best practices

Not Just Bikes argues that the Netherlands, famed for cycling, is also the best country for drivers. It explains how prioritizing walking, cycling and transit makes driving faster and more pleasant.

America's Test Kitchen tests eight carbon-steel skillets to find the best one, asking whether a single pan can replace stainless, cast iron and nonstick. It names a winner and covers how the pans perform.

Kaze Emanuar searches for the best sine approximation for the Nintendo 64, comparing the lookup tables in Mario 64 and Ocarina of Time with polynomial alternatives. It walks through numerics and 3rd, 4th and 5th order approximations.

Not Just Bikes explains why Swiss trains are considered among the best in Europe and the world, covering frequency, connections and what riding them is like.

Not Just Bikes takes on the common excuse that a country is simply too big or spread out for good transit and walkable cities. The video argues that city density and short everyday trips matter, not national size or overall population density.

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.

A Kurzgesagt animated explainer on meat: why people love it and what it costs animals, the environment and health. It lays out the complicated trade-offs of meat production and consumption.

Not Just Bikes tours Houten, a Dutch town designed around cycling, explaining how its layout makes most trips by bike safe and easy. It also promotes a book about the town.

Not Just Bikes explains Dutch bicycle-only roads, which let people travel long distances in and out of cities with almost no car interaction. It shows how this changes cycling from a chore into something enjoyable.

Ray Dalio's 30-minute animated video explains how the economy works through credit, debt, interest rates, and short- and long-term cycles. It is based on his template for understanding the economy.

A 1937 GM-produced film explaining how the automobile differential lets wheels turn at different speeds around a corner. It uses clear animations and cutaway demonstrations to build the idea from first principles.

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.

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.

Explains the proposed NASA JPL plan to use the Sun as a gravitational lens, sending solar sail craft to its focal region to image an exoplanet's surface. It covers the distances involved, how imaging with the Sun would work and the mission design.

An animated introduction to geometric algebra, presented as a language that can describe most of physics. It was made with manim and covers multivectors and how they generalize familiar tools like cross products and quaternions.

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.

ScienceClic explains why the rubber sheet analogy for general relativity is misleading and offers a new visualization that includes the curvature of time and shows gravity as motion through curved spacetime.

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.

3Blue1Brown builds visual intuition for quaternions, showing how to think about this four-dimensional number system using stereographic projection and rotations in 3D space. It is part one of a two-part series with an interactive companion site.

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.

Huygens Optics explains the Fourier transform and shows how a lens performs one optically. A DLP projector is used as a Fourier filter to do simple pattern recognition on lithographic character patterns.

An animated visualization of basic quantum mechanics using a free particle, with simulations based on the actual equations. It covers waves, particles, and how measurement collapses the wavefunction.

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.

Veritasium explains how trees lift water from roots to the top of tall trunks, using transpiration pull and the negative pressure that liquid water can sustain. It explains why trees do not need pumps or valves.

Everyday Astronaut explains the basic physics of rocket engines, the main engine cycles and fuel types, then compares SpaceX's methane-fueled full-flow staged combustion Raptor to other engines. It runs nearly 50 minutes with chapter markers.

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.

3Blue1Brown explains space-filling curves and the Hilbert curve, and how infinite mathematical constructions connect to finite, practical approximations. It touches on mapping between dimensions and sensory ideas.

Not Just Bikes argues that people in walkable, bikeable Dutch cities stay healthy because exercise is built into daily life, which he calls the gym of life. It contrasts this with car-dependent cities that require deliberate workouts.

3Blue1Brown explains how holograms record a 3D scene on 2D film, using wave diffraction and phase. The video includes demonstrations of several real holograms.

A PBS Space Time episode on how the Higgs mechanism gives particles mass, prompted by Fermilab's heavier-than-expected W boson measurement. It goes beyond the usual pop-science treatment without heavy math.

Mark Handley of UCL looks at how SpaceX's November 2018 revisions to the Starlink constellation affect network behavior. The video visualizes the orbits and routing and estimates latencies, building on his earlier video and research paper.

A mini-documentary by a Canadian living in Japan explaining how an average family can afford a new detached house in Tokyo. It covers how houses are treated as depreciating assets and how Japanese zoning and building practices keep prices low.

Richard Feynman, in a clip from the BBC series Fun to Imagine, takes on the puzzle of why mirrors seem to swap left and right but not top and bottom.

Tim Dodd's hour-long deep dive on how rocket engines start, from solid motors to liquid engines. It covers thermal conditioning, spin-up, ignition methods, starting in space, and a step-by-step RS-25 startup.

A three-minute animated video that explains sexual consent through the analogy of offering someone a cup of tea. It is based on a blog post by Emmeline May.

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.

Veritasium explains X-chromosome inactivation, where different cells in a woman's body switch off different X chromosomes, giving a mosaic pattern. It uses animation from the WEHI institute and connects to calico cat coloring.

Isaac Arthur explores space-based solar power, in which satellites beam energy down via microwaves to rectennas on Earth. He discusses feasibility, profitability and its role in spurring space colonization.

Military History Visualized charts ship production by the United States and Japan from December 1941 to September 1945. The growing numbers show why Japan, despite a stronger starting navy, could not win a long war.

Lindybeige gives an hour-long history of English coinage and the problems of maintaining a trustworthy currency. It ends with an explanation of why the pounds, shillings and pence system worked so well.