lost knowledge

WIRED has UCLA professor Amit Sahai explain zero-knowledge proofs to a child, a teen, a college student, a grad student and an expert. Each round goes deeper into the cryptography and why it matters.

Corridor Crew tracks down Disney's lost sodium vapor prism process, used for Mary Poppins-era transparency mattes. They explain how a narrow sodium wavelength and a beam splitter enabled better compositing than green screen.

Kurzgesagt asks whether advanced civilizations could have existed on Earth in the deep past and left little evidence. It looks at time as a dimension for searching for alien civilizations and the limits of the geological record.

Musician and audio engineer Benn Jordan tries Dolby Atmos as a consumer, covering the theory of immersive audio, its business model, and home theater and headphone listening. He concludes it often falls short of the pitch.

Scott Manley examines why SpaceX, Google and others are looking at orbital data centers. He walks through the economics, heat rejection and solar power arguments, with links to the Lumen/Starcloud and Google Suncatcher papers.

Munro Live's Model Y episode 36 has Sandy Munro walk through the disassembled Tesla Octovalve and heat pump system. He explains how the components are made and what each one does.