thomas ricks

Veritasium tells the story of Thomas Midgley Jr., who introduced leaded gasoline and CFCs, and covers the science behind lead exposure and ozone damage. It also touches on isotope geochemistry used to uncover the history.

Technology Connections explains how dishwashers work and how to use them well, including detergent use, the prewash cycle and why pre-rinsing hurts. It follows his earlier dishwasher videos.

Veritasium revisits Thomas Young's original double slit experiment with light, showing how interference supports the wave nature of light. It uses a pond-wave demonstration to explain the pattern.

CGP Grey tells the story of Alexander Pope's long takedown of a historian, Thomas Hearne, framed around the quirks of library books and archival research. It is a funny, digressive video essay about literary feuds and tracking down original sources.

Captain Disillusion explains the visual effects behind the Back to the Future trilogy. He covers ILM's motion-control, computer-controlled camera work and clever pre-CGI tricks.

Vsauce explores math through card tricks and big numbers, including an animation of how enormous 52 factorial, the number of deck orderings, really is.

An episode of Coding Secrets by Jon Burton on retro copy protection, in particular physically damaging a disk with a laser so copies fail. It explains how this defeated hackers and pirates.