no-code

Tom Scott argues that grammatical gender is a silly concept and that the singular 'they' is an established gender-neutral pronoun. The description carries later corrections and reflections he added in 2019.

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.

Paul Irish explains how pointerpointer.com works. It uses a hidden canvas of colored Voronoi regions to look up which photo matches the cursor position.

Tom Scott stands by a construction site and explains why reversing vehicles now use a white-noise hiss instead of beeping. The sound is easier to locate directionally and less annoying to neighbours.

Tom Scott explains how in Norway and other Nordic countries tax returns, and so individual incomes, are public. He looks at the effects of wage transparency and whether it is a good idea, with sources listed in the description.

A doctor from Medlife Crisis explains in under three minutes why even a rich patient should not simply order every medical test, touching on pre-test probability and Bayesian reasoning. False positives make blanket testing counterproductive.

A two-minute clip in which Milton Friedman uses a humble pencil to show how thousands of strangers across many countries cooperate, without central direction, to make a simple product. It is a short visual version of the 'I, Pencil' essay's argument about free markets and dispersed knowledge.

IEEE Spectrum interviews Samsung display researcher Johan Feenstra on how electrowetting displays work. He explains why they can match LCD capability while being about three times more efficient.

A four-minute Not Just Bikes comparison of grocery shopping in Amsterdam versus car-centric North America, arguing that frequent small fresh-food trips beat bulk shopping. It ties this to land use and reduced food waste.

The Center for Election Science explains favorite betrayal in instant-runoff voting: in some elections, ranking your favorite first can cause your least favorite to win. It contrasts this with plurality voting's spoiler problem.

Tom Scott explains phatic expressions such as hello, thank you and how are you, which carry social meaning rather than information, and why replies like no problem can seem rude to some people.

A three-minute excerpt from Milton Friedman's Free to Choose in which he uses a pencil to show that no single person knows how to make it. He argues that the free market coordinates countless strangers peacefully.

A short animation that pairs the sound of a dialup modem handshake with a graphic explaining what each phase of the sound means.

A four-minute 2006 explainer on trusted computing, describing what it is and whether users should support it, with a skeptical DRM angle.

Tom Scott investigates moire-effect beacons, called Inogon leading marks, a Swedish invention from the 1980s that shows different patterns depending on the viewer's position. He visits one used to mark an undersea cable and tracks down its history.

The first of four short videos from Bill Hammack (engineerguy) introducing and giving the history of a 100-year-old mechanical computer, Michelson's harmonic analyzer. The series goes on to explain Fourier synthesis, analysis and operation of the machine.

A two-minute demonstration of the loudness war, showing how heavy dynamic range compression in CD mastering makes music louder while degrading sound quality. It uses audio examples so you can hear the distortion.

A two-minute animated introduction to Bitcoin from 2011, explaining it as a peer-to-peer digital currency. It was widely shared in Bitcoin's early days as the standard newcomer explainer.

Tom Scott explains why hold music sounds worse than it used to, tracing it to old telephone exchanges and the audio compression applied by modern switches. It is a short visit to the Milton Keynes Museum.

Tom Scott visits Cloudflare's San Francisco office to show the wall of lava lamps whose camera feed is used as a source of entropy for random number generation. It is a short explainer on how this helps secure internet encryption.

A short Not Just Bikes video on continuous sidewalks in the Netherlands, where the sidewalk runs unbroken across side streets so cars must visibly cross pedestrian space. It places them within Dutch sustainable safety and Vision Zero efforts.

A short Not Just Bikes video on the 1960s plans (Plan Jokinen) to cut highways through Amsterdam to accommodate cars. It shows how radically different the city would look had they succeeded.

A two-minute animation of an Alan Watts talk arguing that life is like music: it is meant to be danced to in the moment, not rushed toward a final goal. It is a short, accessible take on living in the present.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment arguing that tipping should be banned. It covers the history of tipping, its weak link to service quality, and why employers should pay a fair wage.

Tom Scott visits Penistone to explain the Scunthorpe problem, showing why naive web and profanity filters block innocent words.

A Hitachi promotional cartoon in the style of Schoolhouse Rock explaining perpendicular magnetic recording for hard drives.

A short animation from the DNA Learning Center showing how mRNA carries a gene's message to the ribosome, where tRNA and codons are used to assemble amino acids into a protein.

Mick West explains the three Navy UFO videos (FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST) released in 2020, giving mundane explanations such as a distant plane and camera artifacts. He notes the videos were not new and had been circulating since 2017.

Richard Feynman, in a clip from the BBC series Fun to Imagine, takes on the puzzle of why mirrors seem to swap left and right but not top and bottom.

A two-minute explainer of 3D Gaussian Splatting, the rendering technique from a 2023 research paper. It outlines why it could change how 3D graphics are made.

Derek Sivers annotates a short clip of a lone dancer at a festival, showing how a first follower turns a ridiculous act into a movement. He draws out lessons about leadership and making it easy to follow.

Tom Scott explains why Britain historically has separate hot and cold taps rather than mixer taps, tracing it to how water was stored in tanks. He notes why the hot tap is not safe to drink from.

A three-minute minutephysics video on the orbital mechanics of why crashing into the Sun takes far more energy than leaving the solar system.

Tom Scott and Matt Parker investigate some of the small deceptions and oddities of the London Underground, such as misleading signage and map distortions.

A three-minute Positive Money UK explainer arguing that the commercial banking system, where banks create most money as debt, redistributes income from the bottom 90 percent to the top 10 percent through interest.

Tom Scott explains why a vivid pink pigment by artist Stuart Semple cannot be fully shown on a screen, and touches on the dispute over exclusive rights to the blackest black pigment. It is a short explainer on color gamuts and pigment politics.