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28:44Arcologies
397K views • 10 years ago
Isaac Arthur
An Isaac Arthur episode on arcologies, self-sufficient habitats that could house whole cities, on Earth or on harsh worlds. It covers how such structures might work and what limits their size.
4:02Only Two Countries Can Still Claim Antarctica
7.9M views • 10 years ago
CGP Grey
CGP Grey explains the history and legal status of territorial claims on Antarctica. It covers the overlapping national claims and the Antarctic Treaty that freezes them.
42:02How to Surface a Submarine in the Arctic Ocean - Smarter Every Day 260
6.4M views • 5 years ago
SmarterEveryDay
Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day explains how a US Navy nuclear submarine surfaces through Arctic ice, filmed during the ICEx exercise. It shows ballast and control systems and the physics involved.
5:31Superblocks: How Barcelona is taking city streets back from cars
7.9M views • 10 years ago
Vox
A short Vox video on Barcelona's superblocks, an urban design approach that closes interior streets to through traffic to return space to pedestrians.
23:16The Machinery Of Freedom: Illustrated summary
164K views • 14 years ago
bitbutter
An illustrated 23-minute summary of David Friedman's talk based on The Machinery of Freedom. It describes how law, police and courts could work as market services in a stateless society, covering private law, polycentric law and objections.
8:26AT&T Archives: The Step-By-Step Switch
774K views • 15 years ago
AT&T Tech Channel
A 1951 Bell System training film showing how telephone calls are routed through a step-by-step (Strowger) switching office.
9:41How Steve Jobs got the ideas of GUI from XEROX
272K views • 12 years ago
Ringo Pebam
A short video telling how Xerox PARC invented the graphical user interface and how Steve Jobs's 1979 visit influenced Apple's Lisa.
8:47Cloaking
238K views • 15 years ago
Google Search Central
Matt Cutts of Google explains what cloaking is: serving different content to search engine crawlers than to users. He covers why it violates Google's webmaster guidelines.
12:22Is Most Published Research Wrong?
6.2M views • 10 years ago
Veritasium
Veritasium explains why a large share of published research findings may be false, covering p-values, p-hacking, publication bias and low replication rates. It draws on John Ioannidis's well-known paper and describes reforms such as preregistration.
21:32Alexander Pope Wrote a 35-Page Takedown of a Historian
10.3M views • 5 years ago
CGP Grey
CGP Grey tells the story of Alexander Pope's long takedown of a historian, Thomas Hearne, framed around the quirks of library books and archival research. It is a funny, digressive video essay about literary feuds and tracking down original sources.
11:00International Diversification
221K views • 3 years ago
Ben Felix
Ben Felix rebuts common arguments for holding only US stocks, such as past outperformance and international revenue exposure. He supports the case for international diversification with cited academic research.
33:43TSP #183 - Starlink Dish Phased Array Design, Architecture & RF In-depth Analysis
171K views • 5 years ago
The Signal Path
The Signal Path takes apart a Starlink dish layer by layer, analyzing the phased array RF design, system architecture and integrated circuits, with an X-ray of the RF stack.
27:07Attention Is All You Need
814K views • 8 years ago
Yannic Kilcher
Yannic Kilcher walks through the Attention Is All You Need paper, which introduced the Transformer, a sequence model based solely on attention without recurrence or convolutions. He reviews the architecture and the paper's translation results.
16:21The Ranks of Global Billionaires: Not All Billionaires Are Made Equal
2M views • 6 years ago
Economics Explained
An Economics Explained video on the different kinds of billionaires, from founders to oligarchs. It explains how wealth is held in illiquid stock and why diversification is a problem for some.
7:21How to Cure Aging – During Your Lifetime?
8M views • 9 years ago
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
A Kurzgesagt animated explainer on whether aging could be cured within our lifetimes, made with Lifespan.io and the LEAF foundation. It introduces the idea of treating aging as a medical problem.
8:04Khan Academy and the Effectiveness of Science Videos
1.7M views • 15 years ago
Veritasium
Veritasium examines research suggesting science explainer videos like Khan Academy's make students feel they understand while tests show they have not learned, because misconceptions go unaddressed. It suggests how to partly fix this.
7:42Extremely Large Numbers 1 - Introduction
20K views • 11 years ago
Giroux Studios
The first video in a series on extremely large numbers, introducing the topic with examples. Later parts go deep into the fast-growing hierarchy.
28:11Why Everyone Is Talking About Data Centers In Space
408K views • 10 months ago
Scott Manley
Scott Manley examines why SpaceX, Google and others are looking at orbital data centers. He walks through the economics, heat rejection and solar power arguments, with links to the Lumen/Starcloud and Google Suncatcher papers.
7:28Why Do Things Keep Evolving Into Crabs?
10.9M views • 6 years ago
PBS Eons
A short PBS Eons episode on carcinization, the repeated independent evolution of crab-like bodies in unrelated crustaceans, and what makes that form so successful.
4:31The True Cost of the Royal Family Explained
6.8M views • 15 years ago
CGP Grey
CGP Grey breaks down what the British Royal Family costs the UK versus what it brings in, including income from royal-owned land. He concludes the government nets a profit from the arrangement.
4:49BBC - The Code - The Wisdom of the Crowd
395K views • 15 years ago
timb6
Marcus du Sautoy of the BBC demonstrates the wisdom of the crowd, showing that averaging many guesses of jelly beans in a jar lands near the true count.
35:13I built a QR code with my bare hands to see how it works
9.7M views • 2 years ago
Veritasium
Veritasium builds a QR code by hand to explain how it works. It covers the history of Morse code and barcodes, how QR codes encode data, why damaged codes still scan, and how safe they are.
18:39Resveratrol – The Unfortunate (& Scandalous) Story
208K views • 4 years ago
Dr Brad Stanfield
Dr Brad Stanfield recounts the research history and scandal around resveratrol, the supposed anti-aging supplement, including problems with the original studies.
13:28This Town Did The Impossible
3.1M views • 3 years ago
The Aesthetic City
A look at Le Plessis-Robinson, a French suburb transformed from modernist urbanism into traditional mixed-use fabric with local-style architecture, green space and a more balanced housing supply.
4:59This library has every book ever published.
2.4M views • 3 years ago
Tom Scott
Tom Scott visits the British Library, a UK legal deposit library that receives a copy of everything published, and discusses storing so much material, including the web archive.
25:10How an Atomic Clock Really Works: Inside the HP 5061A Cesium Clock
464K views • 6 years ago
CuriousMarc
CuriousMarc powers up a vintage HP 5061A cesium beam clock and explains both the quantum principle and the HP implementation in detail. It is part of a longer atomic clock series.
7:16Unix and Google
9K views • 10 years ago
FOAM
A short animated simulation comparing how Multics and Unix were developed, showing why Unix's small composable programs and pipes gave it a efficiency advantage. It frames Unix as a moonshot achievable by a small team.
31:39Parking Laws Are Strangling America | Climate Town
1.9M views • 3 years ago
Climate Town
Climate Town traces the history of American parking minimums, how they came from shaky research and ITE guides, and how they shape zoning, cities and housing costs. It is a long, comedic video essay.
14:21How to Make an Attractive City
3.2M views • 11 years ago
The School of Life
The School of Life sets out principles for making attractive cities, arguing that the art has been lost in the modern world.
23:47Bed Bugs- What You've Been Told is Totally False
83.8M views • 3 years ago
Mark Rober
Mark Rober digs into bed bugs, testing popular beliefs about where they come from and how to get rid of them. It mixes entertaining experiments with research-based advice on what works and what does not.
21:03Inadvertant intravenous injections
507K views • 5 years ago
Dr. John Campbell
Dr. John Campbell reviews a mouse study on accidental intravenous injection of an mRNA COVID-19 vaccine and its potential to cause myopericarditis. He walks through the methods and findings and discusses the aspiration technique.
10:18How to Stop a Riot
5.2M views • 9 years ago
Wendover Productions
Wendover Productions explains counterintuitive riot control techniques based on research, showing that effective tactics tend to avoid violence.
13:20Your Home Can Survive a Wildfire
164K views • 11 years ago
National Fire Protection Association
NFPA video in which wildfire researcher Jack Cohen explains that embers (firebrands), not the flame front, are the main cause of homes igniting in wildfires. He shows how landscaping and removing debris around the home reduce risk.
2:23Music and Life - Alan Watts
2.6M views • 19 years ago
seandulac
A two-minute animation of an Alan Watts talk arguing that life is like music: it is meant to be danced to in the moment, not rushed toward a final goal. It is a short, accessible take on living in the present.
6:06The 7 Habits of Highly Miserable People
14.7M views • 9 years ago
CGP Grey
CGP Grey's sarcastic animated video adapted from the book How to Be Miserable, listing habits that reliably make people unhappy. By inverting the advice, it shows what to avoid and prompts reflection on goals and routines.
5:32The Truth about American Cities - Part 1 - Strong Towns [ST01]
858K views • 6 years ago
Not Just Bikes
The first video in Not Just Bikes' Strong Towns series explains the financial instability of North American cities, based on Strong Towns research. It argues that low-density suburban growth costs more to maintain than it brings in.
42:3630 Weird Chess Algorithms: Elo World
965K views • 7 years ago
suckerpinch
Tom Scott-style absurdist tour by Tom7 of SIGBOVIK chess projects: a tournament of 30 weird chess algorithms used to rate a color- and piece-blind chess program. Topics include mirrors, arithmetic encoding, perverted game tree search and a diluted Stockfish.
17:59The Expert Myth
16M views • 4 years ago
Veritasium
Veritasium examines which experts have real expertise, drawing on chess research and work by Klein and Kahneman. It explains that expertise comes from pattern recognition built through deliberate practice in valid, feedback-rich environments.
8:25Akira Kurosawa - Composing Movement
10.8M views • 11 years ago
Every Frame a Painting
An Every Frame a Painting video essay on how Akira Kurosawa used movement, weather and composition to tell stories. It draws on clips and interviews with other filmmakers.
6:48Why Age? Should We End Aging Forever?
9M views • 9 years ago
Kurzgesagt – In a Nutshell
Kurzgesagt's short animated video asks whether humanity should try to end aging, and argues the case for curing age-related disease. It is part one of a pair, with a second part by CGP Grey.