assembly line

Freya Holmer's 74-minute video essay on splines, covering Bezier curves, B-splines, derivatives and the different levels of continuity (C0, C1, C2), built with custom animation tools. She notes she did not cover non-uniform splines.

Wendover Productions explains how airlines make money from different cabin classes and why premium seats matter so much to profits. It also touches on how this shaped decisions such as the decline of supersonic travel.

A Wendover Productions explainer arguing that major airlines make much of their profit from loyalty programs and co-branded credit cards rather than flying. It frames airlines as quasi-banks that sell points in bulk, using United's pandemic-era loan as a hook.

Kurzgesagt explains why humans feel loneliness, its evolutionary role, and how modern life can turn it into a harmful downward spiral. It cites research and offers ideas on what to do about it.

A Wendover Productions explainer on how budget airlines can sell tickets for under 10 euros. It covers the costs airlines face and how low-cost carriers structure their business.

A 10-minute 3Blue1Brown chapter explaining the determinant as the factor by which a linear transformation scales area or volume. It builds the idea geometrically with animations before any formulas.

3Blue1Brown's chapter on eigenvectors and eigenvalues in the Essence of Linear Algebra series. It builds a visual intuition for what they mean, why an eigenbasis is useful, and ends with a puzzle.

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.

The first episode of a Cities: Skylines series on urban politics and planning, focused on parking. It uses the game to show how parking minimums shape cities, drawing on Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking.

Tom 7 (suckerpinch) delivers a long, comedic digression on gradient descent and floating-point imprecision. He shows how rounding behavior can supply the nonlinearity needed to build a neural network.

A short CGP Grey bonus video explaining the shortest-splitline algorithm, which draws electoral districts by repeatedly splitting a state along its shortest dividing line while balancing population. It is offered as a neutral, algorithmic fix for gerrymandering.

Huygens Optics explores the idea that space is a non-linear elastic medium, and uses simulations to show how wave energy might be confined locally into particle-like objects. It touches on inertia, the Schwinger limit and the vacuum as a medium.

ElectroBOOM's Mehdi Sadaghdar responds to Veritasium's lamp-and-long-wire puzzle, analysing it as an electrical engineer. He covers where the original framing misleads and the role of stray capacitance.

Technology Connections explains how analog television produced moving images without computers, covering scanning, CRTs and standards like NTSC and PAL. It is part of a series on analog TV.

Autoline's John McElroy and Caresoft president Terry Woychowski look at the BYD Seagull, an electric hatchback that sells in China for about $11,500. Woychowski points out the cost-saving design and manufacturing choices, and McElroy takes it for a short test drive.

FortNine explains how Harley-Davidson ended up in decline, from a narrow lifestyle niche and an aging customer base to the pandemic hitting a company already in trouble.

A Wendover Productions explainer on the political agreements, from the Chicago Convention onward, that determine which airlines can fly where. It lays out the five freedoms of the air.

A Welch Labs explainer on neural scaling laws and the compute-efficient frontier, asking why model loss seems to hit a line it cannot cross. It draws an analogy to an ideal gas law for AI.

Engineering Explained examines new research suggesting corn ethanol in US gasoline may emit as much or more carbon than gasoline. It covers the Renewable Fuel Standard and why ethanol was assumed to be a green fuel.

Cliff Stoll shows and explains his two Friden EC-132 electronic calculators for Numberphile. The video covers how these early machines worked, including their unusual acoustic delay line memory.

Freya Holmer explains how Bezier curves work, from the helper-line construction to their uses in animation, text rendering and shapes. It uses visuals from her Unity Shapes plugin and was a SoME1 contest winner.

Everyday Astronaut's Tim Dodd runs an hour-long, data-driven analysis of what rockets actually emit and how that compares with airliners and other industries. It breaks down exhaust by propellant type, per-passenger and total emissions, and ways launches could be cleaner.

Veritasium tells the story of Thomas Midgley Jr., who introduced leaded gasoline and CFCs, and covers the science behind lead exposure and ozone damage. It also touches on isotope geochemistry used to uncover the history.

AlphaPhoenix uses a custom high-speed measurement setup to watch voltage waves travel down wires and split at a fork. It answers how electricity knows where to go and how quickly that process happens.

A Kurzgesagt video arguing that social media's problem is information flooding and tribal polarization. It suggests a return to smaller online communities and more in-person interaction.

Wendover Productions explains why modern airliners fly no faster than they did decades ago, covering the economics of speed and fuel efficiency, and why supersonic travel faded.

Veritasium examines whether food has become less nutritious, weighing soil depletion, selective breeding and rising atmospheric CO2. It evidences nutrient decline even in weeds over a century and ties it to faster plant growth.

A speedrunner-made explanation of the Super Mario World credits warp, an arbitrary code execution glitch that jumps the game straight to the ending. It simplifies the underlying assembly and memory behavior with animations so non-experts can follow.

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.

Half as Interesting explains why airlines flew empty 'ghost flights' out of Heathrow to keep their landing slots under use-it-or-lose-it rules.

Tom Scott visits ThyssenKrupp's test tower in Rottweil to see the Multi, a rope-free elevator that uses linear motors to move cabins sideways as well as vertically.

Bill Hammack of Engineer Guy explains the engineering behind the aluminum beverage can: why it is cylindrical, how it is manufactured, why it narrows at the top, the double seam, and how the pull tab works.

Branch Education's animated deep dive into ASML's EUV photolithography machine and how it prints nanometer-scale transistors onto chips. It covers the system's components and the process of chip manufacturing.

Veritasium explains how ASML's EUV lithography machines make the most advanced computer chips, covering the engineering of the light source, mirrors and the supply chain around them. It is a long-form explainer on the world's most complex commercial machine.

Asianometry explains that the worst of the 2021-22 chip shortage sits in trailing-edge semiconductors, not the leading-edge chips usually covered. It covers why those older-node fabs are so hard to expand and fix.

Wendover Productions explains the wave of supply shortages in 2021, arguing the causes go beyond COVID. It covers how just-in-time manufacturing was applied, container imbalances and the chip shortage.

Real Engineering explains the materials science behind metal 3D printing, including crystal structure, laser sintering, and why printed parts develop fatigue cracks. It shows how process imperfections limit the strength of printed metal.

Tom Scott tours Ocado's automated grocery warehouse, where thousands of robots move boxes on a grid called the Hive, and asks whether they are individual robots or a hive mind.

A US Chemical Safety Board video explaining how sugar dust explosions at the Imperial Sugar plant in Georgia killed fourteen workers in 2008.

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.