almost live

Wendover Productions explains why drone delivery has not become the future once promised. It covers no-fly zones, costs and the difficulty of the final drop-off.

Adam Ragusea examines whether olive oil is unsafe for high-heat cooking and whether it tastes bad when heated. He cites studies showing it is among the most stable cooking oils and that smoke-point worries are overblown.

Real Engineering explains how Zipline built a drone delivery network for medical supplies in Rwanda. It covers the fixed-wing drones, catapult launch, parachute drop and the logistics behind the service.

Big Clive tears down the Dubai lamp, a Philips LED bulb developed with Dubai's ruler for maximum efficiency and long life. He examines its construction and circuitry, including underrun LEDs and many filament strips.

Not Just Bikes explains how small pockets of shops and restaurants inside residential Dutch neighbourhoods create liveliness and help reduce traffic. It argues this kind of mixed-use design has been illegal in most of the US and Canada for a century because of zoning, and should be brought back.

Not Just Bikes explains how many American suburbs, built all at once rather than incrementally, cannot cover their infrastructure costs and survive on growing debt. It draws on Strong Towns' work on the growth Ponzi scheme.

A short Not Just Bikes video on the 1960s plans (Plan Jokinen) to cut highways through Amsterdam to accommodate cars. It shows how radically different the city would look had they succeeded.

A Veritasium video on how a feud between Russian mathematicians led to Markov chains and the modern prediction algorithms built on them. It covers the history and the math behind them.

Not Just Bikes visits the Toronto Islands, home to Canada's only car-free neighbourhood. He explains the waiting list and strict ownership rules and asks why more such places aren't built.

Big Clive takes apart an IKEA Koppla USB power supply to assess its safety, looking at isolation and transformer construction.

BigClive explains why microwave oven transformer projects are extremely dangerous, since the high voltage and high current can kill. He contrasts them with spot welder builds where the secondary is replaced by low-voltage heavy wire.

Munro Live's Model Y episode 36 has Sandy Munro walk through the disassembled Tesla Octovalve and heat pump system. He explains how the components are made and what each one does.

Munro Live's team breaks down the thermal management system of the Ford Mustang Mach-E and compares it with the Tesla Model Y. They look at parts count, coolant loops and heating approaches.

Joseph Everett, with Dr. Frank Mitloehner, argues that eating less meat will not do much for the climate. He covers beef's water footprint, land and feed use, and methane.

A Half as Interesting explainer on the US program that drops millions of sterile screwworm flies over Panama every week to keep the parasite out of North America.

Technology Connections explains how heat pumps work as reversed air conditioners and why they can deliver several times the heat of resistive heating per unit of energy. It also tackles common myths such as poor cold-weather performance.

CGP Grey narrates an animated adaptation of Nick Bostrom's Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant. The story uses a dragon that demands a daily toll of lives as a metaphor for aging and society's acceptance of death.

CGP Grey explains why European diseases devastated the Americas while few deadly diseases traveled the other way. He ties it to livestock domestication, dense cities, and the ideas of Guns, Germs and Steel.

Technology Connections explains why heat pumps matter right now, covering their efficiency, how they hold up in cold weather and the energy savings over burning fuel. It follows his earlier explainer on how they work.

Robert Miles explains instrumental convergence: why an AGI with almost any goal would tend to pursue sub-goals like self-preservation and resource acquisition. It builds on Omohundro's basic AI drives and his orthogonality thesis video.

Oh The Urbanity! argues that most city dwellers live in dense residential neighbourhoods outside downtown, which can be calm and peaceful. It draws on older, denser parts of Toronto and Montreal.

A Medlife Crisis video by cardiologist Rohin Francis on overdiagnosis and over-screening. It explains how detecting more disease does not necessarily mean saving more lives, and covers harms such as unnecessary treatment.

Matt Parker talks Numberphile through the different kinds of numbers: algebraic, transcendental, computable, normal, and beyond. It shows how few numbers we can actually name or describe.

The first episode of Crash Course World History, in which John Green covers the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture and how it shaped civilization. It is delivered fast and with jokes.

Wendover Productions examines why carbon offsets so often fail to reduce emissions, covering specific examples and the perverse incentives in offset schemes.

Not Just Bikes explains missing middle housing, such as duplexes, townhouses and small apartment buildings. The video argues that zoning in the US and Canada has made these options almost illegal.

A 2011 remix of over six hours of talks by Kirk Sorensen and other thorium advocates, explaining thorium as a nuclear fuel and the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR). It argues LFTRs could produce energy without long-lived transuranic waste.

Technology Connections explains that the so-called EV charger in an electric car's charging cable or wall unit is really an EVSE, a smart switch that safely delivers AC power. The actual charger is inside the car. The video covers the safety signaling and mechanisms involved.

A video essay from Every Frame a Painting about Vancouver, a major film production city that almost never appears onscreen as itself. It shows clips of films and TV shot there that pass the city off as somewhere else.

Wendover Productions explains how overnight shipping works, covering the hub-and-spoke logistics of companies like FedEx and UPS and the use of cargo aircraft. It touches on the economics that make next-day delivery possible.

Musician and audio engineer Benn Jordan tries Dolby Atmos as a consumer, covering the theory of immersive audio, its business model, and home theater and headphone listening. He concludes it often falls short of the pitch.

Vox breaks down how great rappers build rhymes, from Kurtis Blow's simple bars to Biggie's smooth flow and Kendrick Lamar's dense, fast delivery. It uses on-screen visualizations of rhyme structure.

Andrew Huang explains the harmonic series, which he calls the foundation of almost all music. He builds the idea up step by step, with demonstrations of overtones and how harmonies derive from them.

Tom Scott explains why confetti and snow wreck video quality, using interframe compression and bitrate. He demonstrates it live by changing the quality on screen.

Chef Jon Kung explains why he cooks almost exclusively on induction, citing fast heating, cleanliness and precise temperature control. He shows a rounded induction wok burner.

A Veritasium video on AlphaFold, DeepMind's protein structure prediction system, and the protein design work it enabled. It features interviews with John Jumper and with David Baker's protein design group and explains why predicting protein folding matters.

A BBC Earth clip from Super Powered Owls in which the team uses sensitive sound equipment to compare owl flight with other birds. It shows why owls fly almost silently.

Retro Game Mechanics Explained shows how the Atari 2600 draws images with almost no video memory, by having the CPU race the CRT beam line by line. It walks through the techniques in detail.

A Technology Connections video weighing LED streetlights against high pressure sodium lamps, covering efficiency, color, cost and light pollution. It is a follow-up to his earlier explanation of why street lights are orange.

AVweb's Paul Bertorelli analyzes the safety record of the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS), looking at the 90-plus deployments over 20 years of Cirrus flying. He asks whether the whole-aircraft parachute has actually saved lives.