second law

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.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment on the real facts of the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, covering the severity of the burns and the corporate PR campaign that painted it as frivolous.

Rob Miles explains for Computerphile why simple rule sets like Asimov's Three Laws cannot make robots and AI safe. Terms like harm and human are too ambiguous to specify precisely.

PBS Space Time explains Noether's theorem: conservation laws such as energy and momentum are consequences of deeper symmetries. It also covers why those laws hold only under certain conditions.

Matt Parker explains the history behind NTSC television running at 29.97 frames per second rather than 30, tracing it to the backward-compatible addition of color. He walks through the arithmetic behind the odd ratio.

A short video on the US Sprint anti-ballistic missile, which accelerated to around Mach 10 in seconds under extreme g-forces and heat. It includes striking launch footage and a brief development history.

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.

Paolo fromTOKYO explains why foreign tourists get arrested in Japan, covering strict laws and the justice system's very high conviction rate.

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.

Veritasium explains how trees lift water from roots to the top of tall trunks, using transpiration pull and the negative pressure that liquid water can sustain. It explains why trees do not need pumps or valves.

CGP Grey explains jury nullification, a juror's power to acquit despite the law, and why mentioning it can get you struck from jury selection.

Historia Civilis explains the origins and governing system of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy. It covers the Great Law and the league's surprisingly intricate legal and political structure.

12tone tells the story of pitch inflation and how concert A came to be standardized at 440 Hz, including attempts at legal standards. It is a short music history explainer.

CGP Grey's five-minute animated explainer on how copyright terms grew from 14 years to life plus decades. It uses Disney and Star Wars examples to argue the system has gone wrong.

A five-minute CGP Grey explainer arguing that a phone is effectively an extension of your mind, and that any backdoor or master key into encrypted devices will inevitably be abused or leaked. It frames the encryption debate as locks that are either unbreakable or absent.

Anders Puck Nielsen clears up common misunderstandings about what legally counts as genocide, then compares the situation in Gaza with the genocide case against Putin. The chapters cover the definition, individual intent, and the two case comparisons.

A short urbanism video presenting original observations of how drivers treat stop signs, to argue that cyclists rolling through them under an Idaho stop is no different. It filmed intersections in Ottawa.

Half as Interesting explains why the Eiffel Tower's night-time lighting is under copyright, which makes publishing photos of it at night legally problematic.

Veritasium argues that Facebook's ad revenue relies partly on fake likes, after paying to promote his page and gaining tens of thousands of followers in developing countries who never engaged. He shares his experiment and cites other cases.

Kurzgesagt's short animated video asks whether humanity should try to end aging, and argues the case for curing age-related disease. It is part one of a pair, with a second part by CGP Grey.

A Vox Borders episode with Johnny Harris explaining how China is gradually erasing the line between mainland China and Hong Kong since the 1997 handover. It describes the one country, two systems arrangement and its expiration date.

Not Just Bikes argues that stop signs are a poor traffic control, drawing on Dutch practice and the Idaho stop to show intersections can be safer without them, especially for cyclists.

CGP Grey explains how the 2015 UK general election showed the flaws of first-past-the-post voting, with parties like UKIP winning many votes but few seats.

Numberphile with Tom Crawford of Oxford explains the Reynolds number, the second of three videos on Navier-Stokes and fluid flow, with demonstrations of laminar versus turbulent behavior.

Veritasium examines research suggesting science explainer videos like Khan Academy's make students feel they understand while tests show they have not learned, because misconceptions go unaddressed. It suggests how to partly fix this.

Phil Vischer of VeggieTales and Holy Post gives an 18-minute history of racial injustice in America, covering why anger persists despite civil rights laws. It is told from an evangelical Christian perspective and adapted from a class he co-taught.

Vox explainer arguing the two Boeing 737 Max crashes were not just a software bug but the result of a company's drive to beat its rival, with a flawed MCAS design.

This Place argues that the uncanny valley is a flawed concept, since 'human likeness' is too broad and the supporting evidence is cherry-picked. It proposes that the creepiness really comes from how animated characters and robots move.

PBS Space Time, together with It's Okay to be Smart and PBS Eons, asks how a universe drifting toward disorder produced something as complex as life. It presents the idea that the laws of physics, through thermodynamics, may actually favor the emergence of life.

John Green explains why the US spends far more on health care than other countries, going through insurers, drug companies, hospitals and lawyers. He argues the causes are complicated rather than a simple blame game.

Professor Mike Merrifield of Nottingham explains in a mostly uncut conversation why light travels slower in glass. He treats light as a wave and describes how the material's electrons produce secondary waves that combine to slow it.

BigClive explains why microwave oven transformer projects are extremely dangerous, since the high voltage and high current can kill. He contrasts them with spot welder builds where the secondary is replaced by low-voltage heavy wire.

Engineering Explained compares Lexus's steer-by-wire yoke on the RZ 450e with Tesla's yoke. It covers how steer-by-wire works and how variable steering ratios address the yoke's flaws.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths examines the Texas Supreme Court filing claiming Biden's 2020 win had a one-in-a-quadrillion chance. He walks through why the statistical argument is flawed.