stopping distance

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mathematician Hannah Fry's TED talk on patterns in dating and mate-seeking, including optimal stopping and three math-backed tips for finding a partner.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Bill Gurley's talk at the All-In Summit 2023, titled 2,851 Miles after the distance between Washington and San Francisco. He describes how incumbents use lobbying and regulation to entrench themselves, followed by a conversation with the hosts.

Admiral Grace Hopper holds up a length of wire to show how far light travels in a nanosecond, about 11.8 inches. She explains how she made the idea concrete to people who could not picture a billionth of a second.

Matthias Wandel uses anemometer measurements to find where to place a fan to move the most air through a house at night. He finds that placing the fan some distance back from the window works better.

A Boeing 737 pilot explains the runaway stabilizer checklist, the procedure for stopping unwanted horizontal stabilizer movement such as an MCAS activation on the 737 MAX. He walks through the steps, the trim cutout switches and the jackscrew mechanism, and shows a simulator run including the manual trim wheel effort.

Real Engineering explains why SpaceX is building Starlink, including the economics of satellite internet. It covers the latency advantage of light in vacuum over fiber for long-distance links.

David Kriesel's 36C3 talk, in an English translation, analyzes a year of scraped Deutsche Bahn data covering every stop of every long-distance train in Germany. It explores delays and how punctuality is actually measured.

Mark Handley of UCL looks at how SpaceX's November 2018 revisions to the Starlink constellation affect network behavior. The video visualizes the orbits and routing and estimates latencies, building on his earlier video and research paper.

CityNerd lays out a data-driven method for deciding where high-speed rail should be built in North America and identifies 56 city pairs that justify it, based on population and distance.

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.

A short visualization from HotNets researchers of routing and latency over SpaceX's proposed Starlink constellation, based on its FCC filings. It shows orbital shells, link topology and how inter-satellite routes could beat terrestrial fiber on long distances.

Adam Something gives a short, sarcastic argument that carbon capture does not live up to its promises. He says the energy it uses would be better spent replacing fossil sources directly.

A Kurzgesagt animation about how the immune system constantly detects and kills cells that are turning cancerous. It explains what cancer cells are and why stopping them is so hard.

David Kriesel's 36C3 talk, in German, analyzes a year of scraped data on every stop of every long-distance train in Germany. It shows how Deutsche Bahn delay statistics hide cancellations and delays.

A short video built around an animation of the roughly 10,000 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, placed at their measured redshift distances. It gives a brief history of deep field images and ends with a 3D fly-through.

A demo of Marble Marcher, a game using a fractal physics engine and fully procedural ray-marched rendering. The player rolls a marble through shifting fractal levels.

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.

A short animated explainer that stages a $100 footrace in which contestants start at different distances from the line, depending on the advantages or disadvantages they inherited. It uses the race as a metaphor for how unequal starting points shape outcomes, citing US census income and poverty figures.

A long Tsoding Daily programming stream in which he implements hot code reloading in C by loading a dynamic library at runtime without stopping the main program. It also touches on migrating struct versions across reloads.

Folk musician Peter Mulvey performs Vlad the Astrophysicist, a spoken-word style song that touches on why civilizations may never meet across space and time.

A short film in which friends build the first true-to-scale model of the solar system, with full planetary orbits, on a Nevada dry lakebed. It conveys the real distances and sizes involved.

A short research demo of Autonomous Intersection Management, a protocol in which self-driving cars reserve slots through an intersection instead of obeying signals or stop signs. It uses UT Austin's autonomous vehicle Marvin and a simulation to show cars crossing without stopping.

A Waymo clip, sped up 3x, showing its autonomous car stopping at a broken traffic light and proceeding on a police officer's hand signals.

A two-minute video of an athlete sprinting against a London Underground Circle Line train between Mansion House and Cannon Street. It shows a runner keeping pace with and beating the train.

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.

Not Just Bikes explains Dutch bicycle-only roads, which let people travel long distances in and out of cities with almost no car interaction. It shows how this changes cycling from a chore into something enjoyable.

A Kurzgesagt animation on supernovae, the most powerful explosions in the universe. It explains their role in creating elements and what would happen to Earth if one occurred nearby.