efficiency

Bjorn Nyland compares wireless and wired DC fast charging for an electric car, measuring end-to-end efficiency. The test shows the wireless system holding up well against a plug.

Practical Engineering explains how canal locks work, including the water-saving basins of the new Panama Canal locks.

Technology Connections explains how refrigerator and freezer design affects energy use, using chest freezers to show why top-opening designs and layout choices matter. It includes thermal-camera footage of cold air spilling out of upright units.

Geekerwan reviews smartphone CPUs by power efficiency rather than benchmark scores, with test methodology and chapters on Qualcomm, Apple, Samsung and Google chips. It explains why high benchmark scores can coexist with heat and poor battery life.

Technology Connections explains why heat pumps matter right now, covering their efficiency, how they hold up in cold weather and the energy savings over burning fuel. It follows his earlier explainer on how they work.

A Technology Connections video on how ground-source (geothermal) heat pumps work and why they hold efficiency in winter. It also covers related heat pump information, and the description notes air-source heat pumps have since improved.

Engineering Explained examines Toyota's hydrogen-burning V8 engine built with Yamaha and explains the practical problems of hydrogen combustion vehicles. It covers efficiency, storage and distribution issues.

Technology Connections explains how heat pumps work as reversed air conditioners and why they can deliver several times the heat of resistive heating per unit of energy. It also tackles common myths such as poor cold-weather performance.

Technology Connections' long closing video in his heat pump series, arguing that adopting heat pumps is well within reach. It explains how they work and what it takes to start using them.

Technology Connections explains why electric kettles are uncommon in the US, centering on 120V circuits limiting power. He tests ways of boiling water on gas, electric ranges and kettles.

Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, presents practical data-oriented design techniques for shrinking memory footprint and making programs cache friendly. He ends with a case study of how these ideas sped up the Zig compiler.

Technology Connections explains in 33 minutes why thermoelectric (Peltier) cooling is far less efficient than compressor-based refrigeration.

Technology Connections looks at why awnings disappeared from houses and how effective they are at cutting solar heat gain and cooling costs. It argues they are a simple, forgotten cooling technology.

Technology Connections tests how quickly gas, induction and standard electric stoves boil water, with CO2 measurements and a discussion of the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Technology Connections examines why light bulbs have the lifespans they do, including the real history of the Phoebus cartel. He shows that bulb life trades off against brightness and efficiency rather than being simple planned obsolescence.

Geekerwan's Chinese-language review of Intel's Lunar Lake lightweight laptop chip, covering performance, perf-per-watt curves and battery life benchmarks. It tests whether x86 can compete on efficiency.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains why hydrogen is a poor answer for decarbonization, covering how most hydrogen comes from fossil fuels, the efficiency losses of green hydrogen and reliance on rare metals in fuel cells.

Real Engineering explains why biofuels, especially corn ethanol, are a poor energy source, looking at energy inputs, efficiency and carbon cost.

Bill Dally of NVIDIA gives a University of Washington lecture on trends in deep learning hardware. It covers numeric formats, specialized instructions, energy per operation and co-design of hardware and software.

In Ars Technica's War Stories, Naughty Dog co-founder Andy Gavin explains how the team squeezed Crash Bandicoot onto the original PlayStation. They overwrote Sony library code in RAM, built custom animation compression, and streamed assets around slow seek times.

Casey Muratori's first refterm lecture lays out philosophies of optimization, distinguishing optimization from non-pessimization, which means avoiding needless work. It uses his fast terminal renderer project to show how fast computers really are.

Casey Muratori's two-hour talk tracing the history of object-oriented programming back to the 1960s and examining how its ideas, and later entity component systems, came about. It is followed by a Q&A.

Planet of the Humans, a full documentary by Jeff Gibbs presented by Michael Moore, arguing that the green movement has been co-opted by corporate and wealthy interests and that techno-fixes are not enough.

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.

Climate Town argues for moving away from gas stoves. It covers the gas industry's decades of marketing and lobbying, health effects of gas cooking, methane leaks, and the case for induction.

Casey Muratori shows how fast a terminal renderer can run, building a simple reference renderer that handles Unicode and colored text far quicker than Windows Terminal. He argues that common excuses for slow terminals do not hold up.

Kaze Emanuar explains how he rewrote and optimized the Super Mario 64 source code so it runs far faster on real N64 hardware. He covers performance bottlenecks and fixes in detail for his ROM hacks.

Casey Muratori's University of Twente guest lecture is a case study in how straightforward code can cut thousands of lines and tens of seconds of runtime down to a few dozen lines running in under a second. It uses concrete examples to show why software is often an order of magnitude slower than it should be.

A long Technology Connections video arguing that public understanding of renewable energy is distorted. It covers solar economics, land use compared with ethanol corn, and battery myths such as cobalt.

A feature-length film by the Makani team chronicling their thirteen-year effort to build energy kites that harvest wind power, with footage from test sites in Hawaii, California and Norway. It shows the engineering, the team and the eventual shutdown.

Richard Feldman explains how pure functional languages can match or beat imperative ones on performance. Compilers can turn immutable code into in-place mutation, avoiding naive copying. The talk draws on his work on the Roc language.

Practical Engineering explains why connecting solar and other inverter-based generation to the grid is hard. It covers grid stability, load balancing and the behind-the-scenes engineering challenges of renewables.

Practical Engineering explains what a black start is: restarting a power grid after total collapse. It shows why most plants need outside power to start and why rebuilding a synchronized grid is delicate and high-stakes.

Tech Ingredients shows how to make a homemade radiative cooling paint, with a custom liquid panel that cools below ambient temperature outdoors. The video covers the materials and how to apply the paint.

Casey Muratori shows how typical 'clean code' object-oriented patterns can cost large factors in performance. He benchmarks them against simpler data-oriented code.

Matthias Wandel uses anemometer measurements to find where to place a fan to move the most air through a house at night. He finds that placing the fan some distance back from the window works better.

Emery Berger argues that performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern systems, showing how code layout and link order can swamp optimization effects. He presents tools that evaluate performance more reliably.

Aging Wheels compares a road trip in a Polestar 2 with an identical drive in a Tesla, showing the charging problems of non-Tesla EVs. It argues that outside Tesla's network, EV road trips have become frustrating.

NightHawkInLight shows how to make ultra-white radiative paint that cools surfaces below ambient temperature without electricity. He walks through the research papers and the household-materials process.

The first episode of James Burke's Connections series, 'The Trigger Effect', explores how modern society depends on interlinked technological systems and how quickly it breaks down when they fail, starting with a power blackout.