information processing

A PBS Space Time episode asking whether the universe's information can ever truly be lost, tying quantum mechanics, determinism and black holes together. It sets up the black hole information paradox.

Technology Connections explains why the superheterodyne radio has its name and how mixing frequencies lets it tune stations well. It walks through the underlying wave phenomena and algebra and why the design solved a hard tuning problem.

PBS Space Time episode on the black hole information paradox, covering how black holes seem to destroy information, the no-hair conjecture and the proposed role of the event horizon. It is part of a series on black holes.

3Blue1Brown's animated visual introduction to the Fourier Transform, showing how a signal breaks into frequency components.

3Blue1Brown shows how the uncertainty principle arises from Fourier transforms. A wave packet cannot be narrow in both position and frequency, so the principle is a property of waves rather than of measurement.

MIT researchers show that sound can be recovered from silent video by analyzing tiny vibrations in objects such as a potato chip bag. It works even with consumer cameras by using rolling shutter.

Mike Pound explains the discrete cosine transform and how it underpins JPEG compression. It is part two of Computerphile's JPEG series.

Huygens Optics explains the Fourier transform and shows how a lens performs one optically. A DLP projector is used as a Fourier filter to do simple pattern recognition on lithographic character patterns.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how Unicode and UTF-8 grew out of messy older character encodings to become the web's standard. It covers why the design works and how it handles worldwide text.

Tom Scott explains why confetti and snow wreck video quality, using interframe compression and bitrate. He demonstrates it live by changing the quality on screen.

A Justin Bieber song slowed down 800% with the PaulStretch program, turning a pop track into a long ambient drone.

Onslaught's Bad Apple 64 is a Commodore 64 demo that streams over 2000 frames of the Bad Apple animation from a single disk side at 12fps, with each frame packed to around 70 bytes.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how floating point numbers work, why moving the binary point is fast, and why it handles money badly.

A spectrogram analysis of Aphex Twin's track commonly called [Equation] from Windowlicker, rendered from a lossless version. At about 5:30 the spectrogram reveals an image of Richard D. James's face.

A six-minute clip of Adobe's MAX 2011 sneak peek showing a Photoshop prototype that removes motion blur from photos. The audience reacts with astonishment as blurry images become legible.

A short conference talk from !!Con 2017 in which Kevin Chen explains the HDR imaging algorithm from a foundational paper, framing it as a system of linear equations, and implements it in a Microsoft Excel spreadsheet. No prior image processing knowledge is needed.

The final codec conversation from Metal Gear Solid 2, in which the AI 'Colonel' explains that the Patriots filter out junk information and curate truth for humanity. It plays as a dark meditation on information overload, manipulation and shared reality.

A Kurzgesagt video arguing that social media's problem is information flooding and tribal polarization. It suggests a return to smaller online communities and more in-person interaction.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth argues in this TED talk that perception is a controlled hallucination: the brain constantly predicts the world and our shared agreement is what we call reality. He also touches on the construction of the self.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment takes on Dr. Oz and the dietary supplement industry. It explains what is problematic about both, with a comedic wrap-up.

Acerola explores building a shader that turns games into ASCII art, walking through techniques such as brightness mapping and edge detection to see whether it looks good.

MinutePhysics explains that computers store brightness nonlinearly, so blurring and blending colors in raw RGB gives wrong, dark results. It shows why mixed colors, such as in gradients, look off.

A short Last Week Tonight segment where John Oliver stages a statistically representative climate debate, with Bill Nye facing a crowd of dissenters. It satirizes false balance in media coverage.

A PBS Space Time episode explaining the holographic principle: the idea that our 3+1 dimensional universe may be described by information on a lower-dimensional boundary. It walks through black hole entropy and the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Part 1 of Smarter Every Day's three-part series on manipulating the YouTube algorithm. It features Renee DiResta and examples of how social media platforms can be manipulated.

Kurzgesagt examines how AI-generated content is flooding the internet, from video and music to news and books. It looks at how this makes verifying what is real harder.

Matt Parker examines claims that Biden's 2020 vote counts violate Benford's Law, explaining the law and why it often does not apply to precinct-level election data.

A short clip of molecular biologist Cristina Sanchez describing her lab research on how THC affects cancer cells. It is uploaded on a channel promoting cannabis as a cancer treatment.

A short 'How It's Made' television segment showing the industrial process of turning canola seed into cooking oil. It walks through pressing, solvent extraction and refining steps.

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.

Chinese Cooking Demystified shows an ordinary, everyday Chinese wet market to counter sensationalized coverage during the early pandemic, with a pinned comment adding nuance.

PBS Space Time explains the quantum eraser experiment, in which erasing which-path information appears to reverse causality in a double-slit setup. It discusses what this means for quantum mechanics.

Michael Wesch's five-minute video about Web 2.0, showing how the read/write web, XML and user-generated content change how people create and share information.

Eli Pariser's TED talk argues that personalized web services trap users in filter bubbles, limiting exposure to challenging information. He says this is bad for individuals and for democracy.

minutephysics, in collaboration with the US Census Bureau, explains differential privacy and why the 2020 census adds noise to protect individuals' data. It walks through how statistics can leak private information.

A short clip of former KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov in 1984 describing Soviet ideological subversion of Western societies. It is a political commentary excerpt from his longer lecture.

A short Techquickie explainer on why laptop webcams are much worse than phone cameras. It covers sensor size, image processing, and the interface differences between laptops and phones, with input from a Logitech engineer.

Channel 4 News reports on undercover Greenpeace footage of an ExxonMobil lobbyist describing efforts to weaken climate legislation. Exxon disputes the claims.

2kliksphilip examines UserBenchmark, a hardware comparison site known for strongly biased, pro-Intel writing. The video explains the site's credibility problems and points viewers to better sources for CPU and GPU information.

Pranav Mistry demos SixthSense, a wearable device that projects information onto the physical world and lets people interact with data through gestures. He also shows a paper "laptop" and says he will open-source the software.