high-speed design

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.

Not Just Bikes explains how North American speed limits are set and why posted limits matter far less than street design. It argues that drivers follow the road's cues, so safe speeds have to be built into the street.

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.

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.

Not Just Bikes compares the same cycling trip to a hardware store in Calgary and in Amsterdam, using a 'plus 1 minus 2' format. It shows how street design shapes how safe and practical cycling is.

A five-minute BicycleDutch episode showing how Dutch junctions are designed so cyclists and pedestrians can cross safely. It explains the layout choices that separate and protect them.

A short BicycleDutch episode showing how Dutch junctions with protected cycle paths are laid out. It argues these are proven, non-experimental designs that make intersections safer for cyclists.

A design essay on why products designed in Western contexts often fail when deployed in developing countries. It covers expert blindness and cultural assumptions, with examples such as malaria nets and the One Laptop Per Child project.

Veritasium explains why the one-way speed of light has never been measured, only the round-trip speed, since measuring it requires synchronized clocks that assume the answer. It explores the implications for relativity.

Technology Connections praises a 1940s-50s Sunbeam toaster and explains what makes a toaster well designed, drawing on a vintage Sunbeam video.

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.

Not Just Bikes introduces the "stroad", a street-road hybrid common in the US and Canada that fails at both jobs. He contrasts it with Dutch design, where each road has a single purpose, and covers cost, danger and ugliness.

Not Just Bikes explains why cars rarely crash into buildings in the Netherlands, attributing it to street design that forgives mistakes and to systematic crash investigation. It contrasts this with North American acceptance of such crashes.

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.

Not Just Bikes tours Houten, a Dutch town designed around cycling, explaining how its layout makes most trips by bike safe and easy. It also promotes a book about the town.

Map Men's Jay Foreman tells the story of how the London Tube map nearly looked very different, including Harry Beck's design and TfL's initial rejection of it. A short, witty history of a design icon.

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.

A Design Club episode that analyzes how Super Mario Bros. level 1-1 teaches players to play through level design alone, without text tutorials.

Answer in Progress investigates why Japanese websites look different from those elsewhere, using an AI clustering approach to test the 2013 claim. It then looks at possible explanations.

A short Not Just Bikes video on continuous sidewalks in the Netherlands, where the sidewalk runs unbroken across side streets so cars must visibly cross pedestrian space. It places them within Dutch sustainable safety and Vision Zero efforts.

Not Just Bikes explains how Dutch traffic lights use early detection, transit priority and conflict-free design to cut waiting. The aim is to move as many people as possible rather than as many cars.

A short BicycleDutch episode showing how Dutch protected intersections continue cycle paths through the junction without needing extra street width.

PBS Space Time argues that the speed of light is better understood as the speed of causality, the universal limit on how fast cause and effect propagate. Light travels at that speed because it is massless, but the limit itself is a property of spacetime.

ScienceClic explains why nothing can go faster than light by treating motion through space and time together, so everything moves at the speed of light through spacetime. It uses animated visuals to cover relativity basics in 12 minutes.

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.

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.

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 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.

Not Just Bikes shows how traffic calming is built into streets across the Netherlands, from city centres to villages. Street design naturally slows cars and makes roads safer.

Not Just Bikes explains why crossing streets is dangerous in the US and Canada, where roads are designed to move cars fast, and contrasts it with Dutch designs for pedestrians.

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.

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.

Tantacrul explains how he and engraver Simon Smith designed the free music notation font for MuseScore 3.6. It draws on the history of the SCORE notation application by Leland Smith.

Matt Parker analyzes the Minecraft speedrunning controversy in which Dream was accused of cheating via improbably lucky drops. He walks through the probability and the statistical arguments in the original accusation and the reply.

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.

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.

The Signal Path takes apart a Starlink dish layer by layer, analyzing the phased array RF design, system architecture and integrated circuits, with an X-ray of the RF stack.

Tom Scott explains why Ipley Cross in England's New Forest was one of Britain's most dangerous junctions. The angled crossroads lets a car's A-pillar hide approaching traffic and cyclists because there is no relative motion in the driver's view.

Not Just Bikes argues that oversized American fire trucks and fire department requirements push cities toward wide roads and dangerous street design. He compares this with the Dutch approach to emergency response.