high school debate

Matt Parker on Numberphile explains the strange properties of spheres in higher dimensions, such as how they poke out of their bounding boxes. It uses Pythagoras to build intuition for 4D and beyond.

Tom Scott visits an eHighway test in Lubeck, Germany, where electric trucks with pantographs draw power from overhead wires. He explains how this could electrify road freight.

A Vox explainer on why California's high-speed rail project is years late and far over budget, with only a few concrete structures built by 2022. It covers the political, legal and routing challenges behind the delays.

Numberphile talks with Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown about a darts puzzle with a shrinking bullseye. Solving it takes the volumes of high-dimensional spheres, and the answer turns up Euler's number.

3Blue1Brown visualizes high-dimensional spheres to explain a surprising puzzle about how a sphere fits in a box as dimensions grow. It builds geometric intuition for counterintuitive properties of high-dimensional space.

Thunderf00t presents high-speed camera footage of alkali metals such as sodium and NaK reacting with water. The footage shows that the explosion is not caused by hydrogen ignition, as the usual explanation says. It is a Coulomb explosion driven by electrons leaving the metal.

A short Not Just Bikes video on the 1960s plans (Plan Jokinen) to cut highways through Amsterdam to accommodate cars. It shows how radically different the city would look had they succeeded.

A Technology Connections video weighing LED streetlights against high pressure sodium lamps, covering efficiency, color, cost and light pollution. It is a follow-up to his earlier explanation of why street lights are orange.

A School of Life video arguing that everyone marries someone who is somewhat wrong for them, and that this is unavoidable. It is a four-minute version of an essay by Alain de Botton.

Adam Ragusea examines whether olive oil is unsafe for high-heat cooking and whether it tastes bad when heated. He cites studies showing it is among the most stable cooking oils and that smoke-point worries are overblown.

The School of Life sets out principles for making attractive cities, arguing that the art has been lost in the modern world.

A School of Life short introducing Michel Foucault, who questioned assumed progress in how society treats madness, medicine and sexuality.

PBS Space Time explains the Bohr-Einstein debate over quantum mechanics and how quantum entanglement settled it. It covers the weirdness of measurement and nonlocal correlations.

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.

CGP Grey's sarcastic animated video adapted from the book How to Be Miserable, listing habits that reliably make people unhappy. By inverting the advice, it shows what to avoid and prompts reflection on goals and routines.

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.

A Wendover Productions explainer on how China built the world's largest high-speed rail network so quickly and why its rail strategy differs from America's. It covers politics, social benefits and the economics of unprofitable lines.

The first video in potholer54's climate series, giving a basic look at how climate scientists infer that man-made carbon gases are changing the climate. It is a short explainer meant to present the scientific evidence plainly.

Destin of Smarter Every Day films a cat falling in high-speed slow motion to show how cats right themselves in midair, and introduces the physics behind it.

The 8-Bit Guy explains the color limitations of 1980s computers and consoles such as the NES and Commodore 64. It shows how sprites, attributes and palettes shaped the look of old games.

Veritasium investigates whether a wind-powered vehicle can travel directly downwind faster than the wind, driving the Blackbird craft himself. The video explains the physics behind a claim some physics professors dispute.

PolyMatter examines how universities, especially in the West, depend on foreign and Chinese student tuition and how rankings and incentives distort institutions around that money.

John Green explains why the US spends far more on health care than other countries, going through insurers, drug companies, hospitals and lawyers. He argues the causes are complicated rather than a simple blame game.

A Hitachi promotional cartoon in the style of Schoolhouse Rock explaining perpendicular magnetic recording for hard drives.

A Vox explainer from the 2020 election series on why American public transit is so poor. It traces the effect of the interstate highway system on cities and the resulting car dependence.

BigClive explains why microwave oven transformer projects are extremely dangerous, since the high voltage and high current can kill. He contrasts them with spot welder builds where the secondary is replaced by low-voltage heavy wire.

Tom Scott visits IEX, a stock exchange that slows down trading with a long coil of fiber. The coil removes the speed advantage of high-frequency traders.

A Vox explainer on how mandatory parking minimums and free parking impose hidden costs on cities. It draws on Donald Shoup's work and gives the history of parking requirements.

A School of Life animated overview of Albert Camus, covering his existentialism and absurdism and his answer to the question of meaninglessness.

A rap battle in which John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek debate the causes of boom and bust, stimulus, and bailouts. It was produced by Econstories to teach the two schools of thought.

Wendover Productions explains why US passenger rail lags behind other countries. It covers freight companies owning most of the track, geography and population density, and the economics of competing with flying.

The first episode of Crash Course World History, in which John Green covers the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture and how it shaped civilization. It is delivered fast and with jokes.

A five-minute CGP Grey explainer arguing that a phone is effectively an extension of your mind, and that any backdoor or master key into encrypted devices will inevitably be abused or leaked. It frames the encryption debate as locks that are either unbreakable or absent.

CityNerd explains why traffic congestion grows nonlinearly as more cars use a road network, and why adding road capacity tends not to fix it. It covers the consequences for drivers, bus riders, cyclists and pedestrians, and discusses alternatives such as true bus rapid transit.

A video explaining why Japanese cities look the way they do, through Japan's national tiered zoning system that permits mixed use and flexible development. It compares this approach with more restrictive zoning elsewhere.

A short infographic video on the distribution of wealth in America, contrasting what people believe, what they consider ideal, and the actual numbers. It highlights how top-heavy US wealth is.

Robert Miles explains the orthogonality thesis: how an agent can be highly intelligent while pursuing goals that seem stupid or alien to humans. He separates intelligence from goals and touches on the stamp-collector example.

3Blue1Brown builds visual intuition for quaternions, showing how to think about this four-dimensional number system using stereographic projection and rotations in 3D space. It is part one of a two-part series with an interactive companion site.

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.

The first episode of a Cities: Skylines series on urban politics and planning, focused on parking. It uses the game to show how parking minimums shape cities, drawing on Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking.