cloud lab

Casey Neistat's short New York Times op-doc investigating how accurate restaurant and packaged-food calorie labels really are. He gets items from chains like Chipotle, Starbucks and Subway measured by nutrition researchers and compares them to the printed numbers.

Destin of Smarter Every Day goes behind the scenes at the 23andMe lab to show how genotyping works. He also discusses DNA testing and privacy.

minutephysics, in collaboration with the US Census Bureau, explains differential privacy and why the 2020 census adds noise to protect individuals' data. It walks through how statistics can leak private information.

Tom Scott visits Cloudflare's San Francisco office to show the wall of lava lamps whose camera feed is used as a source of entropy for random number generation. It is a short explainer on how this helps secure internet encryption.

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.

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.

Fermilab's Don Lincoln explains why light travels slower in water and glass. He knocks down common wrong explanations such as absorption and re-emission, then gives the wave-mechanics reason tied to refractive index.

CGP Grey's video "Humans Need Not Apply" argues that automation will make a large part of the workforce economically obsolete, much as engines did for horses. It surveys robots and software replacing both physical and mental labor.

Tom Scott-style absurdist tour by Tom7 of SIGBOVIK chess projects: a tournament of 30 weird chess algorithms used to rate a color- and piece-blind chess program. Topics include mirrors, arithmetic encoding, perverted game tree search and a diluted Stockfish.

Numberphile interviews cryptographer Ron Rivest about end-to-end verifiable voting. He explains how homomorphic encryption and receipts let a voter confirm their ballot was counted without being able to prove how they voted to anyone else.

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.

Joseph Everett compares the food environment of the US, with roughly 30% obesity, to Japan's, around 3.5%. He argues that what is available and normal to eat explains much of the gap.

A re-upload of a video breaking down Eminem's rhyme schemes, showing multi-syllable and internal rhymes in songs such as Lose Yourself. It aims to show why he is considered a standout lyricist.

3Blue1Brown, in collaboration with minutephysics, introduces the math of superposition and quantum states using polarized light. It builds up the quantum behavior of photons as a simple counting and probability problem.

An Extra Credits episode on how MMO economies get overrun by inflation when players can mint unlimited gold by killing monsters. It covers approaches borrowed from real-world economics, such as anchoring or pegging currency, as alternatives to simple gold sinks.