fact-checking

Vsauce explores math through card tricks and big numbers, including an animation of how enormous 52 factorial, the number of deck orderings, really is.

Bill Hammack of Engineer Guy explains the engineering behind the aluminum beverage can: why it is cylindrical, how it is manufactured, why it narrows at the top, the double seam, and how the pull tab works.

The 8-Bit Guy covers IBM's 1981 CGA graphics system, including how composite output and artifacting produced extra colors beyond the nominal palette. He argues CGA looked better in period than it does on RGB monitors.

A short Al Jazeera animation narrated by Amy Goodman presenting Noam Chomsky's five filters of the mass media: ownership, advertising, media elite sourcing, flak and a common enemy. It is part of the MediaTheorised series.

MinutePhysics explains Shor's algorithm, showing how a quantum computer factors large integers by finding the period of a number modulo N. It walks through the modular arithmetic and number theory that give the exponential speedup over classical factoring, and why this threatens encryption.

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.

Engineering Explained works through whether electric cars are really worse for the environment than gasoline cars. It covers battery production emissions, the electricity mix used to charge, and how long an EV takes to break even on lifetime emissions.

An animated simulation comparing single-winner voting methods such as plurality, instant runoff and STAR. Colored regions show which candidate wins as a randomized electorate shifts across a two-dimensional political space, building on Ka-Ping Yee's earlier diagrams.

A Kurzgesagt animated explainer on meat: why people love it and what it costs animals, the environment and health. It lays out the complicated trade-offs of meat production and consumption.

CGP Grey explains the history of the US Social Security card and number, and why they became a de facto national ID despite never being meant for it. He also covers why America resists a proper identity card.

A 10-minute 3Blue1Brown chapter explaining the determinant as the factor by which a linear transformation scales area or volume. It builds the idea geometrically with animations before any formulas.

Veritasium explains the effort to redefine the kilogram, which was still defined by a physical artifact, and how a near-perfect silicon sphere from the Avogadro project helps. It also covers the history of the unit's odd naming.

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.

3Blue1Brown illustrates how enormous the 256-bit search space is, showing how infeasible it is to find a hash or key by guessing and checking.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment on the real facts of the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, covering the severity of the burns and the corporate PR campaign that painted it as frivolous.

Dave Jones of EEVblog looks at a sub-3-cent microcontroller from Padauk and other obscure Chinese manufacturers. He shows how to find such parts and where to buy them in stock.

Kurzgesagt explains how the European Union is governed, how its officials are elected or appointed, and whether a citizen's vote actually matters.

Numberphile's James Grime discusses highly composite numbers, nicknamed anti-primes, which have more factors than any smaller number, using 5040 as the central example. It touches on Plato and Ramanujan.

A short CGP Grey explainer about how countries are defined, why recognition by others matters, and the oddities of places like Taiwan and Vatican City. It shows that statehood is partly a matter of diplomacy rather than fact.

A two-minute clip in which Milton Friedman uses a humble pencil to show how thousands of strangers across many countries cooperate, without central direction, to make a simple product. It is a short visual version of the 'I, Pencil' essay's argument about free markets and dispersed knowledge.

3kliksphilip summarizes Valve's GDC talk on VACNet, a deep-learning system that flags CS:GO cheaters and feeds the Overwatch review queue. It covers Trust Factor, VAC, and how the data is collected and analyzed.