excel

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.

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.

Veritasium's Derek Muller visits NASA JPL to see the Mars helicopter Ingenuity before it was mounted on the rover. He explains how it can fly in Mars's thin atmosphere with large, fast-spinning contra-rotating rotors and low mass, and covers power and cold.

Veritasium explains why the kilogram is being redefined in terms of Planck's constant rather than a physical metal artifact. It visits NIST to show the Kibble balance and why measuring mass precisely is hard.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay on Buster Keaton's visual comedy, examining how he built and framed his gags. It uses clips from his silent films to show the thinking behind them.

An episode of Journey to the Microcosmos, hosted by Hank Green, about diatoms, single-celled algae with glass shells. It covers their role in producing a large share of Earth's oxygen and their uses in beer filtering, paint and kitty litter.

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.

Asianometry traces the 30-year rise and peak of Japan's semiconductor industry from the 1950s to the 1980s, covering how a postwar country gained competence in an emerging technology.