incr_dom

Marcus du Sautoy of the BBC demonstrates the wisdom of the crowd, showing that averaging many guesses of jelly beans in a jar lands near the true count.

Numberphile with Simon Pampena on how humans misunderstand randomness, including coin-flip sequences, run lengths and the gambler's fallacy.

A Wendover Productions explainer on the political agreements, from the Chicago Convention onward, that determine which airlines can fly where. It lays out the five freedoms of the air.

CGP Grey explains why horses could be ridden and why other animals like zebras and bears were never domesticated for war or riding. It is a follow-up on the topic of animal domestication.

Veritasium explores why the number 37 turns up so often, drawing on Tom Magliery's collection of 37 sightings and a poll of about 200,000 people asked to pick a random number. It covers how humans choose numbers and why 37 stands out.

Tom Scott visits Cloudflare's San Francisco office to show the wall of lava lamps whose camera feed is used as a source of entropy for random number generation. It is a short explainer on how this helps secure internet encryption.

A ten-minute explainer from Hypermind on the wisdom of crowds, covering Galton's discovery and the diversity theorem. It argues that collective intelligence comes from diversity, independence and aggregation.

Comedian Dominic Frisby gives a ten-minute explanation of land value tax. He argues it would fix problems of rent-seeking and the economics of land ownership.

Harvard professor Arthur Brooks explains why boredom is useful rather than something to avoid. He describes how a wandering mind engages the brain's default mode network, which supports creativity and curiosity, and suggests it may protect against depression.

An illustrated 23-minute summary of David Friedman's talk based on The Machinery of Freedom. It describes how law, police and courts could work as market services in a stateless society, covering private law, polycentric law and objections.

Numberphile interviews Grant Sanderson of 3blue1brown about Bertrand's paradox, where different reasonable ways of picking a random chord of a circle give different probabilities.

CGP Grey explains why European diseases devastated the Americas while few deadly diseases traveled the other way. He ties it to livestock domestication, dense cities, and the ideas of Guns, Germs and Steel.

CGP Grey's quick, witty explainer on the differences between the United Kingdom, Great Britain and England, and the countries that make up the UK.

Smarter Every Day shares a binaural audio recording of the SpaceX Falcon Heavy launch made by Trevor Mahlmann, with explanations of the sounds including the sonic booms of the landing boosters. It is meant to be heard with headphones.

Modern Vintage Gamer looks at OpenLara, an open source Tomb Raider engine, running on the Game Boy Advance. The video explains how the port achieves playable speeds on the GBA's slow ARM CPU, with input from the developer XProger.

A short explainer from Nat and Friends on where Google Earth's 3D imagery comes from, how it is stitched together, and how often it is updated. It describes aircraft carrying camera rigs and photogrammetry that turns the photos into 3D models.

Dr Mike Pound explains the suspected backdoor in the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator and how elliptic curve constants could let someone predict its output.

CGP Grey's five-minute animated explainer on how copyright terms grew from 14 years to life plus decades. It uses Disney and Star Wars examples to argue the system has gone wrong.

An animated 11-minute tour of the whole field of mathematics as a single map, showing how pure and applied math and their sub-fields relate to each other.

Matthias Wandel tests old and new code on a range of PCs, including a new mini PC, to measure how much faster modern hardware really is. He also shows optimization techniques such as branchless code, with benchmark programs on GitHub.

CGP Grey explains first-past-the-post voting and why it pushes elections toward two dominant parties. It is the first in his series on electoral systems.

A short BicycleDutch video on how the Netherlands got its cycling infrastructure, including the 1970s protests and the shift away from car-centric planning. The channel later published an updated version.

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.

Tom Scott-style absurdist tour by Tom7 of SIGBOVIK chess projects: a tournament of 30 weird chess algorithms used to rate a color- and piece-blind chess program. Topics include mirrors, arithmetic encoding, perverted game tree search and a diluted Stockfish.

Not Just Bikes explains how many American suburbs, built all at once rather than incrementally, cannot cover their infrastructure costs and survive on growing debt. It draws on Strong Towns' work on the growth Ponzi scheme.

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.

Guitarist Jim Lill methodically tests what in an electric guitar affects its tone, swapping parts on a partscaster and even trying a 2x4 body. He finds that wood and construction matter far less than people assume.

Vsauce's explainer on Zipf's law, the pattern in which the frequency of a word is inversely related to its rank. It shows the pattern across many domains and discusses why it remains unexplained.

Linkus7 explains how a community reverse-engineered The Wind Waker to predict its random number generator and beat the Sploosh Kaboom battleship minigame consistently. It includes d3 animations by Peter Schmidt-Nielsen.

Historia Civilis explains the constitution of ancient Athens, including its assembly, offices and use of sortition to choose leaders. It draws on Aristotle and Plutarch.

A Kurzgesagt video on the conditions in which most farm animals are raised. It argues that cruelty is for cheaper rather than better meat, and that a small price increase per meal could avoid most of the suffering.

Military History Visualized charts ship production by the United States and Japan from December 1941 to September 1945. The growing numbers show why Japan, despite a stronger starting navy, could not win a long war.

Tom Scott features Kurtis Baute inside a sealed homemade biodome as carbon dioxide builds up, showing how stale air with elevated CO2 affects cognitive function. Sources include studies on CO2 and cognitive scores.

Asianometry explains why Russia cannot replace TSMC after sanctions halted chip shipments. It looks at Russian chip designers such as Baikal, MCST and Yadro, and at Russia's lagging domestic manufacturing capacity.

IBM's Dr. Talia Gershon explains quantum computing to five people of increasing expertise: a child, teen, college student, grad student and professional. The WIRED series format moves from simple analogies to technical detail.

Wendover Productions explains why American towns, retail and buildings increasingly look alike, covering zoning pressures, corporate standardization and cheap construction types like 5-over-1 buildings.

Professor Brailsford of the University of Nottingham describes how the university set out to print its own mathematics exam papers in the 1980s. The story centers on getting a Mergenthaler Linotron 202 typesetter to work with their own software.

Tom Scott explains YouTube's 11-character video IDs, which are base-64 encoded 64-bit numbers, and whether YouTube could ever run out of them. It covers counting systems and base 64 briefly.

Numberphile's Ben Sparks works through the physics of a car crash, showing how kinetic energy grows with the square of speed and why stopping distance climbs so quickly as velocity increases.

A short Vox video on Barcelona's superblocks, an urban design approach that closes interior streets to through traffic to return space to pedestrians.