back pain

3Blue1Brown's third deep learning chapter gives a visual, intuitive account of backpropagation and what happens to a neural network as it learns. A follow-up video covers the underlying calculus.

3Blue1Brown's chapter 4 on deep learning gives a more formal, symbol-based account of backpropagation calculus, connecting the intuition from the previous chapter to the math found in textbooks and code.

Dr Mike Pound explains the suspected backdoor in the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator and how elliptic curve constants could let someone predict its output.

A five-minute CGP Grey explainer arguing that a phone is effectively an extension of your mind, and that any backdoor or master key into encrypted devices will inevitably be abused or leaked. It frames the encryption debate as locks that are either unbreakable or absent.

Captain Disillusion explains the visual effects behind the Back to the Future trilogy. He covers ILM's motion-control, computer-controlled camera work and clever pre-CGI tricks.

A short explainer on the history and mechanics of public key cryptography and the Diffie-Hellman key exchange. It uses a mixing-paint-colors analogy to show how two parties can agree on a shared secret in public.

A short Veritasium video explaining regression to the mean and how ignoring it leads to wrong conclusions about punishment versus reward, medical treatments and sports streaks. It uses the example of flight instructors who believed criticism works better than praise.

Tom Scott explains Electrical Network Frequency analysis, where hum from the power grid in a recording is matched against grid logs to date and place it. He talks to a researcher and sets them a challenge.

A short video explaining the Intel Management Engine, a hidden embedded computer inside Intel machines with deep access to hardware. It is presented from an insider's perspective and raises backdoor and NSA concerns.

A short Vox video on Barcelona's superblocks, an urban design approach that closes interior streets to through traffic to return space to pedestrians.

Tom Scott explains why Windows does not let you name a file CON, tracing the reserved device names back to backwards compatibility with DOS.

Every Frame a Painting analyzes how Jackie Chan stages action comedy, with nine principles such as starting from a disadvantage, using the environment, clear shots, and keeping action and reaction in the same frame.

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.

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.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay on Michael Bay's style, 'Bayhem', covering his camera movement, composition, color and editing. It argues that even if you dislike his films, they teach something about visual perception.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay analysing how Edgar Wright creates visual comedy through framing, camera movement, editing, sound effects and music.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay on Buster Keaton's visual comedy, examining how he built and framed his gags. It uses clips from his silent films to show the thinking behind them.

A video essay from Every Frame a Painting on animator Satoshi Kon and his editing style, which distorts and warps space and time. It draws on his four features and one TV series.

An 11-minute animated introduction to P vs. NP and the wider landscape of complexity classes, inspired by the Complexity Zoo wiki. It assumes no background in computer science.

A short animated RSA piece with Dr Brene Brown's voiceover on the difference between empathy and sympathy. She argues that real connection requires getting in touch with your own vulnerability, rather than trying to fix someone's pain.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains climate sensitivity and why recent observations suggest climate models may have underestimated warming. She says this changed her view on how worried to be.

CGP Grey compares airplane boarding methods, based on an arXiv paper, and shows why the intuitive back-to-front approach is slow while random or outside-in boarding does better.

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.

A short video from the trafficwaves.org site showing how traffic jams and standing waves form, including the fight between cheaters and blockers at an exit-lane backup. It also touches on how individual driving behavior affects the flow.

Not Just Bikes explains, using Urban3's property-tax analysis, why car-dependent suburbs generate less tax revenue than they cost to maintain, so dense urban cores effectively subsidize them. It is part of a Strong Towns series.

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.

Matt Parker explains the history behind NTSC television running at 29.97 frames per second rather than 30, tracing it to the backward-compatible addition of color. He walks through the arithmetic behind the odd ratio.

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.

Adam Neely explains what perfect (absolute) pitch is, how it differs from relative and quasi-absolute pitch, and why he would not want it. He covers its drawbacks, including drift with age.

A Climate Town video on how the auto industry reshaped American cities and culture through advertising, lobbying and campaigns like the 1939 World's Fair. It is snarky in tone but backed by a published source document.

Polylog explains how algorithms can be turned into circuits and encoded as satisfiability problems, which lets you effectively run them backwards. It uses this to motivate breaking RSA, general reductions to SAT, and what P vs NP is really asking.

Tom Scott stands by a construction site and explains why reversing vehicles now use a white-noise hiss instead of beeping. The sound is easier to locate directionally and less annoying to neighbours.

Kurzgesagt examines who is responsible for climate change, comparing historical, current and per-capita emissions by country. It argues that individual footprints are a distraction from larger responsibility.

Veritasium explores how electrical energy actually travels in a circuit, arguing that it flows through electromagnetic fields around the wires rather than through the electrons. It builds a long-cable experiment with Caltech to test when a distant bulb lights.

LearnCode.academy presents a roadmap of web development technologies to learn in 2016 and 2017, spanning front-end, back-end and DevOps tools.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment on the real facts of the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, covering the severity of the burns and the corporate PR campaign that painted it as frivolous.

Aging Wheels tests how towing trailers affects the range of electric trucks, including a Silverado EV. It shows that trailer aerodynamics matters far more than added weight.

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 short cartoon explaining how language models like ChatGPT work, from autocomplete and conditional probabilities to neural networks, gradient descent and backpropagation. It shows how networks act as universal function approximators.

A Kurzgesagt video on the conditions in which most farm animals are raised. It argues that cruelty is for cheaper rather than better meat, and that a small price increase per meal could avoid most of the suffering.