tor

The first episode of Crash Course World History, in which John Green covers the shift from hunting and gathering to agriculture and how it shaped civilization. It is delivered fast and with jokes.

Practical Engineering explains pumped storage hydropower, which makes up most grid-scale electricity storage. It covers how it works and why it fits only certain geographies.

Ben Eater gives a detailed look at how an NPN bipolar junction transistor works and what it does. It is an eleven-minute explanation aimed at building real understanding of the device.

Afrotechmods plays with 2600F ultracapacitors that can dump hundreds of amps, shorting them to vaporize bits of metal. Along the way he explains the three most important capacitor equations. The uploader warns that the capacitors are not designed to be shorted.

Jeri Ellsworth shows step by step how to make an NMOS transistor at home using a kiln, rust remover, spin-on dopant, eBay wafers and vinyl stickers.

FortNine's tongue-in-cheek guide to why drivers fail to see motorcyclists and how riders can make themselves more visible. It touches on perception psychology, including the role of saccades.

FortNine surveys motorcycle airbag technology and explains why airbags have not reached mainstream adoption. It breaks down gear such as the Helite Turtle, Dainese D-Air and Alpinestars Tech-Air.

CuriousMarc inspects a newly arrived Teletype Model 19, an early military unit built around a Model 15 keyboard and printer, after an initial rough cleaning. It is the first part of a restoration series and touches on 5-bit Baudot code.

An engineering explainer on why Tesla abandoned the induction motor for the Model 3 and used an IPM-SynRM design. It covers the reluctance torque and permanent magnet principles behind the choice.

Asianometry explains why India, a chip design powerhouse, cannot fabricate chips, tracing the 1980s government attempt to build a national semiconductor champion and how it collapsed. It includes the sabotage at the SCL fab.

Adam Savage shows off his collection of analog calculators, ending with a 3D-printed, scaled reproduction of the Curta mechanical calculator built by Marcus Wu. The video examines the replica and the engineering behind it.

Quint BUILDs tests a rooftop water storage setup in which solar power pumps water up to the roof and a turbine generates power later. He works through the numbers to show how much energy it actually stores.

Bill Wurtz's fast, comedic and musical run through the whole history of Japan in nine minutes.

Asianometry traces the 30-year rise and peak of Japan's semiconductor industry from the 1950s to the 1980s, covering how a postwar country gained competence in an emerging technology.

A song by Pig With The Face Of A Boy that narrates the history of the Soviet Union from a worker's view, set to the Tetris melody.

FortNine looks at why Tesla Autopilot has rear-ended motorcyclists, speculating that the vision system misreads motorcycle taillights as a distant car. It argues that radar and other sensors would help.

Posy gives a short history of the computer mouse cursor, from early straight pointers to the tilted arrow, comparing Apple and Windows designs. He then explains why he designed his own cursor set and offers it as a free download.

A fast, absurdist 19-minute animated run through the history of the whole world, narrated and scored by Bill Wurtz in his distinctive style. It compresses millennia of events into jokes, songs and quick visuals.

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.

Kurt Vonnegut's 2004 Case College lecture, with Spanish subtitles, in which he sketches the shapes of stories on a blackboard. He plots story arcs as good and bad fortune against time.

Jiahao Chen's JuliaCon 2017 talk argues that vector transposes should be taken seriously in type systems and linear algebra libraries. It explains why treating vectors as matrices causes trouble in languages.

A short lecture in which Kurt Vonnegut graphs the simple shapes of stories, such as Man in Hole and Boy Gets Girl. He sketches how fortune rises and falls over a narrative.

A demo of a raycasting 3D engine built entirely from in-game mechanisms in vanilla Factorio 0.17. It renders simple 3D scenes, producing a new frame every 45 game ticks, with the video sped up to compensate for low UPS.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science shows how to make and test YBCO high-temperature superconductor with a kiln and eBay chemicals. He demonstrates flux pinning and shows a close-up of the crystal structure.

A WSJ report on China's 'dark factories', highly automated plants run by robots with little human presence, visiting Zeekr's EV factory. It covers Chinese labor costs, automation and overproduction in the EV industry.

Marques Brownlee walks through Tesla's factory with Elon Musk, showing production lines for the Model S, X and 3.

Steve Jobs announces the iPhone App Store at the 2008 iPhone SDK keynote, including the 70/30 revenue split for developers and free apps at no charge.

The first part of Extra History's animated miniseries on the South Sea Bubble. It explains how England's government debt led Robert Harley to turn to financier John Blunt, whose schemes began inflating artificial demand for shares.

The first part of Extra History's series on the Bronze Age Collapse, introducing the Egyptians, Hittites, Assyrians, and Mycenaeans and their interlinked system of trade, agriculture, and war before the Sea Peoples arrive.

Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept video, made for John Sculley's EDUCOM keynote, showing a professor conversing with a tablet-based AI assistant.

Tom Scott investigates the claim that the microwave was invented to heat hamsters, and interviews James Lovelock about freezing and microwave-thawing hamsters in the 1950s. It traces early magnetron uses beyond radar.

Ed March rides a Honda C90 through Iran on his journey from Malaysia to the UK, showing the country and its people. He argues Iran is far more welcoming than the press suggests.

Cliff Stoll shows and explains his two Friden EC-132 electronic calculators for Numberphile. The video covers how these early machines worked, including their unusual acoustic delay line memory.

An animated map showing the borders and populations of European countries for every year since 400 BC. Vassal states and colonies are excluded from population counts.

A short TFiR clip in which Linus Torvalds explains his view that respect should be earned rather than given, in defense of his blunt and insulting style.

Robert Scoble interviews Paul Graham at Y Combinator's Mountain View headquarters as 36 new startups debut. They discuss what YC is, and Graham's no-assholes rule.

A man with no flight instruction and only desktop flight simulator experience attempts to take off and land a Cessna 172, with a commercial airline instructor aboard who gives no help. The flight came out of a prop bet.

A vlog in which Tucker Gott flies a paramotor to a McDonald's for lunch, showing everyday powered paraglider flying.

FortNine argues that e-bikes have injury rates and speeds closer to motorcycles than to pedal bikes. It argues riders should treat them with similar safety gear and caution.

Bret Victor's talk proposing a new kind of maker space built for seeing and understanding a project's behavior: inside it, across time and across possibilities. It argues for scientific understanding over recipes and rules of thumb.