For 20 years, astronauts have been shooting photos of Earth from the space station. Like everything the astronauts do, they are trained for this job. And like everything they do, there is purpose and intention behind it.

By the NASA Earth Observatory. Link to video itself (6m45s).

10 min video by Not Just Bikes.

Copenhagen is a great city, but it's not Amsterdam ... or any other Dutch city for that matter. This video explores the differences in street design taken by Copenhagen and citites in the Netherlands, to discover some of the finer points of what makes for great urban design.

قصة مشروع البيضاء

The final update from Al Baydha Project Co-founder Neal Spackman, 9 years in. How desertification resulted from the loss of an indigenous land management system, and how the land has changed since.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Baydha_Project
https://permacultureglobal.org/projects/286-al-baydha-project
Youtube channel with more videos

Via SOLARPUNKS

The Miracle Sudoku

In a word, thrilling. When is the last time you heard someone describe Sudoku in that way?

Published during Ramadan 1441
إنتاج المركز الإعلامي لمشيخة الأزهر الشريف

I suggest you try to avoid using the Youtube website or Youtube's mobile apps. Instead, if you use the Youtube URL, watch their videos using a client outside of Google's control, such as Invidious or a desktop client like mpv or VLC, or a mobile app like NewPipe.

For safe-keeping, I have also downloaded copies of these videos onto my Nextcloud instance. You can play the videos from there in your browser, or download them locally to your own computer.

Note that the playlist on Youtube is missing two episodes.

"As above, so below" by Roman Hill

https://vimeo.com/400306124
https://www.behance.net/gallery/94353547/AS-ABOVE
https://motionographer.com/2020/03/25/and-now-for-something-soothing-as-above-by-roman-hill/

The video should be viewed as art, not science. From the creator, on post-production:

Afterwards, color-grading is essential in my work. A lot of times I will completely change colors to illustrate something precise, such as fire, gold or water.

The creator again, on which chemical reactions were used:

I like to keep the details of my recipes secret. I see it as a way of protecting the magic surrounding the images. I love seeing adults be kids again by trying to understand what they are seeing. I feel like revealing the trick would take part of the magic away.

Via kottke.org

Level-headed 42 minute video by Tom Scott on the subject of copyright and how it works today.

FIFA has released the 2018 FIFA World Cup Russia™ Official Film.
1h and 20m down memory lane ;-)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MiAcU2DvbXM

Video by Kurzgesagt

Via kottke.org which has a nice write-up of the video.

How interconnections between national grids facilitate more renewable energy generation capacity.

Good explanation of exponential growth and how it relates to health-care capacity in light of the current SARS-CoV-2 virus outbreak.

Of course, virus transmission is in fact logistic, not exponential, but this video by Sharafestien nonetheless does a good job of driving home the main point: why it is prudent for everyone to take precautions.

• No ads
• No need to create a Google account
• Tools for managing subscriptions
• Adds ability to listen only to audio
• No need for YouTube app in order to listen to videos on mobile (or use Newpipe on Android)
• No need to "ding" bell, just being subscribed is enough to receive all notifications
• No age-gate
• Dark mode (although YouTube has this now too)
• Free software (AGPL v3 license)

A good Firefox add-on is Privacy Redirect. Apart from handling Youtube can also redirect other services, and it also automatically rotates each redirect from a list of Invidious instances so as to avoid overloading any single one.

See Invidious Instances for a list of publicly available instances.

• "Small acts of resistance are all we need. Together, we make change", Yarmo Mackenbach
• https://reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/8wvazc/invidous_alternative_frontend_to_youtube/
• https://github.com/omarroth/invidious

Other Youtube front-end alternatives

• yt-dlp
• NewPipe (Android)
• PipePipe (Android), includes SponsorBlock
• yt-local , via reddit thread

Replacing Youtube altogether

Another approach is to replace Youtube with an open-source, federated video host service.
That would be PeerTube (see this blog post by LazyBear).

• https://fedi.video - a good place to get started with PeerTube, by FediThing

RSS offers the ability to follow your favourite channels without having to be logged in to Google.

Note: you don't actually need to scour through the page's HTML code. Just paste the channel ID (it's a long alphanumeric string in the URL when looking at the channel's landing page) into the end of this URL:

https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=

Here's some example links to the RSS feed of some popular Youtube channels:

• https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCHnyfMqiRRG1u-2MsSQLbXA - Veritasium
• https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCEIwxahdLz7bap-VDs9h35A - Steve Mould
• https://www.youtube.com/feeds/videos.xml?channel_id=UCtESv1e7ntJaLJYKIO1FoYw - Periodic Videos

More links

• someone wrote a webapp for that (not that I think it's necessary...). Via reddit

By Open Sourced, a new project from Recode by Vox.

Night of the Living Dead, video by kaptainkristian
Chronicles how the zombies as we know entered popular culture due to a lapse in copyright.

Video of the full event, 4h 16m saved on my Nextcloud instance, because the full video appears to have been removed from Youtube.

You may also like to read this write-up on the event by Salman Hameed.

• https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/2013/jan/11/muslim-thought-on-evolution-debate

Cracking Ancient Codes: Cuneiform Writing, with Irving Finkel, the Royal Institution.
Very entertaining and engrossing.

12 videos by Al-Azhar Al-Shareef on Hajj and its rituals

• الإحرام
• الأمور التي يَحرم على المحرم فعلها
• صفة الطواف بالبيت الحرام
• أحوال الحائض في [#الحج](https://links.solarchemist.se/./add-tag/الحج)
• الحج بالنيابة عن الآخر
• عدد مرات [#الحج](https://links.solarchemist.se/./add-tag/الحج)
• حج المرأة عن الآخر
• يوم عرفة
• المقصود بالوقوف على عرفات
• الأضحية
• الاشتراك في الأضحية
• الفرق بين الرجل والمرأة في أفعال الحج

Use data to your advantage. In this Learning Playlist, Dr Mike Pound will help you understand how to refine your data, clean up datasets, visualise the information & extract meaningful knowledge from your dataset.
Using R.

• Trailer
• Introduction to data analysis
• What is data?
• Data visualisation
• Cleaning data
• Data transformation
• Data reduction
• Principal component analysis
• Clustering
• Classifying data
• Data regression