bill atkinson

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.

Tom Scott makes the difference between a million and a billion dollars tangible by using distance on a road trip instead of volume. The drive makes the scale of a billion intuitively felt.

Numberphile explains the long and short scales for naming large numbers, covering millions, billions, trillions, milliards and the Greek myriad, with James Grime and Tony Padilla.

Mark Rober makes a plant-based burger for Bill Gates and explains why meat production strains the environment. Gates also appears and discusses his worry about steel and cement.

A fast, absurdist 19-minute animated run through the history of the whole world, narrated and scored by Bill Wurtz in his distinctive style. It compresses millennia of events into jokes, songs and quick visuals.

Kurzgesagt's hour-long animated film that compresses Earth's 4.5 billion year history into one hour, roughly a million years per second. It follows the evolution of life through to humanity's tiny final stretch.

The first of four short videos from Bill Hammack (engineerguy) introducing and giving the history of a 100-year-old mechanical computer, Michelson's harmonic analyzer. The series goes on to explain Fourier synthesis, analysis and operation of the machine.

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.

Bill Hammack of engineerguy explains how medieval engineers designed stone cathedrals using rules of thumb, with no science, mathematics or literacy. He uses it to define the engineering method.

A What I've Learned video arguing that industrial seed and vegetable oils have displaced saturated fats and harmed health. It covers the history of vegetable oils, the American Heart Association's role, and rising consumption.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths explains why people keep making the same mistake with millions and billions, using a Bloomberg cash calculator example. He looks at the unit slip behind the repeated arithmetic error.

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.

Bill Hammack of engineerguy uses slow motion video to show how the IBM Selectric typewriter works. He focuses on its fully mechanical digital-to-analog converter, which turns key presses into rotation of the type ball.

Cody's Lab builds a 200-billionth-scale model to show how far away the nearest stars are, using parallax and light speed. A short astronomy explainer on interstellar distances.

A 36-minute animated deep dive from Branch Education into how DRAM works. It shows how memory connects to the CPU and how billions of bits are stored in nanoscale capacitor cells. It also covers why DRAM sits between SSDs and the processor.

Vsauce explores how human reasoning works, drawing on the social theory of reason and the extended mind thesis, made in partnership with Bill Gates around climate change.

A Just Have a Think video on the proposed 16 billion pound Xlinks project to build solar, wind and battery capacity in southern Morocco. It would send around 3.6GW to the UK by subsea HVDC cable as near-baseload power.