names

The Map Men explain why British place names are so hard to pronounce, tracing it to layers of Viking, Anglo-Saxon, Celtic and Norman influence, with a pronunciation guide.

Vox explains the Berlin and Kay research showing that languages around the world tend to invent color words in the same order. It walks through the hierarchy and the debate around it.

Tom Scott explains why Windows does not let you name a file CON, tracing the reserved device names back to backwards compatibility with DOS.

A Ryan George comedy sketch about the absurdities of shopping on Amazon, including nonsense brand names, fake reviews and scammy sellers.

Numberphile explains the long and short scales for naming large numbers, covering millions, billions, trillions, milliards and the Greek myriad, with James Grime and Tony Padilla.

A short SIGBOVIK 2017 presentation by Tom Wildenhain showing that PowerPoint animations are Turing complete, with a working Turing machine built in slides. The talk is delivered deadpan as a serious research result.

3Blue1Brown's chapter on eigenvectors and eigenvalues in the Essence of Linear Algebra series. It builds a visual intuition for what they mean, why an eigenbasis is useful, and ends with a puzzle.

America's Test Kitchen tests eight carbon-steel skillets to find the best one, asking whether a single pan can replace stainless, cast iron and nonstick. It names a winner and covers how the pans perform.

Rob Miles explains "glitch" tokens, odd strings in large language model vocabularies that make the model produce gibberish. He covers how they likely arise from tokenizer training data, such as Reddit usernames, that never appeared in the model's own training.

Dylan Beattie's parody of 'We Didn't Start the Fire' with lyrics made entirely of real software framework names, ending in the chorus about building yet another framework.

A five-minute lightning talk from React.js Conf 2016 by Elie Rotenberg on protecting the DOM from tampering. It shows how React tree obfuscation (react-armor) can shuffle class names, tags and tree structure to defeat CSS-selector-based ad blocking.

CGP Grey investigates why the name Tiffany spiked in popularity and then faded, with help from onomastics experts. It is a short, playful look at how names spread.

EposVox reviews a very cheap USB 2.0 HDMI capture dongle sold under names like BlueAVS/Goodan, testing whether it works as an alternative to the Elgato Cam Link. He covers its quality and limits for webcam-style and camera capture use.

A short Nature video on the discovery that our home supercluster is Laniakea, redefined by mapping the flow of galaxies rather than their density. It names the structure with a Hawaiian word meaning 'immeasurable heaven'.

The Original Ace shows how creators can use a third-party music distributor to file Content ID claims on their own videos, turning false-claim abuse into a share of ad revenue. It also names distribution companies and their revenue splits.

A short scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian in which a Roman centurion cannot keep a straight face over the name Biggus Dickus.