signed distance fields

Johann Korndorfer's NVScene 2015 talk on building content with signed distance functions. It focuses on patterns that make SDF modelling more structured, arguing that SDFs capture a shape's essence like vector graphics do compared with polygons or voxels.

Inigo Quilez live-codes a cartoon character painting entirely from math, using signed distance fields in a Shadertoy shader. He explains each step of building the image from formulas.

Christof Paar's university lecture introducing Galois fields and finite-field arithmetic as used in AES. It covers the mathematics behind the AES S-box.

Terence Tao and Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown walk through the cosmic distance ladder, showing how humans measured distances from the Earth to the Moon, Sun, planets and beyond. It includes animations and the history behind each step.

David Tong, a Cambridge theoretical physicist, explains at the Royal Institution that the fundamental building blocks of nature are quantum fields rather than particles. He covers what we know about these fields and how they fit into the Standard Model.

Sean Carroll's 2013 Fermilab Users Meeting lecture on particles, fields and the future of particle physics. He explains that particles are vibrations in underlying quantum fields and touches on the Higgs, neutrinos and dark matter.

Media Molecule's Alex Evans recounts the journey, including the failures, of finding the Dreams engine, based on his Siggraph 2015 talk. It covers the signed-distance-field and splat-based rendering approach and the artistic goals behind it.

Terence Tao's AMS Einstein Public Lecture at UCLA on the cosmic distance ladder, the chain of methods astronomers use to measure distances from the Earth to distant galaxies. It is aimed at a general audience.

Inigo Quilez live-codes the "Happy Jumping" animated scene in a Shadertoy GLSL shader over about six hours. He builds the raymarched character step by step, explaining the math and procedural techniques, with checkpoints linked for each stage.

Veritasium argues that electric energy is carried by fields around the wires rather than by electrons moving through them, using a thought experiment with a large circuit.

Veritasium explains quantum entanglement and spooky action at a distance, walking through Bell's inequality and the experiments that rule out hidden variables, in under ten minutes.

Tantacrul explains how he and engraver Simon Smith designed the free music notation font for MuseScore 3.6. It draws on the history of the SCORE notation application by Leland Smith.

Cody's Lab builds a 200-billionth-scale model to show how far away the nearest stars are, using parallax and light speed. A short astronomy explainer on interstellar distances.

Inigo Quilez live-codes a painting using only mathematics in a shader, building it up step by step. The linked Shadertoy source shows the result.

Not Just Bikes tours Houten, a Dutch town designed around cycling, explaining how its layout makes most trips by bike safe and easy. It also promotes a book about the town.

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.

Andrew Kelley, creator of Zig, introduces the language at the Recurse Center's Localhost series in 2018. He covers its goals of robustness, optimality and clarity, C interop, cross-compilation and explicit allocators.

Veritasium explores how electrical energy actually travels in a circuit, arguing that it flows through electromagnetic fields around the wires rather than through the electrons. It builds a long-cable experiment with Caltech to test when a distant bulb lights.

Jacob Geller's video essay examines how architecture in schools and in video games, such as cover shooters, is shaped by violence. It touches on brutalism, campus policing and protests.

Roman Mars gives a funny TED talk on vexillology, laying out five basic principles of good flag design and why many city flags fail them.

Tom Scott visits Onkalo in Finland, the planned deep geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste intended to be sealed for 100,000 years.

Astrophysicist Dr. Becky explains the Hubble tension, the disagreement between expansion-rate measurements from the cosmic microwave background and the distance ladder, and what early JWST Cepheid observations add.

Numberphile's Ben Sparks works through the physics of a car crash, showing how kinetic energy grows with the square of speed and why stopping distance climbs so quickly as velocity increases.

A SIGGRAPH 2013 demo from Douglas Lanman and NVIDIA of near-eye light field displays, which allow much thinner head-mounted displays that still show accurate focus and depth cues.

Footage of Richard Box's art installation in which fluorescent tubes light up in the ground under high voltage power lines, showing the electric fields they produce.

Disney Research's demo of quasistatic cavity resonance, which uses a purpose-built room or cabinet to generate magnetic fields that deliver kilowatts of power wirelessly to mobile receivers inside.

Answer in Progress investigates why Japanese websites look different from those elsewhere, using an AI clustering approach to test the 2013 claim. It then looks at possible explanations.

Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind explains what the Higgs mechanism is and what it means to give mass to particles. He also covers what is at stake for physics and cosmology.

Chandler Carruth's CppCon 2016 talk tries to defuse the heated debate over undefined behavior in C and C++. He explains from the compiler writer's perspective why UB exists and how it enables optimization.

A DEF CON 20 talk by RenderMan on the security weaknesses of ADS-B, the unencrypted, unauthenticated aircraft tracking broadcast. It shows how easily the data can be spoofed and what that means for security designed in too late.

The 1997 novelty song by Komar and Melamid with composer Dave Soldier, built from survey results on what listeners dislike most in music. It features bagpipes, an opera singer rapping, and a children's choir urging shopping at Wal-Mart.

ScienceClic gives a 15-minute animated introduction to quantum field theory, covering fields, spin, conserved quantities, the standard model and interactions.

Inigo Quilez shows step by step how to build a simple heart shape from mathematics and shaders, with code on Shadertoy. It is an introduction to procedural graphics and signed distance functions.

Stuff Made Here builds a powder-actuated baseball bat designed to hit a ball past Babe Ruth's record distance, with Smarter Every Day contributing. It covers the engineering of the explosive-assisted swing.

SciPy 2015 talk by Nathaniel Smith and Stefan van der Walt on choosing a new default colormap for Matplotlib. It covers why Jet misleads, how perceptual color spaces work, and how viridis was designed.

Andrei Alexandrescu's CppCon 2015 talk argues that std::allocator is badly designed. He proposes building high-performance allocators from small composable, templated pieces.

Apple security head Ivan Krstic gives a Black Hat 2016 talk on iOS security, covering HomeKit, Auto Unlock and iCloud Keychain. He explains key hierarchies and how data can stay safe even in adversarial clouds.

Matt Kulukundis explains how Google designed SwissTable, a fast, cache-friendly hash table, step by step from std::unordered_map. The talk covers open addressing, SIMD probing and the tradeoffs of changing a fundamental data structure.

Rich Hickey's talk at Clojure's tenth anniversary on the kind of programs Clojure is designed for. He argues for situated programs that deal with changing requirements, and for dynamic typing and data over static types.

Explains the proposed NASA JPL plan to use the Sun as a gravitational lens, sending solar sail craft to its focal region to image an exoplanet's surface. It covers the distances involved, how imaging with the Sun would work and the mission design.