mining

Linus Tech Tips tests a Chinese mining-only Nvidia card, hacked with a modified driver so it can render games and output video through an integrated GPU.

David Kriesel's 36C3 talk, in an English translation, analyzes a year of scraped Deutsche Bahn data covering every stop of every long-distance train in Germany. It explores delays and how punctuality is actually measured.

David Kriesel's 36C3 talk, in German, analyzes a year of scraped data on every stop of every long-distance train in Germany. It shows how Deutsche Bahn delay statistics hide cancellations and delays.

Motherboard's 2014 visit to a secretive Bitcoin mining operation in a repurposed factory in Liaoning, China, one of six sites producing about 4,050 bitcoins a month. It shows the machines and the workers' living conditions.

Andreas Antonopoulos answers a Bitcoin Q&A question about energy consumption in mining. He argues that mining is arbitrage for the cheapest electricity, drives investment in renewables, and that the traditional financial system has hidden externalities.

A two-minute clip of Andreas Antonopoulos explaining why a 51% attack on Bitcoin would not destroy it and what such an attack would cost. It is a succinct take on mining security.

Steve Yegge's OSCON Data 2011 talk imagines what you could do with Google-scale storage and compute a decade later. He argues smart people should work on hard problems such as biology rather than cat pictures, and the talk ends with a moment many took as him quitting Google.

Geologist Nick Zentner of Central Washington University gives an hour-long public lecture on the great earthquakes of the Pacific Northwest, including the Cascadia subduction zone and the evidence for past megaquakes. It is part of his Downtown Geology Lecture Series, recorded in Ellensburg in 2016.

A three-hour Joe Rogan podcast with Randall Carlson, builder and geomythologist, on catastrophic geological events, cosmic impacts and climate at the end of the last glacial period.

A three-hour Joe Rogan Experience conversation with Graham Hancock and Randall Carlson about lost civilizations, the Younger Dryas impact hypothesis and Earth's cataclysmic history.

Footage from the Chasing Ice project of the largest glacier calving event ever filmed, at Greenland's Ilulissat Glacier in 2008. A 75-minute event is condensed to a few minutes of cameras watching ice collapse.

Dan Britt lectures on the history of climate, covering orbital cycles, ice ages and conditions millions of years ago. It frames current climate debate with deep-time context.

Curious Droid asks what traces human civilization would leave in the geological record 65 million years from now. It considers how thin the fossil record of humanity might be.

Five hours of the late-night BBC Radio 4 Shipping Forecast, uploaded to mark its 150th anniversary. It can be used as sleep audio or to learn the sea areas named in the broadcast.

Practical Engineering explains what a 100-year flood actually means, combining statistics, hydrology and how society treats risk. Grady walks through local drainage infrastructure and the caveats in estimating flood probability.

Tom Scott visits Onkalo in Finland, the planned deep geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste intended to be sealed for 100,000 years.

A short documentary about the 1980 Lake Peigneur accident in Louisiana, where an oil rig drilled into a salt mine beneath the lake. The lake drained into the mine, creating a whirlpool that swallowed barges.

A one-minute clip from a cat cafe in Japan where sleeping cats wake and look around just before an earthquake begins shaking the room.

Tom Scott visits the Strid at Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, a deceptively narrow stretch of river with dangerous currents. He covers its reputation and the 12th-century legend of the Boy of Egremont.

Amateur footage of a Japanese coast guard boat riding up and over large tsunami waves after the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake. It is short and unedited.

A Discovery Channel computer simulation of a large asteroid impact on Earth, showing the scale of the devastation. It sits in a broader context of early Earth impacts and the moon-forming collision.

Amateur footage from 2014 of small airplanes being lifted and blown around during a microburst. It is a three-minute clip showing how violent the gusts can be.

Excerpts from Nick Breeze's 2012 interview with researcher Natalia Shakhova about methane release from the East Siberian Arctic Shelf. She discusses the risk of abrupt methane emissions.

Home video of the 11 March 2011 Japan earthquake, filmed as an early warning system detected the P wave and gave seconds of notice before the shaking began. The raw footage shows the warning in action.

A Last Week Tonight segment on the tension between public and private weather forecasting, including NOAA data and AccuWeather's lobbying against free public weather data.

Veritasium shows an experiment from Prof. Dan Lathrop's lab with a spinning sphere of molten sodium, used to study how turbulent convection in Earth's core generates a magnetic field. It is a short demonstration of dynamo physics.

NFPA video in which wildfire researcher Jack Cohen explains that embers (firebrands), not the flame front, are the main cause of homes igniting in wildfires. He shows how landscaping and removing debris around the home reduce risk.

3Blue1Brown explains the math and mechanics behind Bitcoin visually: ledgers, digital signatures, proof of work and the blockchain, building up a decentralized payment system from first principles.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on coal examines the industry, its executives and its treatment of miners, and includes the coverage of Robert Murray that led to a lawsuit.

ContraPoints' 35-minute video essay on incels, examining the community, its worldview and how people get radicalized. It is delivered with theatrical style and an empathetic tone.

AvE tears down the Juicero cold-press juicer, examining its heavily machined parts, electronics and the pricey juice packs. He pokes fun at the product and venture-funded culture along the way.

AvE tears down a roughly $500 Dyson hair dryer, examining how its motor, airflow and electronics fit into a small body. He runs tests along the way and ultimately decides whether the engineering justifies the price.

Michael Shellenberger argues in a TEDx talk that solar and wind need huge amounts of land and mining, and says nuclear power is a better path to protecting both the climate and nature.

Armin Ronacher's EuroPython 2017 keynote examining how the CPython interpreter's leaky abstractions affect language design and how Python could evolve, drawing on JavaScript and Rust experience.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay on Buster Keaton's visual comedy, examining how he built and framed his gags. It uses clips from his silent films to show the thinking behind them.

The first episode of Adam Curtis's 1992 BBC series Pandora's Box, on the engineers' plot, examining communism in the Soviet Union and the rise and limits of technocratic central planning.

A Jimquisition episode examining the human cost of predatory videogame monetization, focusing on loot boxes and microtransactions. It features testimonials from people harmed by gambling-style game mechanics.

Designer Thomas Thwaites describes his attempt to build a toaster from scratch, from mining ore and deriving plastic from oil. It is a short TED talk on how much civilization a simple object depends on.

Kirby Ferguson's film argues that creativity is built from copying, transforming and combining existing works, examining music, film and technology. It makes the case that everything is a remix.

Two Australian YouTubers travel to North Korea and get a haircut while examining how Western media sensationalizes stories about the country.