scott aaronson

Tom Scott explains why electronic voting is a bad idea. Elections must be trusted by everyone and attacks on software scale in ways attacks on paper do not, so open source or blockchain fixes do not solve it.

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.

Tom Scott explains the design of the British BS 1363 plug and socket, including fuses, shutters and safety features, and why he thinks it beats other plugs.

Tom Scott examines why YouTubers must declare paid endorsements while TV, film and other media face no such rule, comparing regulations in the UK and US.

Tom Scott tells how John Reber's plan to dam San Francisco Bay was disproved by the Army Corps of Engineers' giant hydraulic Bay Model in Sausalito. The model showed the plan would have been dangerously wrong.

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.

Scott Manley covers how GPS works and how civilian accuracy went from a planned 100 meters to about one meter. He explains the technology and the removal of restrictions that made this possible.

Tom Scott explains why confetti and snow wreck video quality, using interframe compression and bitrate. He demonstrates it live by changing the quality on screen.

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.

Tom Scott makes the difference between a million and a billion dollars tangible by using distance on a road trip instead of volume. The drive makes the scale of a billion intuitively felt.

Tom Scott visits a rotating house near San Diego and explains how electricity, gas and water keep working on the rotating part. It includes a 3D render of the utility connection system.

Scott Manley looks at SpinLaunch, which aims to throw launch vehicles out of a spinning launcher at hypersonic speed. He covers its recent Mach 1 test of a one-third scale launcher and the engineering problems that remain.

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.

Tom Scott features Kurtis Baute inside a sealed homemade biodome as carbon dioxide builds up, showing how stale air with elevated CO2 affects cognitive function. Sources include studies on CO2 and cognitive scores.

Tom Scott visits the Swiss Military Museum to see the last surviving 1970s tank-driving simulator. It uses a real camera moving over a miniature model landscape rather than any computer graphics.

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

Scott Manley examines why SpaceX, Google and others are looking at orbital data centers. He walks through the economics, heat rejection and solar power arguments, with links to the Lumen/Starcloud and Google Suncatcher papers.

Scott Manley explains the thermal balance of spacecraft and how a satellite could be configured to radiate away the heat from datacenter-scale computing in space. His rough numbers suggest it is feasible.

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.

Scott Manley analyzes the idea of putting data centers in orbit, prompted by Lumen Orbit's funding. He examines the claimed advantage of constant solar power against launch cost, cooling and mass.

Scott Manley surveys the research on whether people can adapt to rotating artificial gravity, from early Soviet centrifuge tests to modern studies. He concludes it is an engineering problem and discusses Coriolis effects and station radius.

Scott Manley explains rotating detonation engines, how they differ from pulsed detonation engines, and why thermodynamics predicts they beat traditional jet and rocket engines.

Tom Scott tours Ocado's automated grocery warehouse, where thousands of robots move boxes on a grid called the Hive, and asks whether they are individual robots or a hive mind.

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.

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.

Tom Scott's video whose title shows its own live view count, and the story of how he made that work. It explains why open APIs were once common and why they largely disappeared.

Tom Scott, with linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Molly Ruhl, examines whether the language you speak changes how you think. The short answer is mostly no, with caveats about the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

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.

Scott Manley explains the Cold War experiments in which steel and aluminium spheres, known as Lew Allen's Balls, were placed near nuclear detonations. The spheres survived the fireball, and he walks through what the declassified results show.

Tom Scott visits Yale's archives to look at a 367-year-old bond from a Dutch water authority that is still paying interest. Finance professor Geert Rouwenhorst explains how it works.

Scott Manley explains the nuclear salt water rocket, Robert Zubrin's concept of a rocket fueled by a rapid nuclear reaction in uranium salt dissolved in water. He covers its extraordinary performance and the dangers of managing it.

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.

Tom Scott makes a short descriptivist argument that language keeps changing and that casual internet writing conventions, like lowercase typing and dropped full stops, are legitimate. It is part of his Language Files series, written with Gretchen McCulloch.

Tom Scott explains YouTube's 11-character video IDs, which are base-64 encoded 64-bit numbers, and whether YouTube could ever run out of them. It covers counting systems and base 64 briefly.

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 explains the famous Dutch flower auction clock at Royal FloraHolland in Aalsmeer, a literal Dutch auction, and how the internet changed it. It is a short look at how the system worked then and now.

Tom Scott visits Dinorwig Power Station in Wales, a pumped-storage hydro plant often called Britain's largest battery. He explains how it works and how its role has shifted from TV pickup spikes to balancing wind and solar.

Scott Manley tells the story of a computerized telemetry system built to sit at the heart of a nuclear test device in place of the plutonium pit, designed to transmit data in the microseconds before it was destroyed.

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