what if

Randall Munroe of xkcd answers what would happen if you swam in a spent nuclear fuel pool, and how much radiation you would receive at the surface versus at depth.

PBS Space Time considers whether life could be based on silicon instead of carbon, comparing the two elements' chemistry and why silicon is the most plausible alternative.

Vladimir Voevodsky's IAS lecture starts from Godel's second incompleteness theorem to explore whether first-order arithmetic could be inconsistent. It motivates his vision of univalent foundations and computer-checked proofs.

Veritasium shows what the world looks like through a UV camera. It covers how pigments absorb UV, how fluorescence works, and how UV imaging reveals sunscreen effectiveness and skin damage.

PBS Space Time examines the Silurian hypothesis, the idea that an industrial civilization could have existed on Earth before humans. It looks at what traces such a civilization might leave in the geological record.

PBS Space Time asks whether dark matter could be made of primordial black holes. It walks through the observational constraints that limit this idea.

Rick Hartley's AltiumLive keynote on differential pairs in PC boards. He argues the rules from cables and twisted pairs do not carry over, and covers which pair geometry gives the best impedance control, the right spacing, routing practice and how much skew is acceptable.

An English-subtitled version of Staplerfahrer Klaus, a gory dark-comedy German workplace safety film about the dangers of forklifts in warehouses.

Researchers from the Artificial Life Lab Graz introduce the Primordial Particle System, where a simple motion law for self-propelled particles produces cell-like structures that self-reproduce and show life cycles.

A long Gamers Nexus investigation into how volatile US tariffs affect the computer hardware industry. It interviews manufacturers and sellers about costs, margins and why moving production to the US is hard.

A Google Tech Talk by Sebastian Deterding on gamification. It looks at what points and badges get wrong and what lessons game design offers for non-game applications.

ScienceClic visualizes what you would see falling into a black hole, from the approach and the accretion disc to crossing the horizon, in 15 minutes.

Gernot Heiser presents seL4, a microkernel with a mathematical proof connecting security properties to the binary code, and explains what its open-sourcing means for users. It covers its roles as a microkernel, separation kernel and hypervisor.

An Apple WWDC24 session introducing Embedded Swift, a subset of Swift with no runtime that targets tiny microcontrollers. It demonstrates the idea on an off-the-shelf Matter smart home device.

The classic Life of Brian scene in which revolutionaries list everything the Romans have done for them, from aqueducts to roads.

A 1937 GM-produced film explaining how the automobile differential lets wheels turn at different speeds around a corner. It uses clear animations and cutaway demonstrations to build the idea from first principles.

A short clip of Richard Feynman explaining the scientific method: guess, compute consequences, compare to experiment, and why vague theories like astrology cannot be proven wrong.

A 1930s Chevrolet training film explaining the principles and development of the differential gear. It builds the idea step by step from first principles to the finished mechanism.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum lectures at the Royal Institution on the invention and decipherment of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, and why it is so hard to translate.

Technology Connections explains why humidity matters and compares the main types of humidifiers, including evaporative and ultrasonic designs. It covers how and why you would add moisture to indoor air.

TEDxStanford talk by Bill Burnett, executive director of Stanford's design program, on applying design thinking to your own life and career. He offers five practical tips such as getting curious, talking to people and trying things.

Lex Fridman interviews University of Glasgow chemist Lee Cronin about the origin of life, aliens, complexity and consciousness. The conversation centers on Cronin's assembly theory.

ElectroBOOM's Mehdi Sadaghdar explains how a full bridge rectifier works, the building block of AC to DC converters, with his usual humor and a demonstration of the circuit.

CGP Grey explains jury nullification, a juror's power to acquit despite the law, and why mentioning it can get you struck from jury selection.

Konrad Malawski's Strange Loop 2023 talk shows how the FoundationDB team adopted Swift incrementally in a C++ codebase. It covers Swift's C++ interoperability, which let them move single functions or entire types over one at a time.

In this first Crust of Rust episode, Jon Gjengset live-codes an example that needs multiple explicit lifetime annotations. Along the way he covers string types and generics over a custom trait.

British Museum curator Irving Finkel teaches how to write cuneiform, with a colleague following along. It is a short, lively introduction to the script.

A one-minute clip of Richard Feynman describing the scientific method: guess a law, compute its consequences, and compare with experiment. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.

Tantacrul examines sonification, the practice of turning data into sound or music, and critiques how scientists and musicians, including NASA and CERN projects, use it well and poorly.

Dr. K of HealthyGamerGG argues that gifted kids can be seen as special needs, tracing a path from the gifted label to burnout and perfectionism.

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.

Swift compiler engineers explain how Swift implements generics using dictionary-passing with reified type metadata. They compare it with Java-style uniform representation and C++ or Rust monomorphization.

The official music video for Macklemore & Ryan Lewis's Thrift Shop featuring Wanz, a hip hop hit celebrating secondhand shopping.

Chris Lattner and Brennan Saeta present Swift for TensorFlow at the TensorFlow Dev Summit 2019, covering language-integrated automatic differentiation and tooling for machine learning in Swift.

The creator of ESPARGOS, an ESP32-based antenna array from the University of Stuttgart, explains how it senses phase and amplitude of WiFi signals to localize devices and build a WiFi camera. It demos the Python library and project.

A step-by-step guide to building a lifter, a small triangular ionocraft made from balsa wood, aluminum foil and thin wire, powered by a high-voltage supply. It also shows high-voltage safety practices.

The Browser Company's CTO explains how the team is building the Arc browser for Windows using Swift. It covers the de-risking work and why they believe it is feasible.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk introducing Polyworld, an artificial life simulator used to evolve artificial intelligence by designing worlds rather than minds. It presents results from ongoing attempts to evolve intelligent behavior.

ThePrimeagen interviews Chris Lattner, creator of LLVM, Clang, Swift and Mojo, with TJ DeVries, in a long live-streamed conversation. They discuss language design and Lattner's experience building Swift.

Lex Fridman has a three-hour conversation with Joscha Bach about artificial consciousness, the workings of the mind, intelligence and the possibly simulated nature of reality.