structural testing

Veritasium tells how Kodak film was fogged by radioactive fallout from the first atomic tests, letting the company detect nuclear testing before anyone announced it. The video also covers the deal to keep it quiet and how fallout contaminated packaging.

Veritasium takes an IQ test and examines what IQ measures, its history including military use and eugenics, its controversies, and how it correlates with life outcomes. Experts including Cecil Reynolds and Stuart Ritchie contribute.

A doctor from Medlife Crisis explains in under three minutes why even a rich patient should not simply order every medical test, touching on pre-test probability and Bayesian reasoning. False positives make blanket testing counterproductive.

A Tom Scott guest video by Grady Hillhouse of Practical Engineering on the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. A seemingly minor change to the support design led to catastrophic failure, which is why the case is taught as a lesson to check and double-check everything.

A Medlife Crisis video by cardiologist Rohin Francis on overdiagnosis and over-screening. It explains how detecting more disease does not necessarily mean saving more lives, and covers harms such as unnecessary treatment.

Adam Neely tests the claims for tuning to A=432 Hz by trying the unusual tuning systems that its proponents' numerology requires. He compares how they sound against standard tuning and temperaments.

Veritasium's Derek Muller spends an hour in a silent, dark anechoic chamber at BYU to test the claim that 45 minutes is the most anyone can bear. He reports on his experience and other people's reactions.

GoldenSound publishes music on Tidal to test MQA, a deep dive into the format's claims and problems including its leaky filter. Testing begins around the 5:45 mark.

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.

Numberphile with Tadashi Tokieda on the Trinity Hall Prime, a prime number whose digits form a picture of the college's coat of arms, left as a gift by a departing mathematician.

Techmoan's beginner introduction to the compact cassette, testing metal tapes and Dolby S noise reduction on a Sony TC-S1 deck. He checks whether a cassette can sound close to a CD when good tape and equipment are used.

Mark Rober digs into bed bugs, testing popular beliefs about where they come from and how to get rid of them. It mixes entertaining experiments with research-based advice on what works and what does not.

Geoff Cumming uses a simulation to show how wildly the p value varies from one replication to the next because of sampling variability. He argues for estimation and confidence intervals over null hypothesis significance testing.

Ben Eater explains why he builds computers on breadboards, including testing their signal behavior on an oscilloscope. It is a companion to his 6502 breadboard computer series.