Embedding Videos Elastically

I've meant to make and share more videos for some time now, ever since my first smartphone brought with it a decent video camera, in fact. This has meant diving deeply into technical subjects I had previously neglected, wrestling with various open-source video editors, and, of course, updating my blog theme so that I could properly embed YouTube iframes into posts. This last turned out to be surprisingly difficult.

I relied on Nick La's techniques for embedding videos in an elastic way, but my initial progress stopped when I found that this method suffered from layout flaws when viewed with the android browser at small screen sizes. As often happens in web development (although less so as browsers continue to improve and converge), the way out of my deadlock was to back down from best practice a bit: dear readers, I have accepted the presence of non-semantic markup (an extra wrapper div) on my blog. For now. Less painfully, I have also hacked around some not-quite-optimal layout using javascript, although, true to my principles, nothing is really broken without it.

These videos, by the way, are of my co-workers and I dropping strong rare-earth magnets down a six-foot-long conductive aluminum tube to demonstrate eddy current braking. These come from my YouTube channel; check often for more videos of science experiments and engineering projects.

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