testing

Destin of Smarter Every Day goes behind the scenes at the 23andMe lab to show how genotyping works. He also discusses DNA testing and privacy.

America's Test Kitchen tests eight carbon-steel skillets to find the best one, asking whether a single pan can replace stainless, cast iron and nonstick. It names a winner and covers how the pans perform.

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.

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.

Tom Scott explains why electronic voting is a bad idea. Elections must be trusted by everyone and attacks on software scale in ways attacks on paper do not, so open source or blockchain fixes do not solve it.

Veritasium explains why a large share of published research findings may be false, covering p-values, p-hacking, publication bias and low replication rates. It draws on John Ioannidis's well-known paper and describes reforms such as preregistration.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why electronic voting is a bad idea, arguing that paper ballots are transparent, auditable and hard to tamper with at scale. He covers why moving voting to phones, tablets or computers undermines trust and verifiability.

A short Veritasium video explaining regression to the mean and how ignoring it leads to wrong conclusions about punishment versus reward, medical treatments and sports streaks. It uses the example of flight instructors who believed criticism works better than praise.

A Wendover Productions explainer on how airport security is designed, covering screening layers, x-ray scanning, and the contrast with Israel's profiling-based approach. It walks through the logic behind why security works the way it does.

Military History Visualized charts ship production by the United States and Japan from December 1941 to September 1945. The growing numbers show why Japan, despite a stronger starting navy, could not win a long war.

Practical Engineering explains what a 100-year flood actually means, combining statistics, hydrology and how society treats risk. Grady walks through local drainage infrastructure and the caveats in estimating flood probability.

Computerphile interview with Prof. Ross Anderson on how Chip and PIN payment systems are being compromised, and the attacks researchers have seen.

Veritasium explains Bayes' theorem with examples and introduces the 'Bayesian trap', where repeated events get mistaken for inevitable ones. It discusses how priors shape our expectations and behavior.

minutephysics, in collaboration with the US Census Bureau, explains differential privacy and why the 2020 census adds noise to protect individuals' data. It walks through how statistics can leak private information.

A Veritasium video on survivor bias, explaining how an observed sample can be incomplete and skewed. It uses examples such as bombers and famous success stories.

A four-minute minutephysics video arguing that causal models and causal networks let statistics infer causation from correlation. It touches on Reichenbach's principle, common causes, feedback and quantum causal discovery.

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.

A SAAMI-produced training video for firefighters explaining what happens when sporting ammunition burns, including that unchambered cartridges lack the energy to penetrate much. It includes test footage of ammunition in fires.

Forgotten Weapons examines the Heckler & Koch G11, a West German experimental rifle built around a caseless cartridge. The video covers the G11K2 and its unusual technology before its cancellation for political and economic reasons.

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.

Matt Cutts of Google explains what cloaking is: serving different content to search engine crawlers than to users. He covers why it violates Google's webmaster guidelines.