entropy

PBS Space Time, together with It's Okay to be Smart and PBS Eons, asks how a universe drifting toward disorder produced something as complex as life. It presents the idea that the laws of physics, through thermodynamics, may actually favor the emergence of life.

3Blue1Brown's animated visual introduction to the Fourier Transform, showing how a signal breaks into frequency components.

3Blue1Brown shows how the uncertainty principle arises from Fourier transforms. A wave packet cannot be narrow in both position and frequency, so the principle is a property of waves rather than of measurement.

Mike Pound explains the discrete cosine transform and how it underpins JPEG compression. It is part two of Computerphile's JPEG series.

Huygens Optics explains the Fourier transform and shows how a lens performs one optically. A DLP projector is used as a Fourier filter to do simple pattern recognition on lithographic character patterns.

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.

Technology Connections explains why the superheterodyne radio has its name and how mixing frequencies lets it tune stations well. It walks through the underlying wave phenomena and algebra and why the design solved a hard tuning problem.

Tom Scott explains why confetti and snow wreck video quality, using interframe compression and bitrate. He demonstrates it live by changing the quality on screen.

A Justin Bieber song slowed down 800% with the PaulStretch program, turning a pop track into a long ambient drone.

Onslaught's Bad Apple 64 is a Commodore 64 demo that streams over 2000 frames of the Bad Apple animation from a single disk side at 12fps, with each frame packed to around 70 bytes.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how floating point numbers work, why moving the binary point is fast, and why it handles money badly.

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 spectrogram analysis of Aphex Twin's track commonly called [Equation] from Windowlicker, rendered from a lossless version. At about 5:30 the spectrogram reveals an image of Richard D. James's face.

A six-minute clip of Adobe's MAX 2011 sneak peek showing a Photoshop prototype that removes motion blur from photos. The audience reacts with astonishment as blurry images become legible.

A PBS Space Time episode explaining the holographic principle: the idea that our 3+1 dimensional universe may be described by information on a lower-dimensional boundary. It walks through black hole entropy and the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Flanders and Swann perform 'First and Second Law', a comic song about the laws of thermodynamics, from their 1964 stage show At the Drop of Another Hat. It sets the first and second laws to a deadpan call-and-response routine.