myst

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.

Tom Scott investigates the claim that the microwave was invented to heat hamsters, and interviews James Lovelock about freezing and microwave-thawing hamsters in the 1950s. It traces early magnetron uses beyond radar.

The first part of Extra History's animated miniseries on the South Sea Bubble. It explains how England's government debt led Robert Harley to turn to financier John Blunt, whose schemes began inflating artificial demand for shares.

CGP Grey tells the story of Alexander Pope's long takedown of a historian, Thomas Hearne, framed around the quirks of library books and archival research. It is a funny, digressive video essay about literary feuds and tracking down original sources.

CGP Grey explains jury nullification, a juror's power to acquit despite the law, and why mentioning it can get you struck from jury selection.

Benn Jordan's video about storing a PNG image in a living bird, a starling that learns to reproduce encoded sounds. It mixes ornithology, audio engineering, and data encoding.

Part 3 of Kirby Ferguson's Everything is a Remix series, using Apple and the iPhone to show how invention builds on copying and combining prior ideas. It argues that creativity and innovation are inseparable from copying.

A speculative-fiction video by Tom Scott, framed as coming from a future, about an AI called Earworm that enforces copyright so aggressively that humanity ends up forgetting a century of pop culture. It is animated and narrated as part of his series of videos from a future.

12tone tells the story of pitch inflation and how concert A came to be standardized at 440 Hz, including attempts at legal standards. It is a short music history explainer.

Casey Neistat's short New York Times op-doc investigating how accurate restaurant and packaged-food calorie labels really are. He gets items from chains like Chipotle, Starbucks and Subway measured by nutrition researchers and compares them to the printed numbers.

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.

Tom Scott follows the ISO 3103 / BS 6008 standard to make an international standard cup of tea, using specialist tasting equipment. The video shows how precisely the standard is specified.

Tom Scott visits Peachtree City, Georgia, which has about a hundred miles of dedicated golf cart paths that serve as an alternative to driving. He explains how the network works as a quasi-transit system that keeps cars off the roads.

Tom Scott visits the British Library, a UK legal deposit library that receives a copy of everything published, and discusses storing so much material, including the web archive.