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Navin Kabra Profile picture
@NGKabra
Sep 27, 2020 • 40 tweets • 20 min read • Read on X
Ok, let's do this. What are good YouTube channels that you watched (or still watch) because they're fun to watch, but you also ended up learning from them?

Only recommendations from people born this century are allowed

@gauravjoshi2000 @arshkabra @KabraRuhi @ShahAvanti02
Include a link to the YouTube channel, what it's about, and why you liked it. And tag others who could add to the list. Younger kids deserve better recommendations than the ones from the previous century.
YouTube for youngsters: Epic Rap Battles of History. This did more for @ArshKabra's history knowledge than ICSE History ever did.
I grew up reading Ya Perelman's books but never could get the kids interested in reading them. ASAP Science came to the rescue.
"Watch for the X, stay for the science", is certainly a theme for this thread, where X = entertainment, animation, rap, irreverence and more
Both @ArshKabra and @david_perell recommend @TheCrashCourse. That's triangulation from two ends of the spectrum.
Science and maths aren't the only subjects that kids can or should learn from YouTube. Here's ...ahem... screenplay writing?
Is mechanics your thing? I feel jealous when I see all the animations and slow-motion videos explaining mechanics. So much easier to learn, and you can focus on higher level things.
More physics and engineering recommendations from Gaurav.
Wide variety of science topics from @veritaserum
Warning: I suggest watching only channels recommended by sensible people

DO NOT TRUST THE YOUTUBE RECOMMENDATION ALGORITHM. There be monsters.

Read this if you want to get scared: I suggest watching only
Because @anujdeshpande whined about the adults being excluded, I'm allowing recommendations from older people. All such recommendations will be tagged #olderpeople

Which means all recommendations *not* tagged #olderpeople are from verified 21st century sources.
I think Rohan just missed the Y2K deadline, so he is technically #olderpeople but close enough that you can give him the benefit of doubt.

It would be difficult to find a modern machine without motors, so this seems like a good topic to explore
As I said just a few weeks ago, all science and maths should be taught using @3blue1brown style animations. And the recommendations in this thread are a step in that direction.
Is it F1 you seek? I guess the answer is yes for some of you...
#oldpeople recommendations. Quite a selection here: Geography, Restorations, Wildlife, and Well-being
Was totally not expecting a youngster to recommend @RayDalio, but here we are.
#oldpeople recommendation: but a channel on space tech sounds interesting. And another vote for @veritasium which also showed up in @ArshKabra's recommendations.
If you watched any YouTube videos because of recommendations from this thread, please let me know. Closing the feedback loop is important in tracking quality.

My DMs are open.
#oldpeople recommendations: CGP Grey's topics are all over the place, but all of them sound interesting.
Why am I separating the people born before 2000 from the ones after? The older people merely adopted the internet. The younger ones were born in it. Formed by it.

Hence their recommendations carry more weight.
Another vote for Wendover Productions. @Jaydeep_W has also recommended it. Looks like it covers Planes, Trains, and Automobiles...
Nerdwriter now had 3 #oldpeople votes. Any youngster wants to upgrade it to a first-class recommendation?
Feels weird to put @manasi_nene into #oldpeople but what to do. Anyway, 3rd votes for Crash Course and Nerdwriter.

And a new category makes an entrance: music theory and history
The School of life covers a bunch of humanities topics, which our science/math oriented schools do a terrible job of. So this should be an antidote.

Maybe I need a #borderline category for late '90s folks instead of #oldpeople
Hmmm... I wonder how many kids are interested in the art of making and writing movies. Second recommendation in this category, this time from #oldpeople
Nerdwriter and Wendover Productions upgraded to a full recommendation. And "Half as Interesting" makes a debut. Explainers for all kinds of stuff, including some geopolitics and current events.
Another bunch of borderline #oldpeople YouTube channel recommendations from Manasi. See her thread for more
This is a second vote for ColdFusion about what's happening on the cutting edge of technology. Even @Jaydeep_W has recommended it.
Third recommendation for @veritasium and second one for @PhysicsGirl for Physics and science experiments.
Second #oldpeople recommendation for Geography Now. Another one for 3blue1brown for advanced maths and physics. And Arvin Ash for advanced physics.
Lost count of how many recommendations Crash Course has received so far. And a new #oldpeople category makes its debut: Finance.
Ok, now we have philosophy and law recommendations also.
New category "Cooking" makes an entry in the #oldpeople category. Sahil recommends @FrenchGuyCookin: youtube.com/channel/UCPzFL…

While we are on the topic, let me add @KrishAshok's channel which combines science with cooking
youtube.com/channel/UCPzFL…
Collection of educational YouTube channels from @LearnAwesome (this is an #oldpeople reco)
Yet another vote for @veritasium
It appears that Veritasium, The Crash Course, and Wendover Productions are at the top with a large number of recommendations.
How's it made has explanations of...umm... how things are made.

Link for the lazy ones:
History recommendation: OverSimplified. Vishwesh promises that the recommendation has come from his son. 😀
More votes for Crash Course, Kurzgesagt, Geo History, Half as Interesting. And new entries: Real Life Lore, Knowlegia, VSauce. All from a verified kid.
Three #oldpeople recommendations by @iamsarnaik here: The Science Asylum, Mind Your Decisions (fun math problems), and Zach Star (advanced sciency topics)

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More from @NGKabra

Navin Kabra Profile picture
Dec 3
Scientists from NCRA Pune have made a discovery with the potential to shake up science's understanding of how early galaxies were formed after the Big Bang

They have discovered a galaxy which they've named Alaknanda. It is a fairly basic galaxy, so why is it such a big deal? 🧵 Image
Alaknanda is a tiny dot on the images taken by the James Webb Space Telescope. If you zoom in, it looks rather unremarkable: a basic spiral galaxy with a thin central disk and two arms. There are billions of galaxies like this, and nothing about its shape or size is special 🧵 Image
What makes Alaknanda special is that it has a redshift of 4. This means that the light from Alaknanda that we are seeing just now was emitted over 12 billion years ago.

How do we know this? (Skip to the next tweet if you don't want to know the details of how we know it is 12 billion years old.) You’ll be surprised by how much we can tell by looking closely at the light. Consider this oversimplified explanation: suppose we pass the light from Alaknanda through a very fancy prism. It splits into the rainbow colours, as you would remember from your high-school physics. If you zoom into this spectrum, you notice a lot of thin bright vertical lines—meaning some specific colours are brighter than the others. These correspond to colours ("wavelengths") emitted by a gas like Hydrogen, which is the most common element in a galaxy. It turns out that one of the bright lines corresponding to Hydrogen is not in the correct place, but is located much further to the right (longer wavelength) than what we expected. This is called ‘redshift’. (This is not literally what was done. This is an oversimplified explanation. NCRA didn’t have access to an appropriate spectrograph, but used advanced data manipulation on the existing data with 21 different filters to get a similar effect. But the basic science principles are the same.)

What causes the redshift? According to Einstein's theory of relativity, the universe is expanding, and this causes the redshift. Imagine a short line drawn on the surface of the balloon. If the balloon is blown up further, the fabric stretches, and the length of the line increases. The same thing happens when light is travelling in expanding space: the wavelength gets stretched and hence increases.

We know how much the universe is expanding and since when, so by looking at the amount of redshift of Alaknanda's light, we can calculate how long it has been travelling through the universe to reach us.

And that is 12 billion years.Image
Read 10 tweets
Navin Kabra Profile picture
Mar 4
What the hell?! This is the most insane science I've heard of.

In this procedure, surgeons remove a patient's tooth+bone, drill a hole in it and put a lens, and then they IMPLANT THE TOOTH IN THE PATIENT'S CORNEA!?

What?!

The more I looked into this, the more insane it is. 🧵
I had so many questions...

Is this some bizarre evil scientist Nazi experiment? Nope. It's a procedure invented in the 1960s and is performed every year in several locations around the world.

Including Sankara Nethralaya in India. 🧵
Why the hell are they putting a tooth in someone's eye?!

There are patients where normal corneal transplants fail (repeatedly) because the patient's immune system rejects the transplanted cornea.

This is rare, but in such cases, a tooth is the only thing that works well. 🧵
Read 12 tweets
Navin Kabra Profile picture
Feb 20
Tall Quantum Claims: Microsoft has a breathless (but difficult to understand) press release about a new quantum computing chip which makes it appear as though they've solved Quantum Computing. This isn't true, but the science of the claims is fascinating 🧵
We don't know for sure if Microsoft have (so far) invented a new type of material (topoconductor) which allows a new type of qubit (Majorana zero modes) that could revolutionize QC. But let me give a high-level explanation of what's being claimed and why it could be a big deal 🧵
This is a rather complex topic: I'll have to explain bits, qubits, why error correction is so important in qubits, Majorana particles and how qubits based on them help with the error correction problem 🧵
Read 28 tweets
Navin Kabra Profile picture
Dec 14, 2024
I recently found out that Akbar's wife, popularly (but mistakenly) known as Jodhabai, was an accomplished international trader and her business problems possibly resulted in changing the fate of India: ensuring the British colonized India instead of Portugal 1/36
So, this is the story of how a Hindu queen's Muslim ship, carrying Hajj pilgrims in Christian waters patrolled by the Portuguese armada resulted in changing the course of Indian History. (Sorry can't find the original source of for this wonderful sentence) 2/36
But first, what do I mean by "mistakenly known as Jodhabai"?

The name of Akbar's wife, mother of Salim (aka Jahangir), was not Jodhabai. Women of the Mughal harem were referred to by their birth place (or place where they were "first viewed with affection by the Emperor") 3/36
Read 44 tweets
Navin Kabra Profile picture
Jul 15, 2024
Who are Indians descended from? Aryans from Europe? Dravidians who've been "here" forever? The Indus valley civilization?

A controversial question for 150+ years, but now we have DNA evidence that answers these questions with a high degree of certainty.

🧵 Image
The controversy originated with the (now discredited) "Aryan Invasion Theory" which began as a respectable theory of how Indian, European, and Persian languages all have a common ancestry: but was quickly adopted by racist white Europeans
It started in late 17xx when William Jones, a linguistic scholar, was appointed a judge of the Bengal Supreme Court. He came to India and noticed striking the similarities between Sanskrit, Persian, Gothic, Greek, Latin.
Read 42 tweets
Navin Kabra Profile picture
Jun 21, 2024
Devanagari is an extremely elegant script. But this was never explained to us in school.

A thread on the awesomeness that is devanagari.

Let's start with the things that my teachers did *not* teach me in school:
Why do both श and ष exist? (The difference in pronunciation was never explained) Why do ङ and ञ exist?

What is ऋ? Is it pronounced “ri” or “ru”, and in any case, why does it even exist if री and रु exist?
Much later in life, when I understood the meaning of the rows and columns in Devanagari, everything fell into place and I saw the beauty and elegance of it all.
Read 17 tweets

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