This channel was highlighted on Last Week Tonight's recent episode on sports. The gist is a completely serious league where they build elaborate courses and have marbles race on them. The marbles have teams, and the whole thing is sponsored and has completely unironic commentary. But then they'll do things like a drive cam. It's simultaneously ridiculous and bizarrely fun.
Last Week Tonight has sponsored the newest tournament or race series or whatever you want to call it (previous ones have been named things like Marbula-1), which releases in mid-June.
All I can say is that it I find myself really engrossed in the whole thing, but I could not possibly explain why.
I do like the sand courses Question for the boffins - how do you carve out the sand courses at an angle to make sure the marbles competitors follow the complete course in the right speed range? They don't look like they've been dug out deep or built up high.
I love that Jelle's channel is getting so much attention now. It's fun to care about something that in the end doesn't really matter. I wonder if it's getting more attention now precisely because there's already plenty consequential shit to care about. (Or is that why it's in John Olivers video? Haven't seen it yet.)
I wonder how long of a race series it would take to for "faster" marbles with better density/inertial imperfections to win, and for the result not to be just brownian motion. Ending up in the inner/outer lane of the first curve off the ramp seems significant, but random.
I've been wondering that too. There's bound to be differences in weight/smoothness just because of manufacturing, but it's not generally enough to make one team totally dominant.
This is definitely a good enough excuse to keep spreadsheets of stats for this wonderful sport. Probably not a good enough excuse to try to measure variation of imperfections in a bag of marbles. There are some principals about inertia of rolling disks and spheres that I learned in a dynamics class and can't remember right now.
I support the use of spreadsheets on most if not all occasions. I'll be curious to see what you come up with :D
I have watched this on many occasions and got other people hooked too. One of my favorite weird corners in the internet :) If we are talking about marbles. The guy who made this musical marble based machine is working on a next one and documenting the whole process in the channel (including the myriad of collaborations he has). Highly recommended