code as data

Scott Manley analyzes the idea of putting data centers in orbit, prompted by Lumen Orbit's funding. He examines the claimed advantage of constant solar power against launch cost, cooling and mass.

Eager Space examines the practicality of putting data centers in orbit, walking through three scenarios with cost calculations and the launch cost reductions that would be required.

CGP Grey explains that postal codes are routing instructions for mail rather than geographic regions. He looks at the quirks and problems this causes.

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.

Matthias Wandel tests old and new code on a range of PCs, including a new mini PC, to measure how much faster modern hardware really is. He also shows optimization techniques such as branchless code, with benchmark programs on GitHub.

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.

Climate Town gives a comedic, fast-paced account of how the plastics industry promoted recycling, including the resin-code recycling symbol, while knowing most plastic could not be economically recycled. It points viewers to the Frontline documentary Plastic Wars for a deeper treatment.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths asks whether a country's reported land area accounts for hills and mountains, working through how surface area depends on the resolution of elevation data. It follows up on a question from a viewer and work by researchers who measured it.

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.

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.

Kyle Hill explains what nuclear waste actually is and how it is stored, arguing that the problem was effectively solved decades ago. It covers solid shielded waste and deep geological storage.

Food YouTuber Adam Ragusea argues that gas stovetops are weaker than electric burners, dirty to clean, and a health risk from indoor air pollution. He cites Consumer Reports ratings and a literature review on gas stove health effects.

Technology Connections praises a 1940s-50s Sunbeam toaster and explains what makes a toaster well designed, drawing on a vintage Sunbeam video.

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.

Cleo Abram's explainer on whether nuclear waste is really the intractable problem it is portrayed as, looking at how spent fuel can be recycled and used. It features a collaboration with Johnny Harris.

Technology Connections complains about the harsh, overly blue color of modern LED Christmas lights and tries more fixes for them. It follows earlier videos by the same creator on holiday lighting.

Asianometry explains the EUV light source inside ASML's lithography machines, where lasers hit falling tin droplets twice to produce 13.5 nm light. It walks through the engineering of the droplet generator, the pre-pulse and main laser, and the plasma that results.

Veritasium explains why the one-way speed of light has never been measured, only the round-trip speed, since measuring it requires synchronized clocks that assume the answer. It explores the implications for relativity.

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.

Veritasium recounts a $10,000 bet with a UCLA physics professor over whether a vehicle can travel downwind faster than the wind. He presents the professor's reasoning and demonstrations, including one without aerodynamics.

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.

Practical Engineering's explanation of the February 2021 Texas winter storm and the resulting power grid outage. It lays out the facts about ERCOT, the grid's isolation, and how generation across fuel types failed in the cold.

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.

Wendover Productions explains why drone delivery has not become the future once promised. It covers no-fly zones, costs and the difficulty of the final drop-off.

Wes Bos breaks down the techniques behind the McMaster-Carr website's speed: server-rendered HTML, prefetching, CDN and service worker caching, preloading, critical CSS and fixed-size images. He also notes its old-school jQuery and YUI JavaScript.

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.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains the delayed choice quantum eraser and argues it does not rewrite the past, as popular accounts claim. She walks through what the experiment actually shows.