bit depth

3Blue1Brown explains the math and mechanics behind Bitcoin visually: ledgers, digital signatures, proof of work and the blockchain, building up a decentralized payment system from first principles.

CGP Grey's sarcastic animated video adapted from the book How to Be Miserable, listing habits that reliably make people unhappy. By inverting the advice, it shows what to avoid and prompts reflection on goals and routines.

A two-minute clip of Andreas Antonopoulos explaining why a 51% attack on Bitcoin would not destroy it and what such an attack would cost. It is a succinct take on mining security.

A two-minute animated introduction to Bitcoin from 2011, explaining it as a peer-to-peer digital currency. It was widely shared in Bitcoin's early days as the standard newcomer explainer.

Andreas Antonopoulos answers a Bitcoin Q&A question about energy consumption in mining. He argues that mining is arbitrage for the cheapest electricity, drives investment in renewables, and that the traditional financial system has hidden externalities.

Andreas Antonopoulos answers a question about how to secure your Bitcoin. He covers holding your own keys, backing up the 12 to 24 word seed phrase, and the tradeoffs of custodial accounts, phone wallets and hardware wallets.

Monty Montgomery of Xiph.org gives real-time demonstrations of sampling, quantization, bit depth and dither using real audio equipment, including both digital analysis tools and vintage analog bench gear. It shows that sampled audio is not stair-stepped and corrects common misconceptions about digital audio.

Isaac Arthur explains the orbital ring, a megastructure launch-assist system that could move bulk cargo cheaply to orbit and beyond. He compares it with space elevators and discusses power transmission.

An 8-minute explainer on the Lightning Network and how it relates to Segwit, Bitcoin and Litecoin. It covers how off-chain payment channels route payments to scale blockchain transactions.

The 8-Bit Guy explains the color limitations of 1980s computers and consoles such as the NES and Commodore 64. It shows how sprites, attributes and palettes shaped the look of old games.

CGP Grey's six-minute explainer of the relationships the UK could have with the EU, based on Barnier's slide, shown as orbits of different closeness. It explains why the UK's red lines ruled out the closer options.

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.

3Blue1Brown illustrates how enormous the 256-bit search space is, showing how infeasible it is to find a hash or key by guessing and checking.

Mathologer explains epicycles and complex Fourier series, inspired by an animation of Homer Simpson drawn with epicycles. It covers the shape of the Moon's orbit around the Sun and how to make your own epicycle drawings.

A PBS Infinite Series episode explaining the mathematics of quantum computers, including how qubits store complex numbers and how quantum computation differs from classical computation. Hosted by Kelsey Houston-Edwards.

A PBS Space Time episode asking whether Venus would be a better colonization target than Mars. It covers Venus's habitable altitudes, floating balloon habitats, and the term surfacism.

Tom Scott explains why confetti and snow wreck video quality, using interframe compression and bitrate. He demonstrates it live by changing the quality on screen.

An Isaac Arthur episode on arcologies, self-sufficient habitats that could house whole cities, on Earth or on harsh worlds. It covers how such structures might work and what limits their size.

A speedrunner-made explanation of the Super Mario World credits warp, an arbitrary code execution glitch that jumps the game straight to the ending. It simplifies the underlying assembly and memory behavior with animations so non-experts can follow.

Isaac Arthur examines Dyson spheres and swarms, including common myths and misconceptions. He covers uses such as interstellar travel, black hole generation, and computing large enough to simulate universes.

A three-minute minutephysics video on the orbital mechanics of why crashing into the Sun takes far more energy than leaving the solar system.

Tom Scott tours the rotating room artificial gravity facility at Brandeis University's Graybiel lab. It shows how humans cope with rotation-based gravity and the odd effects such as Coriolis forces.

Kurzgesagt explains the skyhook, a rotating cable with a counterweight that could catapult spacecraft from Earth orbit toward deep space. It covers why it would make space travel cheaper and more efficient.

The 8-Bit Guy covers IBM's 1981 CGA graphics system, including how composite output and artifacting produced extra colors beyond the nominal palette. He argues CGA looked better in period than it does on RGB monitors.

Kurzgesagt explains how accumulating space junk could trigger a collision cascade (Kessler syndrome) that makes launches too dangerous and traps humanity on Earth.

A Kurzgesagt animation walking through how a Mars base could be built and why it would be punishing, covering radiation, temperature extremes, toxic dust and the need for shielding.

IBM's Dr. Talia Gershon explains quantum computing to five people of increasing expertise: a child, teen, college student, grad student and professional. The WIRED series format moves from simple analogies to technical detail.

An illustrated 23-minute summary of David Friedman's talk based on The Machinery of Freedom. It describes how law, police and courts could work as market services in a stateless society, covering private law, polycentric law and objections.

Wendover Productions explains how airlines make money from different cabin classes and why premium seats matter so much to profits. It also touches on how this shaped decisions such as the decline of supersonic travel.

Episode 4 of Mike Maloney's Hidden Secrets of Money, explaining how currency is created through a chain of IOUs among the Treasury, banks and the Federal Reserve. It covers bonds, Fed checks, debt, taxes and fractional reserve lending, from a gold-and-silver advocate's viewpoint.

CGP Grey explains how traffic jams come from human driving behavior such as tailgating and reaction delays, and how leaving gaps and smoothing speed would reduce congestion. It also touches on self-driving cars.

3Blue1Brown introduces Fourier series, from the heat equation to drawing arbitrary shapes with rotating circles. It builds a visual intuition for decomposing functions into sine waves.

Isaac Arthur's in-depth look at what it would take to settle and eventually terraform Mars. He covers the challenges and the scale of the work needed to make it a home for humanity.

Mathologer examines the infamous Numberphile claim that 1+2+3+... equals -1/12, explaining what is wrong with the calculation and how it connects to real math like the zeta function and analytic continuation.

Pannenkoek explains how Super Mario 64 handles wall, floor and ceiling collisions, including triangles, normal vectors, quarter steps and out of bounds. It is a detailed 37-minute technical walkthrough of the game's physics.

A PBS Space Time episode hosted by Gabe Perez-Giz on the nature of spacetime and whether space and time are fundamental. It builds up reference frames and causality in a short, dense format.

A minutephysics explainer on why the planets orbit in a flat plane. It shows how conserved angular momentum flattens a collapsing cloud of matter into a disk.

Isaac Arthur examines options for colonizing Venus, from vast floating habitats in the temperate upper atmosphere to full terraforming of the planet. It is a long-form speculative futurism episode in his solar system colonization series.

Tom Scott explains YouTube's 11-character video IDs, which are base-64 encoded 64-bit numbers, and whether YouTube could ever run out of them. It covers counting systems and base 64 briefly.

Forgotten Weapons examines the Heckler & Koch G11, a West German experimental rifle built around a caseless cartridge. The video covers the G11K2 and its unusual technology before its cancellation for political and economic reasons.