Veritasium
4 HN recommenders · recommended in 5 months, 2020–2023
18:39 · 17M views · Jan 29, 2020
A Veritasium video on the logistic map, showing how a simple population equation leads to chaos and bifurcation. It connects the idea to convection, neuron firing and the Mandelbrot set, with interactive animations.
HN commenters call it a favourite Veritasium video, praised for how a simple equation reveals surprisingly complex patterns.
6 comments from Hacker News
Here’s a rabbit hole to go down on that theme - this video That’s my second favorite YouTube video. I love how it reveals some universal primitives are really complicated. The pattern in the video is as fundamental to the universe as circles are. Imagine how many other mind-boggling structures are ubiquitous but just outside our understanding.
Absolutely. His "gravity is not a force" video led me through a whole range of emotions from "this is ridiculous" to "actually..." to "holy crap, I've been wrong about this my entire life". In terms of sheer brain-breaking... this is my favourite: this video But this is the one I think people on HN need to watch most [LINK]
Have you ever seen the Veritasium video on where fractals actually come from in 3D? If not, and since you already thought fractals were fascinating, hold on to your hat. this video
Did you see his one about the 3D landscape underlying the Mandelbrot set? I’ll cut him endless slack after that mindsplosion. this video
The original conversation happened almost 2 centuries ago I think (1830's). But sure! I think we throw away the baby with the bathwater when we say "Malthus was wrong". I think it's better to say "Malthus inspired the beginning of an awesome idea". Malthus' original idea was where he plotted population growth and food production in the same graph. When the 2 lines crossed, that's bad. That's obviously not very realistic, but actually he had the gist of it; it just needed a bit of refinement. Not much later, another Belgian by the name of Verhulst did indeed improve on Malthus' model. He came up with a formula where at first the population grows exponentially; and then later it slows down before it reaches the limit (carrying-capacity). In Verhulst's model, you don't have a catastrophic line-crossing. At that point, you basically have an actual Minimal Viable Product that you can use to predict and think about real-world population dynamics, and a whole lot more besides. Over the last two centuries people have built a lot of discoveries on top of that. This Veritasium video is about one small (but awesome) bit of that: this video It's a good thing not everyone thought Malthus was (completely) wrong!