The Thrill and the Drop: A First Date Rollercoaster
Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford
Pushkin Industries
4.7 • 6.4K Ratings
🗓️ 14 February 2025
⏱️ 39 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Leah Washington and her new boyfriend Joe Pugh are on their first day out together. They're at Alton Towers theme park, where they've chosen to ride the "Smiler" rollercoaster: a terrifying tangle of track that loops and swoops through a world-record 14 inversions. Leah and Joe are seated right at the front of the train and, as they reach the highest point of the ride, they steel themselves for the drop. But then, quite suddenly, the ride stops.
Down on the ground, the computer system that controls the rollercoaster is warning that another carriage is out on the track, right in the path of Leah and Joe's train. The engineers are certain the computer is wrong...
Algorithms are often faster and cleverer than humans, and they can help us avoid accidents. But computers can make mistakes. When should we trust our own heads, instead of the machine?
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Pushkin. |
| 0:10.8 | You might have noticed that things are a little different on cautionary tales this year. |
| 0:15.7 | In 2024, we brought you a new episode every fortnight. |
| 0:21.6 | But this year, we are doubling our output. |
| 0:25.0 | New stories of heart-thumping peril, mind-blowing mistakes, |
| 0:29.5 | and jaw-dropping scandal will now be delivered straight to your ears every week. |
| 0:35.7 | Here's one for you right now. |
| 0:40.7 | Not. every week. Here's one for you right now. Not so very long ago, I took my son with me to an amusement park to celebrate his 12th birthday. |
| 0:49.1 | He's obsessed with roller coasters, although usually he just experiences them through the medium of YouTube. |
| 0:56.0 | It's one thing to see the footage someone took from the front seat. |
| 1:00.0 | To actually be there, it's a different thing. |
| 1:03.0 | Riding a roller coaster is a strange kind of fun. |
| 1:07.0 | You're volunteering to be terrified for the sake of entertainment. |
| 1:11.6 | And the roller coaster we'd come to ride certainly leans into that idea. |
| 1:17.6 | It's called the Smiler. |
| 1:20.6 | The conceit behind the Smiler is that people who aren't smiling enough will have their lack of a smile corrected by a |
| 1:31.3 | strange Orwellian institution called the Ministry of Joy. The smiler's logo is a ghastly grin connecting two |
| 1:42.5 | hypnotically spiraling eyes. |
| 1:45.8 | And so we went to Alton Towers in England to ride the Smiler. |
| 1:52.6 | The ride doesn't soar in the high curves of a classic roller coaster. |
| 1:58.4 | Instead, it's an impenetrable-looking spaghetti tangle of black and yellow, |
| 2:03.6 | with the knots and curls of the roller coaster track, intersecting with a huge five-legged structure, |
... |
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