tron

Steve Mould shows Spintronics, a set of mechanical components such as resistors, capacitors and transistors linked by chains, that give an intuitive feel for how electrical circuits work.

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.

The first video in Not Just Bikes' Strong Towns series explains the financial instability of North American cities, based on Strong Towns research. It argues that low-density suburban growth costs more to maintain than it brings in.

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.

Chuck Marohn of Strong Towns explains how a land value tax differs from an ordinary property tax, why it makes economic sense, and why it is rarely used. It is a short six-minute explainer.

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.

Technology Connections explains how touch lamps work and traces them back through patents to the 1950s, far earlier than most people assume.

Strong Towns explains the Growth Ponzi Scheme, in which post-war suburban growth takes on infrastructure costs that new development must keep funding. It describes why municipal finances become insolvent.

Tom Scott explains the design of the British BS 1363 plug and socket, including fuses, shutters and safety features, and why he thinks it beats other plugs.

Technology Connections explains why the superheterodyne radio has its name and how mixing frequencies lets it tune stations well. It walks through the underlying wave phenomena and algebra and why the design solved a hard tuning problem.

Technology Connections explains the early history of analog color television, from the 1954 start of modern color broadcasting, and how shadow masks work in CRTs. It is the first in a series on how analog color TV works.

Technology Connections explains how automatic windshield wiper rain sensors work, using an infrared light source and total internal reflection in the glass.

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.

ElectroBOOM examines whether 5G and other electromagnetic waves can harm people, explaining the EM spectrum and the difference between ionizing and non-ionizing radiation. It includes experiments and measurements in his usual humorous style.

ElectroBOOM's Mehdi Sadaghdar responds to Veritasium's lamp-and-long-wire puzzle, analysing it as an electrical engineer. He covers where the original framing misleads and the role of stray capacitance.

BigClive explains why microwave oven transformer projects are extremely dangerous, since the high voltage and high current can kill. He contrasts them with spot welder builds where the secondary is replaced by low-voltage heavy wire.

Technology Connections explains how analog television produced moving images without computers, covering scanning, CRTs and standards like NTSC and PAL. It is part of a series on analog TV.

Veritasium explores how synchronization arises spontaneously in nature, with metronomes, fireflies and bridges, drawing on Steven Strogatz's work on chaos and complexity.

Guitarist Jim Lill methodically tests what in an electric guitar affects its tone, swapping parts on a partscaster and even trying a 2x4 body. He finds that wood and construction matter far less than people assume.

A short video built around an animation of the roughly 10,000 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, placed at their measured redshift distances. It gives a brief history of deep field images and ends with a 3D fly-through.

Not Just Bikes introduces the "stroad", a street-road hybrid common in the US and Canada that fails at both jobs. He contrasts it with Dutch design, where each road has a single purpose, and covers cost, danger and ugliness.

Not Just Bikes explains the Strong Towns argument that car-dependent American suburbs cost more to maintain than they generate in taxes. It describes the growth Ponzi scheme that props up municipal finances.

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.

Not Just Bikes explains how many American suburbs, built all at once rather than incrementally, cannot cover their infrastructure costs and survive on growing debt. It draws on Strong Towns' work on the growth Ponzi scheme.

Cody's Lab builds a 200-billionth-scale model to show how far away the nearest stars are, using parallax and light speed. A short astronomy explainer on interstellar distances.

Not Just Bikes explains, using Urban3's property-tax analysis, why car-dependent suburbs generate less tax revenue than they cost to maintain, so dense urban cores effectively subsidize them. It is part of a Strong Towns series.

Professor Brailsford of the University of Nottingham describes how the university set out to print its own mathematics exam papers in the 1980s. The story centers on getting a Mergenthaler Linotron 202 typesetter to work with their own software.

A rap battle in which John Maynard Keynes and F. A. Hayek debate the causes of boom and bust, stimulus, and bailouts. It was produced by Econstories to teach the two schools of thought.

Tantacrul explains how he and engraver Simon Smith designed the free music notation font for MuseScore 3.6. It draws on the history of the SCORE notation application by Leland Smith.

Vox Earworm explains why John Coltrane's Giant Steps is so hard to improvise over: it is fast and moves through three keys. Musicians Braxton Cook and Adam Neely walk the host through the underlying music theory.

Veritasium explores planned obsolescence, from the Phoebus lightbulb cartel to printers and phones. It explains how companies deliberately shortened product lifetimes and why products aren't better.

Adam Neely explains what perfect (absolute) pitch is, how it differs from relative and quasi-absolute pitch, and why he would not want it. He covers its drawbacks, including drift with age.

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.

Rick Beato argues that adults cannot develop true perfect pitch, which he ties to critical-period brain plasticity and language acquisition. He says it can only be developed in young children, and discusses the research behind this.

Louis Rossmann gives a basic, non-technical introduction to right to repair legislation for people new to the issue.

Vox breaks down how great rappers build rhymes, from Kurtis Blow's simple bars to Biggie's smooth flow and Kendrick Lamar's dense, fast delivery. It uses on-screen visualizations of rhyme structure.

Andrew Huang explains the harmonic series, which he calls the foundation of almost all music. He builds the idea up step by step, with demonstrations of overtones and how harmonies derive from them.

A minutephysics video explaining why a piano cannot be perfectly tuned, comparing equal temperament with just intonation and the math of harmonics.

Musician Adam Neely examines whether certain keys sound sadder than others, looking at the history of tuning systems and temperaments and at how instrument timbre shapes the emotional character we hear. It draws on historical aesthetics writing and audio examples.

An episode of Plogue's chipresearch series on emulating the Yamaha DX7 from the hardware up. It covers the sub CPU and main CPU, address map investigation, cartridges, firmware analysis and a skeleton MAME driver.