crop yield

Dr. Bruce Bugbee walks through the calculations for crop yield potential when light is the limiting factor, from photosynthetic quantum yield through respiration efficiency and harvest index, using the Energy Cascade Model.

A FoundMyFitness episode on how microplastics and associated chemicals such as BPA and PFAS accumulate in the body, including the brain and reproductive systems. It also discusses ways to reduce exposure.

Lex Fridman interviews legendary chip architect Jim Keller about Moore's Law, microprocessor design, and first-principles thinking. Keller draws on his work at AMD, Apple, Tesla and Intel, discussing instruction sets, transistor budgets, and self-driving.

Sophie Wilson, designer of the ARM instruction set, discusses the future of microprocessors, including the economics of scaling below 28nm and why much of a chip must stay powered off.

Coffeezilla reacts to Sam Bankman-Fried's explanation of yield farming on the Odd Lots podcast, arguing he effectively described a Ponzi scheme. The video was made well before FTX collapsed.

MIT researchers show that sound can be recovered from silent video by analyzing tiny vibrations in objects such as a potato chip bag. It works even with consumer cameras by using rolling shutter.

A creator runs an informal live test of whether Google or Facebook listen through the microphone to target ads, using Chrome on Windows 10. The description admits the methodology is flawed, including that live streaming itself records the microphone.

Farmer Gabe Brown talks about how he rebuilt the soil on his ranch using no-till farming, cover crops, and grazing animals. The talk was recorded at a sustainable agriculture symposium in Idaho in 2014.

A long talk by rancher Gabe Brown on turning his North Dakota farm into a regenerative ecosystem using no-till, cover crops and integrated livestock. It covers the five principles of soil health and how they pay off financially.

A ShortCircuit (Linus Tech Tips) review of Nvidia's RTX Voice, which uses GPU-based neural networks to remove background noise from microphone audio. It demonstrates how well the filtering works.

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.

Dave Jaggar, who defined much of the ARM architecture, recounts how Acorn's near-extinction led to ARM, including the history of Thumb, StrongARM, and the Austin team.

A vlogbrothers video tracing how the claim that people eat a credit card of plastic every week spread. It walks through the funded talking point, the misleading amplification, and the peer review that missed it.

A Computer History Museum oral history of Chuck Peddle, the engineer behind the 6502 and the Commodore PET, covering his career from GE through Motorola and MOS Technology. It runs nearly four hours.

A critique of the HD remaster of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, walking through cropping, color and effects problems that damaged the original look. It also advises which versions to buy.

Ben Eater starts a series building a working computer on breadboards around the 6502 microprocessor. In this first part he gets a 'hello world' running from scratch.

Gary Bernhardt's RubyConf 2012 talk on testing in isolation without mocking everything. It goes through behavior versus data, mutation versus immutability, and how a functional core with an imperative shell yields natural isolation and parallelism.

Mark Seemann argues that functional programming naturally yields many of the best practices object-oriented developers learn painfully. He shows how functional architecture leads to a pit of success, with a pure core and impure shell.

Conal Elliott presents his paper on automatic differentiation, deriving a simple, generalized AD algorithm from a natural specification. Varying the representation of derivatives yields forward and reverse mode algorithms that avoid the complexity and statefulness of backpropagation.

Jon Moore's Strange Loop 2017 talk argues that rate limiting is the wrong tool for protecting services from noisy clients. He proposes concurrency-based capacity management and quotas instead.

Footage from a camera on a Space Shuttle solid rocket booster from liftoff through descent, with audio enhanced by Skywalker Sound from the original camera microphones. The sound is real, not foley.

Peter Norvig's UBC distinguished lecture on how massive amounts of simple data, such as for language modeling, can yield understanding that hand-built models could not.

A Lambda Days keynote by Simon Peyton Jones and Tim Sweeney introducing Verse, Epic's functional logic language for the metaverse. It covers existential variables, unification and expressions yielding multiple values.

A short tour of the Megaprocessor, a microprocessor built at enormous scale from tens of thousands of discrete transistors. The builder shows what the machine is made of and where it now lives, at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, where visitors can play Tetris on it.

Quint BUILDs tests a rooftop water storage setup in which solar power pumps water up to the roof and a turbine generates power later. He works through the numbers to show how much energy it actually stores.

Big Clive tears down a smart meter with a wireless modem found among fly-tipped materials. He examines its internals and checks conspiracy claims about microphones, cameras and 5G.

A 1979 BBC Nationwide report asking whether word processors and networked microprocessors could end office commuting. It shows early word processing and a woman working from home, with surprisingly prophetic predictions.

Matt Parker follows the community effort to speed up his slow Wordle-solving code, which ended up running hundreds of millions of times faster. He walks through the techniques contributors used.

Researchers from the Artificial Life Lab Graz introduce the Primordial Particle System, where a simple motion law for self-propelled particles produces cell-like structures that self-reproduce and show life cycles.

Josef Holzer walks through his family's Krameterhof, one of Europe's oldest permaculture farms in the Austrian mountains, with fish ponds, terraces, fruit trees and grazing animals. It showcases water management and microclimates.

A CNN clip from an October 2008 rally where John McCain takes the microphone from a supporter and tells her Barack Obama is a decent family man.

A short Reuters news clip showing declassified Russian footage of the 1961 Tsar Bomba, the largest nuclear weapon ever detonated. It shows the blast and the mushroom cloud.

The Monty Python sketch "Dirty Hungarian Phrasebook", in which a faulty phrasebook yields lines like "My hovercraft is full of eels".

Epic Games' reveal of Unreal Engine 5, a real-time demo running on PlayStation 5. It showcases Nanite virtualized micropolygon geometry and Lumen global illumination.