command line

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 Wendover Productions explainer arguing that major airlines make much of their profit from loyalty programs and co-branded credit cards rather than flying. It frames airlines as quasi-banks that sell points in bulk, using United's pandemic-era loan as a hook.

Kurzgesagt explains why humans feel loneliness, its evolutionary role, and how modern life can turn it into a harmful downward spiral. It cites research and offers ideas on what to do about it.

A Wendover Productions explainer on how budget airlines can sell tickets for under 10 euros. It covers the costs airlines face and how low-cost carriers structure their business.

A 10-minute 3Blue1Brown chapter explaining the determinant as the factor by which a linear transformation scales area or volume. It builds the idea geometrically with animations before any formulas.

3Blue1Brown's chapter on eigenvectors and eigenvalues in the Essence of Linear Algebra series. It builds a visual intuition for what they mean, why an eigenbasis is useful, and ends with a puzzle.

Real Engineering explains how Zipline built a drone delivery network for medical supplies in Rwanda. It covers the fixed-wing drones, catapult launch, parachute drop and the logistics behind the service.

The first episode of a Cities: Skylines series on urban politics and planning, focused on parking. It uses the game to show how parking minimums shape cities, drawing on Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking.

ElectroBOOM's Mehdi Sadaghdar responds to Veritasium's lamp-and-long-wire puzzle, analysing it as an electrical engineer. He covers where the original framing misleads and the role of stray capacitance.

Technology Connections explains how analog television produced moving images without computers, covering scanning, CRTs and standards like NTSC and PAL. It is part of a series on analog TV.

FortNine explains how Harley-Davidson ended up in decline, from a narrow lifestyle niche and an aging customer base to the pandemic hitting a company already in trouble.

A Wendover Productions explainer on the political agreements, from the Chicago Convention onward, that determine which airlines can fly where. It lays out the five freedoms of the air.

Engineering Explained examines new research suggesting corn ethanol in US gasoline may emit as much or more carbon than gasoline. It covers the Renewable Fuel Standard and why ethanol was assumed to be a green fuel.

Cliff Stoll shows and explains his two Friden EC-132 electronic calculators for Numberphile. The video covers how these early machines worked, including their unusual acoustic delay line memory.

A Kurzgesagt video arguing that social media's problem is information flooding and tribal polarization. It suggests a return to smaller online communities and more in-person interaction.

Wendover Productions explains why modern airliners fly no faster than they did decades ago, covering the economics of speed and fuel efficiency, and why supersonic travel faded.

Veritasium examines whether food has become less nutritious, weighing soil depletion, selective breeding and rising atmospheric CO2. It evidences nutrient decline even in weeds over a century and ties it to faster plant growth.

Matt Cutts of Google explains what cloaking is: serving different content to search engine crawlers than to users. He covers why it violates Google's webmaster guidelines.

Half as Interesting explains why airlines flew empty 'ghost flights' out of Heathrow to keep their landing slots under use-it-or-lose-it rules.

Tom Scott visits ThyssenKrupp's test tower in Rottweil to see the Multi, a rope-free elevator that uses linear motors to move cabins sideways as well as vertically.

Autoline's John McElroy and Caresoft president Terry Woychowski look at the BYD Seagull, an electric hatchback that sells in China for about $11,500. Woychowski points out the cost-saving design and manufacturing choices, and McElroy takes it for a short test drive.

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.

CGP Grey compares airplane boarding methods, based on an arXiv paper, and shows why the intuitive back-to-front approach is slow while random or outside-in boarding does better.

Wendover Productions explains why Boeing's efficient 787 beat Airbus's giant A380, contrasting hub-and-spoke with point-to-point routes. It covers the economics of long-haul flights.

A Wendover Productions explainer on why train tickets, especially Amtrak in the US, cost so much compared with flying. It breaks down staffing, speed and the cost components behind a ticket.

A short Wendover Productions explainer on ETOPS, the rules that let twin-engine jets fly long routes over oceans. It covers the economics that favored twinjets like the 787 over four-engine aircraft like the A380 and 747.

Tom Scott's video whose title shows its own live view count, and the story of how he made that work. It explains why open APIs were once common and why they largely disappeared.

A short Harvard animation narrated by Professor Rob Lue introducing mitochondria as the cell's powerhouses and how cells turn food and oxygen into energy.

Not Just Bikes introduces the "stroad", a street-road hybrid common in the US and Canada that fails at both jobs. He contrasts it with Dutch design, where each road has a single purpose, and covers cost, danger and ugliness.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains how close nuclear fusion really is to break-even, and why headlines about ITER and lab milestones are misleading. She distinguishes plasma gain (Q plasma) from whole-system gain (Q total) and shows the latter is still far below one.

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.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why electronic voting is a bad idea, arguing that paper ballots are transparent, auditable and hard to tamper with at scale. He covers why moving voting to phones, tablets or computers undermines trust and verifiability.

CGP Grey explains how ideas spread like germs, and why content that triggers outrage spreads fastest, using a study on what makes online content viral. He argues that opposing outrage-driven memes feed each other.

Kurzgesagt's animated take on climate change argues that, despite alarming headlines, there are real reasons for hope as technology, policy and public attitudes shift. It surveys trends and solutions while acknowledging the scale of the problem.

MinutePhysics explains that computers store brightness nonlinearly, so blurring and blending colors in raw RGB gives wrong, dark results. It shows why mixed colors, such as in gradients, look off.

Engineering Explained works through whether electric cars are really worse for the environment than gasoline cars. It covers battery production emissions, the electricity mix used to charge, and how long an EV takes to break even on lifetime emissions.

Not Just Bikes explains how small pockets of shops and restaurants inside residential Dutch neighbourhoods create liveliness and help reduce traffic. It argues this kind of mixed-use design has been illegal in most of the US and Canada for a century because of zoning, and should be brought back.

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.

Adam Neely explains what perfect (absolute) pitch is, how it differs from relative and quasi-absolute pitch, and why he would not want it. He covers its drawbacks, including drift with age.

A Vox Borders episode with Johnny Harris explaining how China is gradually erasing the line between mainland China and Hong Kong since the 1997 handover. It describes the one country, two systems arrangement and its expiration date.