ray marching

Digital Foundry's Alex Battaglia analyzes Metro Exodus Enhanced Edition, the first AAA game built around ray tracing. It covers the new global illumination, emissive lighting, DLSS and performance on AMD and Nvidia hardware.

Ray Dalio's 30-minute animated video explains how the economy works through credit, debt, interest rates, and short- and long-term cycles. It is based on his template for understanding the economy.

An animated 44-minute summary of Ray Dalio's book Principles for Dealing with the Changing World Order. It lays out the Big Cycle of rising and declining nations, covering debt cycles, internal conflict, and shifts in global power over the past 500 years.

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.

Veritasium explains how cosmic rays and other particles flip bits in computer memory, with examples including a Belgian election count error, plane incidents and game glitches. It is inspired by a RadioLab episode on bit flips.

The Signal Path takes apart a Starlink dish layer by layer, analyzing the phased array RF design, system architecture and integrated circuits, with an X-ray of the RF stack.

Walt Disney Animation Studios' short introduction to path tracing, showing how rays are traced and bounced through a virtual scene to simulate light. It explains how this approach is used in animated films.

A Two Minute Papers episode on NVIDIA's recurrent denoising autoencoder, which cleans up noisy Monte Carlo path-traced image sequences. It shows how a neural network can produce usable renders from very few samples.

Branch Education explains how Starlink works, from the ground dish and satellites to phased-array beam steering and data routing. Animations cover how a beam stays connected to a satellite moving at 27,000 km/h.

ElectroBOOM's Mehdi Sadaghdar responds to Veritasium's lamp-and-long-wire puzzle, analysing it as an electrical engineer. He covers where the original framing misleads and the role of stray capacitance.

A 105-minute technical deep dive from Noise In Space evaluating whether Starlink satellites could work as synthetic aperture radar. It covers SAR signal-to-noise, amplifiers, antennas, duplexing, phased array beamforming and simulations of V2 Mini and V3 satellites.

CityNerd Ray Delahanty explains induced demand and what happens when freeways are widened. He walks through the economics of supply and demand applied to traffic and asks how much new traffic appears and whether congestion returns.

CityNerd's Ray Delahanty tallies the personal costs of driving and then the externalities that car dependency imposes on everyone else, with numbers for each. It is an urbanist case that driving is heavily subsidized and costs society far more than drivers pay.

CityNerd explains why traffic congestion grows nonlinearly as more cars use a road network, and why adding road capacity tends not to fix it. It covers the consequences for drivers, bus riders, cyclists and pedestrians, and discusses alternatives such as true bus rapid transit.

Aaron Francis walks through how PHP has changed from 2012 to 2023, covering traits, array destructuring, generators, typed properties and more. It is a quick chaptered tour of modern PHP features.

A Wendover Productions explainer on how airport security is designed, covering screening layers, x-ray scanning, and the contrast with Israel's profiling-based approach. It walks through the logic behind why security works the way it does.

Tom Scott tours the rotating room artificial gravity facility at Brandeis University's Graybiel lab. It shows how humans cope with rotation-based gravity and the odd effects such as Coriolis forces.

A Kurzgesagt video exploring how advanced civilizations might wage war across light years. It looks at weapons such as relativistic beams and what they would do.

Cleo Abram's explainer on whether nuclear waste is really the intractable problem it is portrayed as, looking at how spent fuel can be recycled and used. It features a collaboration with Johnny Harris.