Crash course - chemistry

The Green boys are outstanding.

There's almost nothing else to be said about them - between the novels, the magazine, and the various YouTube channels, they've offered up a lifetime of intelligent entertainment already and show no signs of stopping.

And their Crash Course series (in chemistry and fourteen other topics) are wonderful introductions (if sometimes a little quickly spoken) to the topics, and the graphic style and illustrations help to augment their explanations.

Well worth your time, but I will warn you that they present their information thoroughly and rapidly. Be prepared to watch through a couple of times if you're not already somewhat familiar with the topic about which they are elucidating.

Khan Academy - chemistry

I remember a few years back hearing that Khan Academy was going to revolutionize education.

Then I took a look at some of the videos and realized this wasn't so much a revolution as an evolution. Salman Khan's videos are just those of a guy recording his voice while drawing on an electronic screen. At their core, that's all they are. They're just lectures.

They are, however, well constructed lectures. Khan puts a lot of thought and preparation into his lectures, ensuring that he has his patter down...well...pat and has every graphic he might need immediately at hand.

His website (the link above, Khan Academy) has expanded to include self-check questions that accompany his lectures, so that is a bit of an improvement, admittedly, from a simple lecture that you watch.

And his videos are available whenever you want them, ready to be watched again and again, slowed down or sped up until you have the content down perfectly.

His chemistry videos (all 104 of them), by the way, are admittedly outstanding.

Symphony of Science

Admittedly, this one might not be for everybody out there.

It's a series of autotuned 'songs' created from music and quotes from famous and inspirational scientists. It's from a musician (?) called Symphony of Science, and the songs are available for download for a name your price model.

Personally, I think the best tune is the first one embedded up there.

Reactions: everyday chemistry

The American Chemical Society has a YouTube channel of videos focusing on the chemistry of everyday topics, like how you could ever find an atom...or a whole bunch of chemistry jokes



How blue jeans get blue...



...how salt melts ice...

Veritasium

Dr Derek Muller is Veritasium, a brilliant and quasi-Australian YouTube channel. On Veritasium Muller does a whole lot of on-the-street science, questioning people who wander by and teaching them some science along the way.

He also gets around the world and makes videos along the way, including at the Salton Sea in California, a lake that exists at the moment but hasn't always...



...a video from Pripyat, the city outside Chernobyl in Russia...



...or making a levitating barbeque...

Smarter Every Day

There are very few videos that I can watch as joyously - whether it's the thousandth or first time through - as that video above about Prince Rupert's Drops. The exhilaration of watching the glass explode in slow motion - and then of watching it reassemble itself, too, always gets me.

That's one of the many outstanding videos that Destin of Smarter Every Day has put together. He's a rocket scientist in the southern US (Atlanta, I think) who records these videos to make a little extra money for his kids' college funds.

His job apparently gives him a decent bunch of opportunities to travel, so some of his videos are from pretty far-flung locales, but some of them are right in his metaphorical backyard with his kids (to see why helium balloons don't do what you would expect when you hit the gas on the minivan)...



Or on his home office desk (looking at the creation of color depending only on structure of the scales)...



...or at a tattoo parlor.



He has more than a hundred outstanding videos on his channel.

Goggle up, because science is gonna happen.