ublock origin

David and Ben Crystal introduce the Original Pronunciation production of Shakespeare and show what it reveals about the history of English, including puns and rhymes lost in modern speech.

Kurzgesagt's animated overview of human origins and the vast prehistory before recorded history. It covers how modern humans emerged and spread.

PBS Space Time, together with It's Okay to be Smart and PBS Eons, asks how a universe drifting toward disorder produced something as complex as life. It presents the idea that the laws of physics, through thermodynamics, may actually favor the emergence of life.

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.

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.

3Blue1Brown's discovery-oriented introduction to error correction codes, building up Hamming codes from the puzzle of locating a flipped bit. It explains the parity-check idea and why it is so efficient.

Kraut traces centuries of political development, from Mongol rule and the Orthodox church to Muscovite autocracy, that shaped Russia's authoritarian state. It uses countryball animation and compares Russia with Europe and China.

Part 3 of Kirby Ferguson's Everything is a Remix series, using Apple and the iPhone to show how invention builds on copying and combining prior ideas. It argues that creativity and innovation are inseparable from copying.

Kurzgesagt explores the idea that life might have arisen shortly after the Big Bang, when the whole universe was warm enough to be habitable. It discusses what that would mean for the origin and spread of life.

Vsauce asks whether music will ever run out of new melodies. It counts the possible note combinations and discusses how common chord progressions and remixing affect originality.

Veritasium explains that the Higgs boson accounts for only a small fraction of everyday mass. Most of a proton's mass comes from the energy of the gluon field binding its quarks.

Science journalist potholer54 examines the claim that SARS-CoV-2 came from a Wuhan lab, tracing the sources behind it and the weaknesses in the evidence.

A Vox explainer on how the wildlife trade and wet markets are linked to coronavirus and why new diseases keep emerging in China. It stresses that most people in China do not eat wildlife.

Steve Mould explains homochirality: why biological molecules like sugars and amino acids come in only one handedness. He covers ideas about how this asymmetry might have arisen, touching on meteorite samples and RNA.

Stated Clearly explains the RNA world hypothesis, which resolves the chicken-or-egg problem of genes versus enzymes by proposing that RNA once did both jobs. It outlines how evolution could begin with RNA chains alone.

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.

Kurzgesagt explores the idea that black holes could create universes and that we might live inside one. It builds up the physics of how density falls as black holes get larger.

CGP Grey investigates why the name Tiffany spiked in popularity and then faded, with help from onomastics experts. It is a short, playful look at how names spread.

Dr Brad Stanfield recounts the research history and scandal around resveratrol, the supposed anti-aging supplement, including problems with the original studies.

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.

Matt Parker analyzes the Minecraft speedrunning controversy in which Dream was accused of cheating via improbably lucky drops. He walks through the probability and the statistical arguments in the original accusation and the reply.

Technology Connections explains how the simple American drip coffee maker works, including the bimetal valve and bubble-pump heating, and compares the original Mr. Coffee with modern machines.

Mick West analyzes the Navy "Go Fast" UFO footage and shows with simple trigonometry and the data overlay that the object is slow and high up, consistent with a balloon. He explains how parallax makes it look fast and argues the original TV claims were wrong.

Ward Cunningham explains the history and intent of the debt metaphor, which he coined while refactoring the WyCash product. He says debt means code reflecting an incomplete understanding of the problem, not sloppy programming.

Rune Skovbo Johansen explains Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering, a technique he invented and released as open source. It makes dithering stick to 3D surfaces and covers the experiments and shortcomings along the way, inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn.

Ted Nelson explains the original Xanadu hypertext idea of visible connection, the notion that links between documents should be shown and preserved. He argues that the Web and current document standards lost this concept.

Veritasium asks people where a tree's mass comes from, then explains that most of a dry tree's mass originates from carbon dioxide in the air. It combines street interviews with a short explanation of photosynthesis.

A short Tracklib video visualizing the disco sample that Daft Punk's One More Time is built from. It shows how the track is composed from the original material.

Roaring Kitty's July 2020 analysis of GameStop, arguing a bullish deep-value case when the stock was about $4 and short interest exceeded 100%. It covers fundamentals, cash balance and technicals.

Historia Civilis explains the origins and governing system of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy. It covers the Great Law and the league's surprisingly intricate legal and political structure.

Alex O'Connor shows that ChatGPT cannot draw a wine glass filled to the brim, and ties the failure to David Hume's missing shade of blue. It asks what the failure says about how image models learn.

A five-minute animated explainer of liquid democracy, in which voters can delegate their vote to trusted people. It starts from the origins of democracy and contrasts direct and representative models.

CGP Grey explains why airport codes are inconsistent and sometimes confusing, from their origins in old weather station codes to the quirks that cause mistakes. He builds the story around a single typo that sent a flight to the wrong continent.

Veritasium explains the Dzhanibekov effect, also called the tennis racket theorem, where a spinning object flips unexpectedly about its intermediate axis. The video gives an intuitive account of the underlying rotational dynamics, drawing on Terry Tao's explanation and the original papers.

Corridor Crew dive into the visual effects of Terminator 2 and try recreating the T-1000 bars scene with modern tools. They explain how the original effects were achieved.

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.

A video essay on how the editors of Star Wars: A New Hope recut and rearranged the footage to rescue the film. It walks through specific changes that improved pacing and drama.

A short urbanism video presenting original observations of how drivers treat stop signs, to argue that cyclists rolling through them under an Idaho stop is no different. It filmed intersections in Ottawa.

A one-minute clip about Paul Otlet, the Belgian bibliographer who in 1934 imagined users accessing a remote database through an electric telescope over a phone line. It presents his vision as a precursor of the web.

Tom Scott visits the Strid at Bolton Abbey in Yorkshire, a deceptively narrow stretch of river with dangerous currents. He covers its reputation and the 12th-century legend of the Boy of Egremont.