dan dennett

A SciShow episode in which Hank Green introduces five of the most dangerous chemicals, from lethal toxins to substances that explode on contact. It is an entertaining overview of extreme chemical hazards.

Vox's Joe Posner, with help from 99% Invisible, explains why bad doors are everywhere. It covers Don Norman's long-running complaint about doors and the idea that good design should not need instructions.

Benn Jordan's video about storing a PNG image in a living bird, a starling that learns to reproduce encoded sounds. It mixes ornithology, audio engineering, and data encoding.

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.

Tom Scott explains why Ipley Cross in England's New Forest was one of Britain's most dangerous junctions. The angled crossroads lets a car's A-pillar hide approaching traffic and cyclists because there is no relative motion in the driver's view.

Derek Sivers annotates a short clip of a lone dancer at a festival, showing how a first follower turns a ridiculous act into a movement. He draws out lessons about leadership and making it easy to follow.

Tom Scott visits the Strid at Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, a deceptively narrow stretch of river with dangerous currents. He covers its reputation and the 12th-century legend of the Boy of Egremont.

An RSA Animate whiteboard adaptation of Dan Pink's talk on what motivates people at work. It argues that beyond simple tasks, autonomy, mastery and purpose drive performance more than money.

Technology Connections explains how LED traffic lights, which do not melt snow, drew complaints and were blamed for accidents. He uses it to illustrate the 'but sometimes' fallacy against new technology.

AlphaPhoenix uses a custom high-speed measurement setup to watch voltage waves travel down wires and split at a fork. It answers how electricity knows where to go and how quickly that process happens.

An Extra Credits episode on China's Sesame Credit, which gamifies obedient citizenship through a social score. It covers how the system rewards conformity and pressures people through their friends' behavior.

Geoff Cumming uses a simulation to show how wildly the p value varies from one replication to the next because of sampling variability. He argues for estimation and confidence intervals over null hypothesis significance testing.

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.

An RSA Animate adaptation of a Dan Ariely lecture on dishonesty. It explores when ordinary people lie or cheat and how they rationalize small acts of dishonesty.

A guest video by Welch Labs on 3Blue1Brown explaining how text-to-image and video models work. It covers CLIP, shared embedding spaces, diffusion models (DDPM, DDIM), conditioning, guidance and negative prompts.

FortNine argues that the US DOT motorcycle helmet standard (FMVSS 218) is badly outdated and weak. It compares it with Snell and ECE standards and points to where you can look up test reports for your own helmet.

Benn Jordan explains how Flock Safety's license plate cameras log and share vehicle locations, and explores how adversarial AI can defeat them. It covers weak security and the surveillance risks of private police-camera networks.

Benn Jordan investigates infrasound and low-frequency noise from data centers, including xAI's Colossus and a crypto mine, and reports his own experiments on the effects. The video covers the health and community impacts on nearby residents.

Musician and audio engineer Benn Jordan tries Dolby Atmos as a consumer, covering the theory of immersive audio, its business model, and home theater and headphone listening. He concludes it often falls short of the pitch.

Musician Benn Jordan explains and demonstrates adversarial noise that poison-pills music files against AI training and scraping.

Musician Benn Jordan uses AI to detect AI-generated music and digs into music industry data, including streaming payouts and sample library copyright problems. He covers ways to tell whether a track is human-made.

A two-minute animation of an Alan Watts talk arguing that life is like music: it is meant to be danced to in the moment, not rushed toward a final goal. It is a short, accessible take on living in the present.

A Computerphile video in which Rob Miles warns against assuming a general AI will think like a human. He uses the thought experiment of a stamp-collecting AI to show how a goal-driven system could pursue its aim with dangerous results.

A one-minute clip about Paul Otlet, the Belgian bibliographer who in 1934 imagined users accessing a remote database through an electric telescope over a phone line. It presents his vision as a precursor of the web.

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.

Veritasium argues that electric energy is carried by fields around the wires rather than by electrons moving through them, using a thought experiment with a large circuit.

Veritasium debunks the idea of learning styles, such as being a visual learner, with an interview with Daniel Willingham and a memory experiment. It argues that a multimodal approach helps everyone.

Not Just Bikes explains how SUVs and light trucks have grown in size and share of US sales, and why that is dangerous for pedestrians, cyclists and city life. He covers the regulatory loopholes, such as fuel economy rules and the chicken tax, that favored them.

Mick West explains the three Navy UFO videos (FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST) released in 2020, giving mundane explanations such as a distant plane and camera artifacts. He notes the videos were not new and had been circulating since 2017.

Kurzgesagt explains how accumulating space junk could trigger a collision cascade (Kessler syndrome) that makes launches too dangerous and traps humanity on Earth.

America's Test Kitchen tests eight carbon-steel skillets to find the best one, asking whether a single pan can replace stainless, cast iron and nonstick. It names a winner and covers how the pans perform.

Real Engineering looks at why Africa's abundant solar potential is hard to turn into usable power, especially for Europe. It covers the transmission, infrastructure and economic obstacles, and the pivot from concentrated solar to photovoltaics.

Technology Connections explains weaknesses in the US electrical system, centering on how cord and circuit ratings can mismatch and cause fires. It covers extension cords, power strips and plug history in about 25 minutes.

Tom Scott tells how John Reber's plan to dam San Francisco Bay was disproved by the Army Corps of Engineers' giant hydraulic Bay Model in Sausalito. The model showed the plan would have been dangerously wrong.

Not Just Bikes compares the same cycling trip to a hardware store in Calgary and in Amsterdam, using a 'plus 1 minus 2' format. It shows how street design shapes how safe and practical cycling is.

Not Just Bikes argues that oversized American fire trucks and fire department requirements push cities toward wide roads and dangerous street design. He compares this with the Dutch approach to emergency response.

Rob Miles explains on Computerphile why implementing an off switch for a general AI is hard. A capable agent would resist being stopped because shutdown prevents it from achieving its goal.

Numberphile with Daniel Erman on the Josephus problem, where people in a circle are eliminated in turn. It shows how the survivor's position follows a neat pattern tied to powers of two and binary.

Technology Connections explains how a home can act as a thermal battery by pre-cooling or pre-heating when electricity is cheap or abundant. He shows how this shifts load off-peak and eases strain on the grid.

Randall Munroe of xkcd answers what would happen if you swam in a spent nuclear fuel pool, and how much radiation you would receive at the surface versus at depth.