program analysis

A Wendover Productions explainer arguing that major airlines make much of their profit from loyalty programs and co-branded credit cards rather than flying. It frames airlines as quasi-banks that sell points in bulk, using United's pandemic-era loan as a hook.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay on how Akira Kurosawa used movement, weather and composition to tell stories. It draws on clips and interviews with other filmmakers.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay on Michael Bay's style, 'Bayhem', covering his camera movement, composition, color and editing. It argues that even if you dislike his films, they teach something about visual perception.

An Every Frame a Painting video essay analysing how Edgar Wright creates visual comedy through framing, camera movement, editing, sound effects and music.

Matthias Wandel tests old and new code on a range of PCs, including a new mini PC, to measure how much faster modern hardware really is. He also shows optimization techniques such as branchless code, with benchmark programs on GitHub.

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.

An episode of Plogue's chipresearch series on emulating the Yamaha DX7 from the hardware up. It covers the sub CPU and main CPU, address map investigation, cartridges, firmware analysis and a skeleton MAME driver.

Tom Scott explains Electrical Network Frequency analysis, where hum from the power grid in a recording is matched against grid logs to date and place it. He talks to a researcher and sets them a challenge.

A Half as Interesting explainer on the US program that drops millions of sterile screwworm flies over Panama every week to keep the parasite out of North America.

James Hoffmann runs caffeine analyzer tests comparing filter versus espresso, extraction over time, steep time, instant coffee and light versus dark roast.

CGP Grey compares airplane boarding methods, based on an arXiv paper, and shows why the intuitive back-to-front approach is slow while random or outside-in boarding does better.

Martin Donald explains the Wave Function Collapse algorithm using Sudoku-like constraint solving and shows how he implemented it with Blender and Godot. It links demos and reference articles.

Polylog explains how algorithms can be turned into circuits and encoded as satisfiability problems, which lets you effectively run them backwards. It uses this to motivate breaking RSA, general reductions to SAT, and what P vs NP is really asking.

2swap explains how he solved the Klotski sliding-block puzzle by mapping its full state space as a graph and visualizing it. The video includes footage of the Guinness world-record solve and links to an interactive graph.

Numberphile with Daniel Erman on the Josephus problem, where people in a circle are eliminated in turn. It shows how the survivor's position follows a neat pattern tied to powers of two and binary.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why handling time and timezones in code is so hard, walking through a simple web app that computes how long ago something happened. It covers the quirks of timezones and calendars and ends in an exasperated rant.

Every Frame a Painting analyzes how Jackie Chan stages action comedy, with nine principles such as starting from a disadvantage, using the environment, clear shots, and keeping action and reaction in the same frame.

Numberphile's Dr James Grime explains the flaw in the Enigma machine, namely that a letter could never be encrypted to itself, and how that helped the Allies break the code. It touches on the Bombe and Alan Turing.

Engineering Explained compares the lifetime CO2 emissions of a Toyota RAV4 Prime plug-in hybrid with a Tesla Model Y, looking at break-even mileage and whether electric cars are worse for the environment.

Matt Parker examines claims that Biden's 2020 vote counts violate Benford's Law, explaining the law and why it often does not apply to precinct-level election data.

Practical Engineering explains how engineers and agencies put a dollar value on a human life to weigh cost against safety. It covers the legal and regulatory basis for these calculations.

A short animated simulation comparing how Multics and Unix were developed, showing why Unix's small composable programs and pipes gave it a efficiency advantage. It frames Unix as a moonshot achievable by a small team.

VFX supervisor Jonas Ussing examines what studios mean by "no CGI", showing how much invisible CGI hides behind practical-effects marketing. It is the first part of a multi-part series that includes analysis of doctored behind-the-scenes footage.

MinutePhysics explains that computers store brightness nonlinearly, so blurring and blending colors in raw RGB gives wrong, dark results. It shows why mixed colors, such as in gradients, look off.

Not Just Bikes explains, using Urban3's property-tax analysis, why car-dependent suburbs generate less tax revenue than they cost to maintain, so dense urban cores effectively subsidize them. It is part of a Strong Towns series.

Ward Cunningham explains the history and intent of the debt metaphor, which he coined while refactoring the WyCash product. He says debt means code reflecting an incomplete understanding of the problem, not sloppy programming.

Zack Freedman gives advice on why makers fail to finish projects, including scrapping bad ideas, showing work publicly and writing a plan that keeps projects fun. It is aimed at hardware DIY but generalizes.

PBS Space Time examines the interstellar object 'Oumuamua and the popular theories about it, including the light-sail hypothesis. It argues that a natural rock is the likeliest explanation.

Mark Handley of UCL explains, with simulation visualizations, how early Starlink satellites without inter-satellite links could still give low-latency wide-area communication by hopping via ground relays. He shows it can beat fibre on many long paths.

Engineering Explained uses physics to show why today's electric cars, including Teslas, are poor at towing, pointing to battery energy density and weight. It examines Cybertruck and F-150 towing claims.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths examines scatter plots that were claimed to show fraudulent vote-switching in Michigan's 2020 election. He recreates the analysis and shows that the pattern arises from comparing percentages across different bases, not from fraud.

Asianometry's short analysis of SMIC's N+2 node, China's 7nm leap forward. It considers how far behind the competition SMIC still is.

Asianometry examines why Japan's software industry has lagged despite its hardware strengths. It looks at dependence on US software and the low prestige of programming.

Ben Felix explains how to decide between renting and buying a home, weighing financial and non-financial factors. He argues that renting is often as good or better than owning, both financially and for well-being.

AVweb's Paul Bertorelli analyzes the safety record of the Cirrus Airframe Parachute System (CAPS), looking at the 90-plus deployments over 20 years of Cirrus flying. He asks whether the whole-aircraft parachute has actually saved lives.

Steve Mould shows Spintronics, a set of mechanical components such as resistors, capacitors and transistors linked by chains, that give an intuitive feel for how electrical circuits work.

Illumina's 3D animation of its sequencing-by-synthesis workflow, from sample preparation and cluster generation to sequencing on a flow cell and data analysis.

Quanta Magazine explains the 2022 experiment that claimed to create a holographic wormhole on Google's quantum computer. The description now notes that a later independent analysis questioned whether any wormhole was created.

Tom Scott visits the US National Helium Reserve in Amarillo, Texas, and explains why headlines that the world is running out of helium are misleading. He covers the Federal Helium Program and its planned privatization.