side projects

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.

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.

Robert Miles introduces the first of several videos on the paper 'Concrete Problems in AI Safety', focusing on how AI systems can cause accidental negative side effects. It explains the problem in accessible terms.

Insider explains how The Mandalorian replaced green screens with LED walls that project real-time 3D environments behind actors, with over half the show filmed on such virtual sets.

Adam Savage and engineer Zach Radding examine Lumafield CT scans of Apple's $130 Thunderbolt 4 cable alongside cheaper USB-C cables. They explain the internal components that distinguish Thunderbolt from ordinary USB-C.

A PBS Space Time episode explaining how space and time swap roles inside a black hole's event horizon. It is part of the channel's black hole series.

A PBS Space Time episode asking what black holes really are and whether events can happen inside them. It covers event horizons, time dilation and common misconceptions about black holes.

A short CGP Grey animation showing how the US electoral college lets a candidate win the presidency with as little as about 22 percent of the popular vote. It lays out the arithmetic of winning states by narrow margins.

A PBS Space Time episode asking whether our universe could sit inside a black hole. It covers what physicists think happens inside black holes and the arguments for and against this idea.

A short video explaining the Intel Management Engine, a hidden embedded computer inside Intel machines with deep access to hardware. It is presented from an insider's perspective and raises backdoor and NSA concerns.

Tom Scott visits ThyssenKrupp's test tower in Rottweil to see the Multi, a rope-free elevator that uses linear motors to move cabins sideways as well as vertically.

A 21-minute animation showing how a sphere can be turned inside out without creases or tears, known as sphere eversion.

3Blue1Brown visualizes high-dimensional spheres to explain a surprising puzzle about how a sphere fits in a box as dimensions grow. It builds geometric intuition for counterintuitive properties of high-dimensional space.

Technology Connections' long closing video in his heat pump series, arguing that adopting heat pumps is well within reach. It explains how they work and what it takes to start using them.

CuriousMarc powers up a vintage HP 5061A cesium beam clock and explains both the quantum principle and the HP implementation in detail. It is part of a longer atomic clock series.

Dave Plummer tours the IBM z16 mainframe from design through factory assembly, test lab, accelerators and water cooling. He explains why mainframes still exist and what makes them reliable.

A Vox explainer on why California's high-speed rail project is years late and far over budget, with only a few concrete structures built by 2022. It covers the political, legal and routing challenges behind the delays.

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.

A Vox Borders explainer on Hong Kong's housing crisis, the least affordable market in the world, and the tiny cage homes and subdivided flats people squeeze into. It looks at why prices keep climbing and how land policy contributes.

A Business Insider World Wide Waste episode on H&M's garment recycling machines, which turn used clothing into new apparel. It asks whether a fast fashion company can solve the waste problem it helped create.

Technology Connections explains that the so-called EV charger in an electric car's charging cable or wall unit is really an EVSE, a smart switch that safely delivers AC power. The actual charger is inside the car. The video covers the safety signaling and mechanisms involved.

Kurzgesagt explores the idea that black holes could create universes and that we might live inside one. It builds up the physics of how density falls as black holes get larger.

Tom Scott explains how decades of deep coal mining sank parts of Germany's Ruhr Valley and changed its drainage. Pumps run by Emschergenossenschaft must now work permanently to keep towns and cities from flooding.

Asianometry explains the EUV light source inside ASML's lithography machines, where lasers hit falling tin droplets twice to produce 13.5 nm light. It walks through the engineering of the droplet generator, the pre-pulse and main laser, and the plasma that results.

A short infographic video on the distribution of wealth in America, contrasting what people believe, what they consider ideal, and the actual numbers. It highlights how top-heavy US wealth is.

Oh The Urbanity! argues that most city dwellers live in dense residential neighbourhoods outside downtown, which can be calm and peaceful. It draws on older, denser parts of Toronto and Montreal.

A Technology Connections video on how ground-source (geothermal) heat pumps work and why they hold efficiency in winter. It also covers related heat pump information, and the description notes air-source heat pumps have since improved.

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.

Tom Scott-style absurdist tour by Tom7 of SIGBOVIK chess projects: a tournament of 30 weird chess algorithms used to rate a color- and piece-blind chess program. Topics include mirrors, arithmetic encoding, perverted game tree search and a diluted Stockfish.

3Blue1Brown visualizes Feynman's lecture on the refractive index, explaining why light appears to slow down in glass and why the effect depends on color. It builds the idea from waves produced by oscillating charges in the material.

Practical Engineering explains what a black start is: restarting a power grid after total collapse. It shows why most plants need outside power to start and why rebuilding a synchronized grid is delicate and high-stakes.

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.

Not Just Bikes explains how small pockets of shops and restaurants inside residential Dutch neighbourhoods create liveliness and help reduce traffic. It argues this kind of mixed-use design has been illegal in most of the US and Canada for a century because of zoning, and should be brought back.

3Blue1Brown's visual walkthrough of the attention mechanism inside transformers, covering self-attention, multiple heads and cross-attention. It is chapter 6 of his deep learning series.

Technology Connections explains why single-hose portable air conditioners are inefficient and often a poor choice compared with window units. It details how the single hose pulls in warm outside air and wastes energy.

Real Engineering's Brian McManus explains Helion's approach to nuclear fusion: colliding two plasma rings, compressing them magnetically, and capturing energy directly from the changing magnetic flux rather than boiling water. It covers why this pulsed design sidesteps problems of tokamaks and laser fusion.

Benn Jordan investigates infrasound and low-frequency noise from data centers, including xAI's Colossus and a crypto mine, and reports his own experiments on the effects. The video covers the health and community impacts on nearby residents.

A minutephysics explainer showing that the Moon's path around the Sun is not a spiral but closer to a 12-sided polygon with curved corners. It argues the Moon arguably orbits the Sun rather than the Earth.

Adam Neely explains what perfect (absolute) pitch is, how it differs from relative and quasi-absolute pitch, and why he would not want it. He covers its drawbacks, including drift with age.

An RSA Animate drawing of Barbara Ehrenreich's talk on the darker side of positive thinking. It argues that forced positivity in culture, work and policy can be harmful and played a part in the financial crisis.