spatial computing

Veritasium explains why analog computing may suit AI workloads, covering old analog computers, The Analog Thing and Mythic's analog chips that use flash memory for neural network inference. It argues digital hardware is hitting limits.

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.

An Asianometry explainer on why the Soviet Union, once a leading computing power, fell far behind the US in computers by the 1980s. It traces the gap from the 1960s onward despite strong state support for science.

Huygens Optics explains the Fourier transform and shows how a lens performs one optically. A DLP projector is used as a Fourier filter to do simple pattern recognition on lithographic character patterns.

Veritasium traces analog computers from the Antikythera mechanism and Kelvin's tide-predicting machines to fire control and modern analog approaches. It explains how these machines computed continuously rather than digitally.

Musician and audio engineer Benn Jordan tries Dolby Atmos as a consumer, covering the theory of immersive audio, its business model, and home theater and headphone listening. He concludes it often falls short of the pitch.

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.

Quanta Magazine explains the 2022 experiment that claimed to create a holographic wormhole on Google's quantum computer. The description now notes that a later independent analysis questioned whether any wormhole was created.

Veritasium's explainer on Godel's incompleteness theorems and the limits of mathematical proof, tracing set theory, Hilbert's program and the road to Turing and modern computing.

CGP Grey explains that postal codes are routing instructions for mail rather than geographic regions. He looks at the quirks and problems this causes.

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.