birth 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.

Hans Rosling uses data and animated statistics to show how world population is changing, why birth rates fall as child survival and wealth rise, and why population is expected to peak around 11 billion. It also tackles common misconceptions about Africa and family planning.

A Kurzgesagt explainer on why the human population exploded and why growth is slowing, drawing on Our World in Data. It argues that birth rates fall as countries develop, easing overpopulation fears.

The opening sequence of the film Idiocracy, which satirically shows less intelligent people out-breeding more intelligent ones. It runs about three minutes.

Hans Rosling's TEDxSummit talk asks whether some religions have higher birth rates and how that affects population growth. He charts data across time and religions and reaches a surprising conclusion about fertility.

A Kurzgesagt animation on South Korea's record-low fertility rate and rapidly aging population. It explains why a demographic collapse looks hard to reverse and projects the population shrinking sharply by 2060.

Mark Rober builds a glitter-bomb booby-trapped package to take revenge on porch pirates, filming the thieves' reactions. Some reactions were later acknowledged as partially staged.

Dan Worrall explains when higher sample rates help in recording and mixing, and when they do not. He goes into oversampling versus higher sample rates, and aliasing in distortion plugins.

A Vox reporter tries to learn what his son's birth would cost before it happens and fails, showing how opaque US hospital pricing is even for the most common procedure.

Mark Rober spends eleven months building and testing a glitter bomb package with GPS and cameras to get back at porch pirates who steal parcels.

A short scene from the film Pirates of Silicon Valley where Steve Jobs confronts Bill Gates after the Macintosh announcement over Windows copying Apple's work, and Gates replies that it doesn't matter.

8-Bit Show And Tell walks through the BASIC source code of the original Commodore 64 Sid Meier's Pirates!. It covers bugs, quirks and traces of abandoned features and scenarios left in the code.

Excerpts from Nick Breeze's 2012 interview with researcher Natalia Shakhova about methane release from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. She discusses the risk of abrupt methane emissions.

The opening scene of the 2006 film Idiocracy, which explains in a short montage how average intelligence declines as less intelligent people have more children.

Eric Bier, a PARC research scientist, demonstrates the Cedar integrated programming environment and language, an evolution of Mesa from Xerox PARC. The demo shows the Tioga editor, garbage collection, and a full graphical workstation environment.

Ted Nelson demonstrates Xanadu Space, his software for representing hypertext in three-dimensional space with linked, referenced content fragments.

First part of a four-part video history of Japan's electronics industry, covering the birth of the transistor and the rise of Japanese semiconductors. It appears to draw on NHK documentary material.

An episode of Coding Secrets by Jon Burton on retro copy protection, in particular physically damaging a disk with a laser so copies fail. It explains how this defeated hackers and pirates.

Gerald Jay Sussman speaks at Dan Friedman's 60th birthday celebration about how programming helps formulate and clarify ideas. He argues that ambiguous mathematical notation hinders understanding.

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

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.

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.

A professor from Illinois compares the cost of building, fueling and operating a nuclear plant against a natural gas plant, using visual charts. It shows how construction time and interest rates dominate, when the investment pays off and when costs cross over.

A roughly two-hour demonstration by Dan Ingalls of Smalltalk running on the Computer History Museum's restored Xerox Alto. It shows the integrated environment and language designed at Xerox PARC as personal dynamic media.

A Dartmouth-produced documentary on how professors John Kemeny and Tom Kurtz, with a group of undergraduates, invented the BASIC language. It covers the creation of BASIC and the early time-sharing environment at Dartmouth.

3Blue1Brown presents Bayes' theorem through a geometric diagram, showing how evidence should update beliefs. It works through the Kahneman and Tversky style questions and base rates.

A short Stanford video in which Chao-Lin Kuo surprises Professor Andrei Linde with BICEP2 evidence supporting cosmic inflation, the first apparent images of primordial gravitational waves.

Bobby McFerrin uses audience participation at a World Science Festival event to demonstrate how instinctively people follow the pentatonic scale.

An excerpt from Richard Dawkins's lecture on Climbing Mount Improbable demonstrating how a complex eye can evolve through incremental steps. It answers the creationist irreducible complexity argument.

A clip from Channel 4's Inside Nature's Giants in which Richard Dawkins shows the recurrent laryngeal nerve of the giraffe during a dissection. The nerve takes a long detour down the neck and back up.

Mark Rober builds a third-generation glitter bomb trap and films it catching package thieves, with phone trackers and fart spray included. It shows the engineering behind the build and the comic payoff.

Ben Felix examines whether the well-known 4% retirement withdrawal rule holds up, drawing on academic papers. He argues that a safe rate may be closer to 2.7%, especially for early retirees.

A Fox News segment in which Jesse Watters interviews the moderator of the r/antiwork subreddit. The interview went badly for the moderator and led to the subreddit going private.

A short clip of Bill Gates demonstrating Visual Basic in 1991, showing drag-and-drop building of a Windows GUI.

Adam Neely examines Phil Ewell's paper arguing Western music theory is framed by a white racial perspective. He covers North Indian theory, alternative frameworks, Schenker and responses to the paper.

Alain de Botton's 2004 documentary based on his book Status Anxiety, running over two hours. It asks why people in rich societies are still unhappy, and examines how worries about success, snobbery and meritocracy drive that anxiety.

CGP Grey explains the history of the US Social Security card and number, and why they became a de facto national ID despite never being meant for it. He also covers why America resists a proper identity card.

A one-hour 2019 KOMO News documentary hosted by Eric Johnson on Seattle's homelessness and drug crisis, with interviews and looks at proposed solutions including a drug court program in Rhode Island. It argues addiction and mental illness are at the core of the problem.

The first part of Innuendo Studios' six-part video essay series on the online hostility around Anita Sarkeesian and GamerGate. It lays out the history and the motivations of the people involved.

ContraPoints' 35-minute video essay on incels, examining the community, its worldview and how people get radicalized. It is delivered with theatrical style and an empathetic tone.