"Despite my hatred of abstract art"..... I hear this while painting.... abstract art. Great 😂😂🤣🤣
Nothing personal, I just like things that look like things
I love that Kevin (Simon's writer) and his friends are into Magic: the Gathering!! ❤️ As a #wotcstaff, it always makes me happy to hear people like hanging out over a game or two 🤩
“The Apex Twins song The Windowlicker”
💀
But this whole thing, from a technical perspective, does kind of feel like something Aphex Twin would create, or that would be inspired by him 😄
The people I know who are really into aphex twin are totally the same type of people who would go thru that much trouble to make this sort of ambiguously spooky nerd thing
Yep, I find the inclusion of something from The Apex Twins is a big clue haha
@bruh moment Your profile is even a picture of one of the Apex Twins! And your name describes my reaction when they were mentioned 😄
@bruh moment I saw the Apex Twins in concert they were amazing 😉
The artwork doesn't look too dissimilar to WeirdCore's work, which is aphex twins content creator / VJ
I listen to these podcasts on Spotify on my way to work and it somehow makes my day better
Once again, Kevin is making sacrifices for his art. Absolute legend!
"Au" is gold. Coincidence that Simon would choose those letters at random? 🧐🤔
Hahahahaha
The recruitment test can't just be ignored because there are no rules or announcements for it. Maybe the instructions are written down for people in person, something like;
"Thank you for coming to this test, please log to this UA-cam channel and turn to page 2"
I mean, it is as complex as Cicada, but without the helpful instructions, as is said at the end...but that just assumes the instructions would gave to be linked to the videos. The instructions could be printed out or on another website. There is no reason to believe this test is for everyone rather than just for people who have been pre-selected and given instructions.
That episode had me hooked, just going through watching random videos of yours has been good for my soul recently. Thanks so much Simon and team!
My inner dork smiles when Simon says Magic the Gathering. Thanks again Kevin
You're welcome!
“There an A there, there’s a U. There’s Au there” that joke is gold.
23:30 this is how the SETI Arecibo message in 1974 was made. It's 1679 bits which has the prime factors 23 and 79. When the bits is arranged as 79 lines and 23 columns, an image appears.
With that video, if it was made in a sensible way, it would have a number of frames that's the product of 2 primes. Each frame is the color of a pixel and by factoring the frame count you would know the dimensions. Otherwise you would have to check all the possible line widths individually.
When you get close to a multiple you would start to see a pattern though. E.g. at 1/2 the correct width it would look like 2 stretched and superimposed images. At +/- a few pixels it would look skewed, etc.
So aliens????
@@thomasbaker6563 👽
learning that simon deliberately tries to break tech in public places is hilarious
Damn. I was unemployed and on UA-cam a lot when this channel first started up, and this video is the first I'm hearing about it. I'll definitely be following this mystery and looking for updates on its solution.
Apparently it was solved after this was written/recorded.
It's been solved as an art piece
That’s not a very satisfying solution, anything passes for art these days apparently…
@@Sniperboy5551 I agree. I was hoping for something a bit more substantial... but then, considering the lack of substance in our society these days, I shouldn't be surprised; finding meaning in capitalism is like finding water in the desert.
@@ThatWriterKevin Seems like unlucky timing to me.
"Hey guys! Check out this wild, unsolved mystery!"
*mystery gets solved while video uploads
"Well, damn."
Oh well, guess it proves that these mysteries aren't all just static enigmas that will always be there to tease your brain, sometimes the opportunity to be baffled is finite.
I think the creepy composite image looks a bit like an ultrasound. Not saying that's what it's supposed to be but that's what popped into my head first
Vaguely like the creepy ultrasound image at the end of Earthbound on SNES...
I thought it looked like a rose
That's what popped into my head first, too.
"Steamboat Willie" isn't just a classic, it's THE classic. It was the first cartoon with sound.
I'm not the only one who laughed at "unfavorable semi" right
Ironically that name is probably why the channel got removed.
The pixel image they first came up with (23:30) reminds me of some old paintings that don't look like much of anything until you set a reflective tube in the center. "Anamorphosis" is what the painting style is called. If I had some mylar to roll into a tube I'd try it, but I don't.
A kaleidoscope?
Archer’s writers nailed the British equivalent of “inside baseball”-“woefully esoteric”
Google+ was mostly garbage, but it had some great community features that no other website has really matched since
I remember signing up for Google+, getting an invite a few months later and realizing it was a ghost town because none of my friends were on there.
What were they thinking? A walled garden social network??🤦♂️
@@HallsteinI it was walled only during beta testing - later it was literally forced onto Gmail and UA-cam users with the option to repost UA-cam comments onto it to fill empty home feed
Thank you Kevin. This was amazing. Love your research and your dedication to the scrips story. I also enjoy every episode of brain blaze where you wrote the script.
Just wanna say this is awesome. You are awesome. We want more awesome
The death card in tarot cards doesn’t mean that you or somebody will die but that something like a habit or plans to do something or your tv phone or computer could stop working
It means major change.
True but most people think it means they will die
Well, a semi-circle is half of something. So, as the name suggests, you can’t get in without knowing the other half.
And, well, other than that… aliens!
This is weird and complex enough to be some digital artist's art project. Still, an interesting bit of interwebs mystery!
For people that don't believe an artist would put this much effort, time and dedication into something, there are real known examples out there of artists that have dedicated inordinate amounts of energy to an abstract project before, like the performance artist Tehching Hsieh
It's an art project. The author revealed it a few weeks ago, after this vid was recorded.
This was certainly an interesting topic. Really enjoyed it.
Delocking could be used to describe the act of removing the lock from a door, not just releasing it.
This is an old video but only just watched it. I've only watched this and know nothing else of this mystery but it definitely feels like a Richard James (Aphex Twin) project or maybe Paul Wolinski of 65daysofstatic. It's got a vibe of one of them.
I think this is quite possibly an early attempt of an (maybe artistic) AI. If you've ever listened to music or read stories by earlier AI's, you'd recognise a series of nonsense not unsimilar to these uploads.
AI would explain the not quite right images and odd choices in music, it would explain how so many videos were being uploaded so quickly, and possibly why the channels were being shut down as it wasn't a human creator and would have been identified as a 'bot'. The name 'Unfavourable Semicircle' could also be referencing a non human and underdeveloped brain, as a human brain is roughly the shape of a semicircle but this basic AI attempt lacks the same functionality and is therefore Unfavourable in comparison. The reference to Sagittarius could have been to make it seem more human, and 'Delock' is actually the name of an IT Hardware company which seems to be fairly common through Europe 🤔
Would be interested to hear others thoughts on this 😊
This was my thought as well. I'd expect that the name could perhaps be generated by the AI as well though, and is just as meaningless as the video's content. It might also be limited to using public domain assets so as to avoid copyright strikes. Perhaps it's end goal has something to do with YT's infamous algorithm, either exposing it, or learning to game it.
@@IvanTheVandal I kinda get the feeling it's a practise run for things. Like feeling out what it can and can't do, areas for improvement, and people just kinda got suckered along for the ride hahs
@@IvanTheVandal I like your idea with the random generation of the name though, and definitely onto something with the public domains
Naw this doesn't seem like an ai thing
@@PolyesterMoustache will the real moustache please make themselves known, not the polyester one?
I don't think it's an art project. I got my degree in fine arts and have spent more than my fair share of time around other artists. There is no way any of them would have kept quiet about a project this large. If there is one things I've noticed, the larger and more intellectually abstract the piece the more narcissistically pretentious they are. They crave attention and discourse.
Thank god my daughter got over Peppa Pig quickly! And now we have an actual pig…🤦♂️🤦♂️🤦♂️
Named Peppa?
I was waiting for him to mention the bald child who shall not be named when he mentioned that it could be worse...
@@Bildgesmythe 🤣🤣🤣 No, Delilah
Since you brought up number stations and intelligence agents, the reference to a wiki page made me think of book codes. Yes, wiki pages can be edited, but past editions can still be viewed on the page's history. And part of the 'noise' in the images could be the numerical or spatial reference to specific words and letters on that page.
I bet this is Richard D. James (aka Aphex Twin) art..
After all, he started to make music (or sounds someone might say) inspired by old tech loading screen, made loads by mainly tweeking his own equipment of mismash computrons and samplers, has a weird history of titles in his tracks and is an overall eccentric.
I have to give you major Kudos for the bit about YT being a private entity. People truly forget YT isn't some global initiative or something it's a company with its own rules and culture. Yes, we can push back and complain, but at the end of the day it's their house, therefore their rules.
For me it was a different way around, I knew a little about Astrology and found a book on star-charts while working in a store. It was a beautiful book and I really want to know where it has gone, because it explained how to calculate the positions of every major and minor known body in the solar system, as to any date and position on the globe. It also contained some information on how to read these things, but for me I was fascinated by just how much work goes in to doing Astrology properly.
That is when I realized something very important, something that made me walk away from the whole thing:
Not one person who has claimed to follow Astrological signs knew what these charts where....
Let alone could do the complex math found within in order to figure out where Mercury was in the night sky, on the 2nd of May 2012, viewed from Cairns, QLD. Every single time you will find they throwing together some ********** 'quick chart' that barely works to mark the Sun and the Moon during that particular quarter. One that doesn't even know how to take location into account, and thus removes the entire point of the exercise in the first place... for if the chart doesn't even line up with the sky your claiming will tell you the future, how can it be telling the future?
The people who claim faith in Astrology... do not follow Astrology!
Love this comment! It's so great to see reason prevail within people. The world needs more people like you (and me, I hope, but it's always hard to judge oneself).
maybe it was an astronomy book instead?
Sounds like you only knew certain kinds of people. A lot but certainly not all the people I know do the actual work with the ephemeris and do the math. I only look at astrology casually. But I do double check if it's someone who actually understands charting.
@@theConquerersMama does the astrological math determine Earth's _actual_ historical location w regard to the constellations & the sun? or does it determine Earth's location within 1 of 12 zodiac signs/ constellations that are nearly equally spaced from each other?
It's simply not true to say that "not one" person who does astrology knows what these charts are. I know a couple of people who do star charts. I'm not saying they can tell the future, but they certainly can do the math and they know what star charts are.
51:25 that editing here is just hilarious 😂🤣
"This is seriously like, not interesting to people who aren't interested in it."
Just the facts.
It's why I love Simon... he just makes sense.
i love around 15 minutes in when we get to see Simon reading with interest. furrowed brow, inquisitive, it's sinking in; almost as if Simon forgot the audience for a moment. kewel writing!
also, American spies get recruited the old-fashioned way: nepotism. be smart and make good marks in school also, but if you have a few generations of no such agency family behind you, it helps.
a good example, with publicly available records (a rarity, even among those living near no such agency), is e. snowden.
exit the highway before or after no such agency (the NSA exit itself is akin to platform 9 & 3/4) and you can be at the airport fence on a picnic blanket, on a patch of grass beside the road. heaven. watch the planes fly just above your nose and make your infant and toddler children giggle, every time.
also very close to a place that never existed, is a seafood distributor for the East Coast. one morning per week, for the fee of $1, after waiting in line amongst the 18-wheelers, they permitted a minivan with a mom and a baby or two to enter the premises, and purchase the seafood that just came off the boats. i hope they still do.
NSA. when people tell you there's no such agency, just remember there's a community of kind, hardworking Americans living nowhere in order to work nowhere.
I suspect it's some long project by one or more artists with an interest in cryptography and encoding. The audio sample from Aphex Twin's Windowlicker is interesting, and I think people with those interests are more likely to be into Aphex Twin or similar musicians.
At the very end of the Windowlicker song, there are some tones going up and down in pitch. If you put the audio through a spectrogram to create an image, you see the tones create a perfectly round spiral. Aphex Twin put an even more startling eater egg in the end of his song [Equation]. (The real title of the song is a long and complicated mathematical equation). When the song ends, you hear some strange electronic squealing sounds. When run through a spectrogram, the noises create a creepy distorted image of Aphex Twin's face, smiling creepily at you.
I don't think these easter eggs have any direct connection to the whole mystery here, but I think it shows an interest in hiding encoded messages and/or images.
I remember coming across this mystery years ago and lurking on the subreddit. I remember making a post about how I thought a lot of the "grating noises" reminding me of gamma or x-ray bursts from stellar objects being transformed into an audio waveform. I think it might have been right around the start of the stitching of video frames together.
21:47 I now feel slightly targeted by the fact that I use various pheromones to ‘talk’ to ants in order to understand their social structure and the use of pheromones within their ‘hive’ mind (I don’t like that phrase, but it’s one that’s now entered the popular lexicon).
I just commented about that. Plenty of perfectly valid reasons to want to communicate with ants, or any other form of life.
I would 100% talk to ants if I could. I don't know what Simon's on about.
Well, I used an algorithm which was based on ant behavior in college, for a work. It's called Ant System.
And for that I thank people like you.
bunch of freaks
'Inside Baseball' is a bit of a mouthful. I've only ever heard it referred to as 'Shop-Talk'. Example: 'Hey, can we talk shop/Shop-Talk for a minute?' or 'Save the Shop-Talk for the office' or 'No talking shop at the table' etc. First time I ever heard 'Inside Baseball' is when Simon said it. 🙂
Wouldn't an "unfavorable semi-circle" be a frown emoji? :(
Whatever the subject, Simon brings it to life. Love the 'adults standing around talking is just great'. 😁👍💜✌🇨🇦
A bit of a spoiler, but--
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This was solved very recently! The art theory is true - the twitter account linked to the Google + basically confirmed it, and did a Q&A answering some questions. Still one of my favourite internet mysteries for sure, and I'm interested to see what the artist goes on to create. But yeah, sorry to break the mystique •~•
Spoiler alert, maybe?
@@lauriejones4507 very good point!
Confirmed what?
@@SRW_ confirmed it was an art project.
Whoa, that's crazy? How recently was this solved? The script was written/recorded months ago, so I'm wondering how much I missed out on that by.
Haha I always just assumed Unfavorable Semicircle was just a riff on A Perfect Circle.
Not to be /that guy/, but I'm gonna be /that guy/ for one sec.
In tarot (which simply comes from middle ages playing cards), the Death card doesnt mean someone is going to die. The Death card represents major change. It represents the concept of ending one chapter to begin another - the life, death, rebirth sort of idea. It isnt necessarily negative, and it isnt particularly foreboding. Mostly because tarot isnt a future/fortune telling device, but simply a narrative device developed by people to learn and communicate ideas about common themes in life, and to aid in self reflection and analysis via story telling and symbolism (like any other kind of storytelling we humans have done for millennia). Astrology is something entirely different, and is based on complex calculations of planet and star positions and a whole bunch of math I'm not willing to do. But both are used as narrative tools to convey complex concepts using symbols and analogies to explain human behavior and major life themes. Im also not saying that some people dont take it too seriously or go way overboard on the woo-woo. But I think its incredibly silly to say that something definitely isnt real or is complete nonsense yet know absolutely nothing about it. If you gave it one earnest look into what it actually consists of, being as judgmental as you want to be, you could learn something that may or may not change your perspective on what it actually is or about the people who do actually give it weight, whether that changes your mind in the woowoo factor or veracity of any of these things or not is irrelevant and besides my point. I just think you may think it's something it's not simply because you havent looked at it at all. I believe things exist that we do not understand, and there are things we can perceive but not explain, and that doesnt mean they dont exist. It just means we havent yet found the data or the words to interpret/communicate that data
only host writing team i follow through 20 channel iterations and watch all the videos, great work dudes!
Simon freedom of speech needs to apply to all monopolies not just the ones who monopolize violence. And many people think youtube monopolizes video distribution.
Monopolies are private companies though, and free speech only pertains to the government. The NFL is a monopoly and they had no problem shutting down free speech, to mixed reviews.
@@ThatWriterKevin I'm not saying what the first amendment applies to but what free speech should apply to. Monopolies should be allowed total control of anything including speech.
I now have the sudden urge to talk to ants. 🤣
Theres 1 thing that hasnt been suggested, an AI for content creating learning through sounds and visuals and the pixel images just an early attempt of an AI trying create something from nothing or perhaps it was given a prompt word like watch, as in a video, but it came back with a wristwatch shape and if your programmer i would imagine you have an interest in science in general an atom would be one of my first things id want to see if an AI could create.
So how can we hack it to be racist?
@@baalzeebub4230 Hook it up to "social media"?
btw: your name is not verified, just in case you're still the one: great fan!
Simon never seems to allow for the possibility of the equivalent of a weirdo entomologist alien who's obsessed with insignificant humans much to the amusement and confusion of their colleagues.
😂😂😂
I loved the astrology signs spinning around Simon.
I thought this was solved a few years ago. It was a tool to test UA-cam's algorithms for recognition of issues in videos to flag them for removal.
Looks like this was solved about a month ago (months after this was recorded) when the artist came forward.
@@ThatWriterKevin Link to this solution?
@@cruztastrophe Better yet, follow up video
"Yep, we solved another one!*
*it wasn't really us."
The one you're thinking of, Rob, is Webdriver Torso.
Love your stuff Simon.
There are plenty of humans that are very interested in studying ants, and spend their entire lives doing so
So even if we are like ants to the aliens, at least some of them should be interested in us, the way some humans are interested in ants
Yeah, human study is considered very vital to the Galactic Bureau of Pest Control, but the benefits package is dirt...
I mean, only one cycle in the Pleides vacation time bubble?.. What a ripoff!
There's also the fact that, as far as we can tell, the phenomenon of life is relatively uncommon in the universe, if not very rare. Any advanced alien species capable of interstellar flight is likely to be interested in science to at least some degree and studying the life that evolves on other planets would be extremely interesting in terms of scientific study and would provide invaluable insights into evolutionary biology.
In all likelihood, aliens would be more likely to view humanity as a more primitive, albeit biologically and culturally advanced, species, similar to how people today view early human civilizations. Even considering that we have only one planet that we know of that life evolved on, making it difficult to speculate on the probability of that event occurring, we do know that it took several billion years for a species to evolve the advanced communication and cognitive capacity necessary for the scientific knowledge that we have today. Traits such as those are likely to be relatively rare, easily identifiable by any advanced civilization, and of significant scientific interest.
@@aleksandr6691 I totally see your angle and tend to agree but just to play steel man... What if the idea was reversed.
We can stick with ants. In one sense you could say they are better coordinated and superior in social systems. Given billions of years, could a centralized "hive mind" become superior to human intelligence? I think we tend to view human intellect as the only form of intelligence and may underestimate even other animals on this planet and their form of intelligence.
We could be viewed as a self destructive, low intelligence species destroying our environment and killing each other fighting for resources.
In some sense you could consider some of the less destructive and more cooperative species as more cooperative and intelligent over a longer period of time than humans.
I pretty much agree with your original post being the more reasonable conclusion aliens would come to considering we are smart enough to have made weapons that could practically destroy our rock in space that we happen to live on, but fun to poke ideas.
Hello Decoding the Unkown Team,
the video just startet but you already earned my thumbs up, because you two mentioned Magic as a evening/meeting activety. I am very pleased. ^^ And hoping - and expecting - the rest of the video to be good too.
Greetings
Juy Juka
personally, I'm a fan of the British phrase "swings and roundabouts" to highlight the up and downs that make up the majority of "real-life" tedium
32:11 Kind of famous, yeah. Greek myth (which is where all the common astrological constellations are taken from) is still a major influence on all of Western culture.
Google made pretty big changes to their algorithm around the time that this channel started uploading. My bet is there was a small team of people who were fans of math, digital communication and algorithm interaction. The videos were filled with content in different states to see how sophisticated it was and if it would flag embedded copyrighted and non-copyrighted material. They were likely hired by a larger company that holds copyrighted material.
Hey Simon, you ought to make a “Decoding the unknown” backstage series, and talk with people like Lore Podcaster Aaron Mankie. (Spelling? Idk how his name is properly spelled…) just having candid conversations with people who either believe in or tell stories about strange, “mystical” things. That would be really interesting to listen to your side on those thing!
According to the Unfavorable Semicircle wiki this one was recently resolved. Very recently, June 2022. Spoiler Alert....
It was mostly just some guy stringing us along. He didn't even have all of the answers anymore himself.
I love numbers stations. It’s such a fascinating phenomenon, and interesting that the first official confirmation of their existence came about as a way to prosecute a group of Cuban spies. But a UA-cam version? That’s clever.
Simon, the idea that private companies shouldn't be bound by the Constitutions of the nations they operate in is deeply problematic.
We should not be allowing private corporations to determine what Rights we have access too.
Besides if you take that line of thinking to its logical extreme you end up at the idea that private citizens also don't have to respect your Rights, which means nobody has any Rights anymore.
If a company whats or needs a public space to operate they should not have any more control over that space than any other member of the public. That applies to social media as much as resturaunts.
And before anyone disagrees with me, do you think street vendors and buskers should have more control of the sidewalk around them than anyone else?
Private companies are bound by the laws of the countries they operate in. That’s why every website has that annoying cookie notification now.
The US constitution does not guarantee any sort of right to be published or uncensored. It strictly prevents the government from making laws against speech, and even that has limits.
Otherwise, taken to the logical extreme, I could force you to let me graffiti your house.
This episode reiterates why I never thought the takeover by Elon Musk even made sense.
Twitter is a company and if they choose not to post what you want to say that's their right..
Simon hit the nail on the head when he said free speech isn't what everybody thinks it is.
Yes we have it but if you're using a private company platform to post your thoughts they have the right to take them down.
Edit: Another great video nonetheless
The thing is, that's where they are a Publisher not a Platform. Thats where the issue lies. If they can decide what gets published, that is a publisher. A Platform has legal protections a publisher does not have. A Publisher can be sued for what they publish, a Platform cannot be sued for the content on it.
@@justinlast2lastharder749 exactly what I came here to say. Publishers have that legal right to dictate what is or isn't said on their platforms but that's because they take legal responsibility for anything on it. UA-cam and Twitter aren't publishers though and therefore people can post things on their platform without UA-cam and Twitter themselves taking responsibility for every message posted and therefore silencing speech that isn't illegal is in fact a violation of freedom of speech. What UA-cam and Twitter want though is a mixture: they don't want to take responsibility for what's posted but they want to control what's being said and that's a big no no. Or well, it should be anyway.
24:30 that 'watch' looks exsactly like a cartoon i remeber from my childhood. i dont remeber what the name of the show or what's about would have been but i remeber seeing that face hug a kid in a cartoon. i think it was purple?
@34:08 the best part......... Of any video ever!! 😂😂
Isn't the moon a semi-circle? 🤷