code as data

Veritasium explains that the Higgs boson accounts for only a small fraction of everyday mass. Most of a proton's mass comes from the energy of the gluon field binding its quarks.

A Veritasium video that runs the 2-4-8 rule-guessing puzzle on people to show how they test only examples that confirm their hypothesis. It uses this to illustrate confirmation bias and falsification.

A Veritasium video on survivor bias, explaining how an observed sample can be incomplete and skewed. It uses examples such as bombers and famous success stories.

Gamers Nexus benchmarks how the amount and application method of thermal paste affect CPU cooling. It compares pea-sized dots, thin spreads and large blobs with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut.

A short How to ADHD explainer, featuring Brendan Mahan, on why simple tasks can feel impossible for people with ADHD. It introduces the 'wall of awful', a pile of past failures, shame and anxiety that builds up in front of a task and blocks starting it.

A short explainer on the physiological differences between fasting and simply eating less. It covers ketosis, ghrelin and hunger waves, and the hormonal effects of fasting.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how Unicode and UTF-8 grew out of messy older character encodings to become the web's standard. It covers why the design works and how it handles worldwide text.

Techmoan's beginner introduction to the compact cassette, testing metal tapes and Dolby S noise reduction on a Sony TC-S1 deck. He checks whether a cassette can sound close to a CD when good tape and equipment are used.

David Kipping presents his proposed Terrascope, a telescope that uses Earth's atmosphere as a lens to achieve enormous magnification. He covers the history of telescopes and his path to the idea, plus Sol-scope and Jupiter-scope variants.

A Boeing 737 pilot explains the runaway stabilizer checklist, the procedure for stopping unwanted horizontal stabilizer movement such as an MCAS activation on the 737 MAX. He walks through the steps, the trim cutout switches and the jackscrew mechanism, and shows a simulator run including the manual trim wheel effort.

A PBS Space Time episode asking what matter, mass, and energy really are, starting with inertial versus gravitational mass and what mass-energy equivalence means.

Vox explainer arguing the two Boeing 737 Max crashes were not just a software bug but the result of a company's drive to beat its rival, with a flawed MCAS design.

Mentour Pilot, a 737 instructor, explains the approach-to-stall and escape manoeuvre and why the 737 MAX needs MCAS while the 737NG did not. He covers the jackscrew and pitch behavior in terms a general viewer can follow.

A two-minute explanation of what a rocket mass heater is, starting from how a conventional wood stove works and why creosote and chimney fires occur. It shows how burning hot and storing the heat in thermal mass makes for an efficient heater.

Numberphile's James Grime makes the case for base 12 (dozenal) over base 10, showing how twelve's many divisors make arithmetic and everyday fractions easier.

Paul Irish explains how pointerpointer.com works. It uses a hidden canvas of colored Voronoi regions to look up which photo matches the cursor position.

The first episode of Crash Course World History, in which John Green covers the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture and how it shaped civilization. It is delivered fast and with jokes.

Veritasium asks people where a tree's mass comes from, then explains that most of a dry tree's mass originates from carbon dioxide in the air. It combines street interviews with a short explanation of photosynthesis.

Veritasium explores why time seems to speed up as we age, covering chronoception and several competing explanations beyond the common proportional-theory argument.

Mick West analyzes the Navy "Go Fast" UFO footage and shows with simple trigonometry and the data overlay that the object is slow and high up, consistent with a balloon. He explains how parallax makes it look fast and argues the original TV claims were wrong.

National Geographic footage showing the cordyceps fungus infecting ants and other insects and steering their behavior so it can reproduce.

A Veritasium explainer on how the brain works and how we learn. It is inspired by Kahneman's Thinking, Fast and Slow and covers System 1 and System 2 thinking and why harder learning builds skill.

Technology Connections takes apart a 1940s Sunbeam Radiant Control toaster. It senses the toast's own browning and lowers and raises it automatically using purely mechanical parts and no electronics.

CGP Grey explains why European diseases devastated the Americas while few deadly diseases traveled the other way. He ties it to livestock domestication, dense cities, and the ideas of Guns, Germs and Steel.

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.

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.

A short Al Jazeera animation narrated by Amy Goodman presenting Noam Chomsky's five filters of the mass media: ownership, advertising, media elite sourcing, flak and a common enemy. It is part of the MediaTheorised series.

PBS Space Time explains the quantum eraser experiment, in which erasing which-path information appears to reverse causality in a double-slit setup. It discusses what this means for quantum mechanics.

Robert Miles examines whether the case for AI safety is a Pascal's mugging, a tiny probability of an enormous payoff. He argues it is not, because AI risk does not depend on vanishingly small probabilities.

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.

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.

Rob Miles explains for Computerphile why simple rule sets like Asimov's Three Laws cannot make robots and AI safe. Terms like harm and human are too ambiguous to specify precisely.

An animated xtranormal explainer on quantitative easing, what the Federal Reserve was doing and how things got there. It was made by Omid Malekan.

Minutephysics compares how efficiently different processes convert mass to energy per E=mc^2, from fire and fission to fusion, antimatter and black holes, which can convert a large fraction of mass to energy.

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.

Professor Mike Merrifield of Nottingham explains in a mostly uncut conversation why light travels slower in glass. He treats light as a wave and describes how the material's electrons produce secondary waves that combine to slow it.

A Tom Scott guest video by Grady Hillhouse of Practical Engineering on the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. A seemingly minor change to the support design led to catastrophic failure, which is why the case is taught as a lesson to check and double-check everything.

Numberphile's Ben Sparks works through the physics of a car crash, showing how kinetic energy grows with the square of speed and why stopping distance climbs so quickly as velocity increases.

A short Harvard Online animation, narrated by Professor Rob Lue, showing how ATP synthase works inside mitochondria. It comes from the HarvardX Cell Biology: Mitochondria course.

LegalEagle analyzes Katko v. Briney, the Iowa case about a homeowner whose shotgun booby trap injured a burglar, and the limits on deadly force in defending property.