base rates

Patrick Boyle examines why birth rates are falling in nearly every country and argues the standard explanations do not hold up. He presents data suggesting fewer couples forming is a major driver.

FortNine argues that e-bikes have injury rates and speeds closer to motorcycles than to pedal bikes. It argues riders should treat them with similar safety gear and caution.

EEVblog's Dave Jones critiques Reflect Orbital's plan to sell sunlight to solar farms after dark using orbital mirrors. He walks through the numbers to show the idea does not work out.

A two-minute John Cleese monologue showing the pathology of extremism, explaining why it feels good and how it drives out moderates.

CityNerd lays out a data-driven method for deciding where high-speed rail should be built in North America and identifies 56 city pairs that justify it, based on population and distance.

Jonathan Blow's hour-long livestreamed response to a RustConf 2018 closing keynote about entity systems in Rust. He argues that index-based entity systems amount to manual memory management that sidesteps the borrow checker, and he talks about friction for game developers.

A clip from Charlie Brooker's BBC show Screenwipe showing how reality TV uses editing to manufacture emotion and narrative. It demonstrates how the same footage can be cut to give very different impressions.

Nassim Taleb argues that evidence on terrorism risk presented in media is statistically naive, using extreme value theory without math to separate fat-tailed risks like Ebola and terrorism from thin-tailed ones.

A Last Week Tonight segment on the US Postal Service's financial troubles. John Oliver explains why it matters, what pushed it to this point, and what viewers can do.

Rick Beato discusses a theory of why some children develop perfect pitch, based on early exposure to music. He draws on his experience with his own children.

A video essay arguing that the next major real-time strategy game will fail unless it gets the fundamentals right. It covers the playerbase and demographics, what older RTS games did well, and the roles of the engine, spectacle, development tools and player-generated content.

A Last Week Tonight episode segment in which John Oliver explains gerrymandering, how lawmakers reshape voting districts to shift political power. It uses humor and examples such as oddly shaped districts.

Doug DeMuro reviews the 2017 Chevy Bolt, which has a $37,500 base price and 238 miles of range. He looks at why it sells poorly next to the Tesla Model 3, noting its quirks and narrow seats.

Matt Gray and Tom Scott review how viewers worked out where they watched the 2017 solar eclipse from, based on clues in their video. They go through the methods people used and how accurate the guesses were.

Louis Rossmann, an independent repair technician, explains why he thinks Apple's soldered-in SSDs are a poor design. He covers failure modes and repair difficulty on MacBook logic boards.

A video debunking popular primitive-building YouTube channels, arguing that their digging, concrete and construction are staged. It uses the Primitive Technology channel as a baseline for what is plausible in a natural setting.

A Thunderf00t video debunking Energy Vault, a gravity-based energy storage scheme that stacks concrete blocks with cranes. He argues it is impractical and compares it to pseudoscience.

h3h3Productions describes how a hacker took over their phone number by getting a SIM card from T-Mobile, and gives security advice such as using a hardware key and an authenticator app.

A short clip based on Zbigniew Brzezinski's views about the erosion of national sovereignty and his criticism of the war on terror. It is titled Political awakening.

The video argues that machine-learning-based aimbots, which read the screen and drive the controls externally, could make cheating in FPS games undetectable. It explains how conventional aimbots work, how the new approach differs, and speculates on possible detection.