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Recognized this from the Tom Scott video a month ago. If your not subscribed to him I highly recommend it. Every video he makes is interesting.
Agreed. Tom Scott is an excellent yt'er.
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I usually like Tom Scott's videos, but my main takeaway from that video is that, as far as I can tell, he did not consult a single subject matter expert(harbor pilot, captain, longshoreman, lighthouse keeper, so on) on the matter. Maybe it makes for more fun videos when you play up a mystery by only asking questions to people who you know won't know the answer, but it was a pretty pathetic research attempt on his end.
The Gell-Mann Amnesia effect at work?
This one is weird, since he usually find sources that seem accurate, most of the time people working on what he's talking about. Perhaps he did not search hard enough that time.
Perhaps a bit of a leap here, but I'm reminded of hyperbolic navigation [0] systems used for ships in WWII. In both cases information is derived from the combination of two different regular patterns... one just happens to be radio.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperbolic_navigation