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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Mick West analyzes the Navy's Gimbal UFO video and gives four checkable observations suggesting it is an infrared glare that appears to rotate because the camera rotates while tracking. He argues the object is likely a hot craft hidden behind the glare.

A short video on the US Sprint anti-ballistic missile, which accelerated to around Mach 10 in seconds under extreme g-forces and heat. It includes striking launch footage and a brief development history.

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.

Veritasium explains why many real-world systems follow power laws rather than normal distributions. It covers self-organized criticality, with simulations of sandpiles, magnetism and forest fires.

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.

David Spiegelhalter, Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, uses statistics to weigh everyday risks such as bacon sandwiches and cycling. The six-minute piece introduces micromorts as a way to compare the risk of dying.

Perun analyzes how corruption and theft in defence procurement hollowed out the Russian military before its invasion of Ukraine. It explains the mechanics of graft and how it degrades capability.

Wendover Productions explains how the US military moves people and materiel worldwide, including prepositioned equipment, sealift and airlift. It shows the scale of the logistics system behind US force projection.

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.

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.

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.

Tech Ingredients demonstrates how microwaves work and how they affect objects at range, then shows ways to defend against them. It includes a correction about rectifier output frequency.

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.

Veritasium visits the US Navy's Crane facility to test top night vision goggles. It explains how image intensifier tubes and thermal or digital systems work and compares the generations of the technology.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths examines scatter plots that were claimed to show fraudulent vote-switching in Michigan's 2020 election. He recreates the analysis and shows that the pattern arises from comparing percentages across different bases, not from fraud.

Matt Parker examines claims that Biden's 2020 vote counts violate Benford's Law, explaining the law and why it often does not apply to precinct-level election data.

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.

Musician Benn Jordan explains and demonstrates adversarial noise that poison-pills music files against AI training and scraping.

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.

Linus Tech Tips warns against cheap Android TV boxes, many of which ship with preinstalled malware. It looks at several boxes and suggests safer alternatives such as Chromecast and Nvidia Shield.

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.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day explains how a US Navy nuclear submarine surfaces through Arctic ice, filmed during the ICEx exercise. It shows ballast and control systems and the physics involved.

A four-minute 2006 explainer on trusted computing, describing what it is and whether users should support it, with a skeptical DRM angle.

Scott Manley explains the Cold War experiments in which steel and aluminium spheres, known as Lew Allen's Balls, were placed near nuclear detonations. The spheres survived the fireball, and he walks through what the declassified results show.

RealLifeLore explains France's military posture towards Russia, including French involvement in Africa and Russian influence in the Sahel. It covers the geopolitics behind current tensions.