Name: "I've Been Skating On Thin Ice For 40 Years"
Uploaded: 2025-06-17T16:52:51.000Z
Duration: 12 min 18 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

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In celebration of World Statistics Day we're bringing you some of the most fascinating data-driven stories. From using math to skate on thin ice to AI poker and even a James Bond villain lair. We've got it all. What would your ideal villain lair look like? Let us know in the comments. The ice is typically around five centimeters when I skate on it. That sound you hear is actually a combination of two sounds. It's the sounds from cracks striking beneath me and the vibrations within the ice plate itself. It sounds like it's something supersonic.

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Meet Morten Einer. Hi, I'm Morten Einer. He's a mathematician who enjoys riskier hobbies than most. I've been skating on thin ice for 40 years. When he's skating though he's also listening.

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The thinner the ice, the higher the pitch. Just about when the ice is to break, and that would be about three centimeters, the pitch is at the higher C, the supposedly highest note of the soprano C. Morten relies on his knowledge as a mathematician to calculate the thickness of the ice, its flexibility, and its temperature. Many people tend to freak out when they see us skating on thin ice, but I couldn't be more calm because I know what I'm doing. Sometimes the ice is perfectly clear and I can see fish below, even a beaver, and also freedivers swimming under the ice. When Morten first started, there wasn't any physics or scientific information to explain how thin ice skating is possible. He studied the ice for 10 years every winter to explain the phenomenon.

I observe three things with a thin ice. One is that the ice bends, and the thinner it is, the more it bends. The ice needs to be flexible to support you. Second, the first crack is a true warning signal, then I know the ice is thin, and when it gets even thinner, more cracks evolve.

Finally, the ice gives sonorous tone, beautiful eerie tone, which immediately tells me how thick the ice is. It's called the coincidence frequency, and it can be calculated mathematically.

Morten has skated on over 1,800 bodies of water in North America,

Norway, and Central and Eastern Europe. I love skating for the excitement and challenges it brings. It's an opportunity for math and nature to come together and make it understandable for me.

I've been skating most of my life, and I always look forward to next winter.

Hi, welcome to Great Big Story Questions. Please state your name and your specialist subject.

I'm Stuart, I'm from London, and my specialist subject is brilliant. Let's start the clock.

Instead of memorizing, which brand uses hands-on problem solving, a learning method proven to be six times more effective than watching lectures?

Pass. The answer was brilliant. Next question. Coding with Python, predicting probability, vector graphs, and improving large language models are all lessons you can find in which interactive learning app? Pass. It's brilliant. Last question. In 2023, it was found that

Americans spend on average 4.5 hours on their phones per day. Which platform builds your personal and professional growth by converting some of that time into learning? I really don't know. Pass. Really? It's brilliant. That's the whole point. I give up.

Brilliant is where you learn by doing, with thousands of interactive lessons in math, data analysis, programming, and AI. To try everything Brilliant has to offer for free for a full 30 days, visit brilliant.org slash greatbigstory, or click on the link in the description. You'll also get 20% off an annual premium subscription. Learn by doing with Brilliant.

When I look up at the stars, it's very hard not to think about big questions. But you know, it can turn I think anyone into a philosopher. And you're looking back in time, you're looking at something that's such an immense distance, your brain can't even compute it.

I'm Liv Bury, and my educational background is in astrophysics. And I've been absolutely fascinated with space ever since I was a little girl. I grew up in Kent. And at university,

I studied physics with astrophysics, using the language of mathematics to figure out mechanisms and processes behind the nature of reality itself. But now I'm a poker player, primarily.

The game of No Limit Hold'em is a game of incomplete information. There is more unique situations in the game of No Limit Hold'em than there are atoms in the universe. It's crazy complicated. It's just numbers on a mind boggling scale. And that's what I love about the game. It's about being as methodical as you can, but also adding this sort of intuitive flair of how to read humans as well. Poker, and in particular, heads up No Limit Texas Hold'em poker has become the leading benchmark in the AI community for solving imperfect information games. I am Dr.

Tuomas Sandholm. I'm a professor in the computer science department at Carnegie Mellon University.

We developed the strategy for Libratus. Libratus is the first poker AI run on Bridges, which is the newest supercomputer at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing Center. Bridges is the largest system in the world that converges high-performance computing with artificial intelligence and big data. I'm Nick Nystrom. I'm interim director at the Pittsburgh Supercomputing

Center. Pairing Libratus with the HPE Supercomputer Bridges, we really made history.

I remember hearing about a team of some of the very best No Limit heads up players were going to be playing against Libratus. And we all watched it fairly closely to see how a human mind is matched up against a supercomputer. A key aspect is that there are both multiple players and missing information. The algorithms automatically created the poker strategy for Libratus. They beat the humans in real time at the game they're best at. That was a groundbreaking moment here.

To me, it was a demonstration of the power of the human mind because it takes a supercomputer to start beating some of the best minds in poker. And now the question is, where do we take it from there? What else do we apply it to? Like you can apply science to poker, you can apply science to fixing the world's problems. The algorithms in Libratus can be applied to situations where we're missing information, precision medicine, global hunger, climate, environmental damage. The possibilities really are limited only by our imagination. What I'm most personally excited about is the application of supercomputing in AI to solve some of these really big questions that we have about the nature of the universe itself. In some ways we are tiny and insignificant, but at the same time we also have incredible potential with our minds and the things that we can do with them.

Ground reaction force data, joint kinematics, underfoot pressure, thermal cameras, high-speed video. The bridge between data and performance is really that with the right information we can make better decisions.

Hi, I'm Keith Stern and I use data to help athletes break records. At the top level runners there's only a few seconds between the person that finishes first and the person that doesn't podium finish at all, so any small change can really make a big impact down the road.

My job here is to work with the rest of the Reebok Innovation team to help bring data into the design process.

Hi, my name is Dan Hobson. I'm the VP of Innovation. There's a lot of information to take into consideration on campus. Here we built a CrossFit box and lived with the athletes monitoring how they were working out, what they were eating, how they were recovering, and making that understandable for the design team.

Keith Stern is testing the product. He's gathering data. The amount of data he can compile with his team is vast. A lot of our testing on athletes starts here in the Human Performance Engineering

Lab. The force plate treadmill is actually a split belt treadmill so that we can record forces from the left and right foot.

Our mechanical impacting machine simulates what we see in ground reaction force data and then look at the performance of material over time.

Through high-speed video we can track how much your foot is moving in certain areas.

A lot of times we can't see with the naked eye what's going on in those really fast movements, so slowing it down, that transfer of knowledge is way easier than graphs and charts and numbers. It's really easy to understand how the shoe works with that person can make a big difference in the running form. The future of data collection and athletic performance is something that's really important. There's a growing field of smart sensors. Sensors could be woven into this technology that we're developing with FlexWeave. FlexWeave is really a method of weaving materials together and allows us to combine structure or durability into a single package that's also still lightweight and breathable. The same types of things that we record in the lab, we could then record on foot in the field. So if you have those smart fibers in the FlexWeave, if you want to track heart rate or distance or put GPS in it, you know, into those fibers, you can weave that into the fabric. The more data we have, the better we can make decisions on what types of material advances are actually making an improvement. Providing that performance benefit, even if it's just comfort to get people up and active, that's what's really important to me.

Time for the Data Analyst's Dream Lair. Sweden's largest internet service provider is located somewhere you might not expect, below 100 feet of bedrock in a former nuclear bunker.

The Pionen Data Center houses some of the most sensitive information in the world, which once included WikiLeaks servers. They can help protect their clients' information under Sweden's Free Speech Act. Inside, engines intended to be for German submarines are used as backup generators. The design and style is the work of CEO John Carlin, who took inspiration from his love of films. He says that the choice to put plants in the caves was to capture the computer meets plants vibe of sci-fi films from the 70s. The plants are kept alive by grow lights. The center has simulated daylight, and the waterfall, well, that's just for fun. And while it may look like a villain's lair from James Bond, you won't find Goldfinger here. Just the 15 senior technical staff who run the servers.