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Kind: captions
Language: en

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This is the Roe River. And if you believe
the hype, it is the shortest river in the world.

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And through the miracle of modern technology,

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the waterproof camera on this stick,

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I can show you the full length of it.

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All the way from the source, a crystal-clear
spring in Giant Springs State Park, Montana,

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flowing down 61 metres

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until it joins the much, much, much larger
Missouri River flowing to the ocean.

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Yeah, the river's just there.

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And it really is crystal clear:
while I was setting up,

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someone came along with some bottles and
filled them up for drinking water.

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I was off in Vidcon in Los Angeles last week
as I record this,

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and I was having dinner with a few folks who
make educational videos

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when I mentioned that I was coming here to
talk about 'the shortest river'.

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And if I'm honest, the conversation
didn't go well.

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They kept raising different objections,

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and seemed to get angry just at the concept.

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So eventually I looked up the dictionary definition
of 'river' in the Oxford English Dictionary:

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"A large natural stream of water
flowing in  a channel

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"to the sea, a lake, or another, usually larger,
stream of the same kind."

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First objection: this is man-made.

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True, the course of this was
refined by people, but...

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...so was the Los Angeles River and that's
still a river

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despite a lot of people thinking it's just
an overgrown storm drain.

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Although to be fair, the Roe River here didn't
even have a name until the 80s

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when some students surveyed it and campaigned
for it to be named the shortest river.

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The Guinness Book of Records did
 eventually agree, at least for a while.

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Okay, said the folks I was talking to,
but how do you know it's the shortest?

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That is a fair point.

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There have been long-documented arguments
about whether this river

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is even the shortest
in the United States...

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...and there are international claims too,

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like this short channel between two lakes
near Jyväskylä in Finland.

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And I was really skeptical before I got here,
but yeah,

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now I'm standing by it, I genuinely think
this is the shortest river in the world.

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It is a large, natural channel flowing in
one direction to a lake.

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Fits all the dictionary definitions, unless
you want to argue that it's not large enough,

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but frankly if it's large enough to drown in,
I think it should count.

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You could try adding more specifics.

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Forget arguing about whether this is natural:

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how about saying that a river
starts at a source,

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flows somewhere in a consistent direction,

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and ends at a much bigger bit of water?

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That seemed like a great definition to me,

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until someone pointed out that
that would include waterslides.

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Every time we tried to nail down a definition,
it slipped away.

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I'll be honest, I'm not really here to show you
The World's Shortest River, because I 
 can't.

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Because there will always be quibbles about
definitions.

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All the categories that we try to put the
natural world into,

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to fit everything into maps and databases,
all those categories have to be fuzzy.

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Mapmakers have known for years that, as with
so many things in the real world,

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"is it a river" is not always a question that
can be answered with a binary 'yes' or 'no'.

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There is almost always
an exception to the  rule.

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The 'river' is whatever humans agree it is.

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The exact definition probably differs between
languages and cultures anyway.

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And in the end, the Guinness Book of Records
decided not to have a listing for shortest 
 river.