!!con

A concept video from Nokia Research Center and Cambridge Nanoscience Center showing Morph, a flexible, self-cleaning, shape-changing phone imagined through nanotechnology.

Economist-comedian Yoram Bauman delivers a humorous translation of Mankiw's ten principles of economics for the uninitiated. It was presented at the AAAS humor session in 2007.

Philosopher Dan Dennett argues in a TED talk that we do not understand our own consciousness and that our brains often fool us. He uses perceptual examples, including a painting that invites the viewer to fill in detail.

A scene from the film Back to School in which Rodney Dangerfield takes his first economics class and brings real-world business experience to a classroom exercise on widgets. It shows the gap between school and the real world.

A 2007 Computer History Museum conversation in which Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang interviews TSMC founder Morris Chang. Chang recounts his career and the creation of the dedicated silicon foundry model.

A 2006 television appearance in which Peter Schiff warns on Kudlow & Co about the housing bubble and an approaching US economic collapse.

A short concept video of Microsoft's unreleased Courier, a dual-screen tablet designed as a digital notebook with clippings and annotation. It was first leaked by Gizmodo in 2009.

In a TED talk, behavioral economist Dan Ariely uses visual illusions and his research to show that people are less rational in their decisions than they think. He covers defaults, such as organ donation rates, and how choice framing steers decisions.

The Geopolymer Institute presents Joseph Davidovits's theory that the Egyptian pyramids were built from cast artificial limestone, a geopolymer concrete, rather than carved blocks. It demonstrates how few people could make blocks.

Steve Blank tells how World War II, Stanford's Frederick Terman and military and intelligence agencies shaped the rise of Silicon Valley. The talk centers on the Cold War electronic warfare and signals intelligence work that seeded the region's tech industry.

A concept video from 2003 showing an early vision of Windows Longhorn's interface, before it shipped as Vista.

Linus Torvalds gives a Google tech talk on git, the source control system he created two years earlier. He argues for distributed version control over centralized systems such as CVS and Subversion.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt presents his moral foundations research in a TED talk. He argues that liberals and conservatives weigh a different set of moral values, which helps explain political divides.

A Google Tech Talk by the author of Kilim, a Java library for lightweight actor-style message passing. It argues that message passing can replace shared-memory concurrency and claims performance competitive with or better than Erlang for huge numbers of actors.

Press conference footage in which the suspects in the 2007 Boston Mooninite bomb scare answer questions about 1960s and 1970s hairstyles.

Douglas Hofstadter's Stanford Presidential Lecture argues that analogy is the core of cognition, illustrating how concepts, categorization and thought arise from analogy-making.

Steve Blank's Computer History Museum lecture argues that Silicon Valley's roots lie in WWII radar and electronic warfare work, Stanford's Fred Terman and Cold War military funding rather than the semiconductor alone.

The introductory lecture of Stephen Boyd's Stanford Convex Optimization I course (EE 364A). It outlines convex sets, functions and problems, and the course's coverage of least-squares, linear and semidefinite programming, duality and interior-point methods.

The full webcast of SpaceX's Falcon 1 Flight 4, the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit, on 28 September 2008. It includes the crew's cheering and Elon Musk's statement afterward.

Cuong Do of YouTube describes how a handful of engineers scaled the site, covering hardware, software and database scalability challenges during its rapid growth. The talk was given at the 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability.

Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes watching her own brain functions shut down during a massive stroke. She gives a first-person account of losing speech, motion and self-awareness.

A short video of Robert F. Kennedy's 1968 speech criticizing Gross Domestic Product as a measure of progress, saying it counts everything except what makes life worthwhile.

Peter Schiff's November 2006 speech to the Western Regional Mortgage Bankers Conference, in which he warned an audience of mortgage bankers that the housing bubble would collapse. The clip runs about 73 minutes.

A short clip of economist Milton Friedman discussing the dynamics of illegal immigration and its relationship with the welfare state. It is part one of two.

A 30-minute condensed version of the documentary I.O.U.S.A., which examines the growing US national debt and its consequences.

A short clip, titled Orwell Comes to America, on reasoning and perception. One HN user links it repeatedly as the science showing human minds are bad at reasoning and do not see reality as it is.

A three-minute excerpt from Milton Friedman's Free to Choose in which he uses a pencil to show that no single person knows how to make it. He argues that the free market coordinates countless strangers peacefully.

A short scene from the film Clerks in which two characters debate whether the independent contractors killed on the second Death Star were innocent victims. It is a comedic discussion of moral responsibility.

Cal Henderson's DjangoCon 2008 keynote, "Why I Hate Django", is a funny critique of Django from a Flickr architect. It touches on scaling topics such as database replication.

Robert Martin's RailsConf 2009 talk looks at why Smalltalk lost out despite its technical strengths. He draws lessons about language communities and arrogance that he argues could hurt Ruby too.

Short US Missile Defense Agency footage of the December 2008 free-flight hover test of Lockheed Martin's Multiple Kill Vehicle. The test showed it hovering for 20 seconds while tracking a simulated target.

Footage of an Airbus A380 engine blade-off test, in which a fan blade is deliberately released at full thrust to show the engine contains the failure.

Air traffic audio of a pilot slurring and incoherent while declaring an emergency due to extreme hypoxia, with controllers at Cleveland Center struggling to understand him.

Van Jacobson's 2006 Google Tech Talk argues that networking should be rethought around named data rather than host-to-host conversations. He contrasts the circuit and datagram views of the internet and sketches content-centric networking as a replacement for the location-centric TCP/IP model.

George Carlin's classic stand-up routine about 'stuff' and how much of life is spent accumulating and storing it, from Comic Relief 1986. It satirizes American consumerism and possessions.

A short edited excerpt of Terence McKenna arguing that culture acts as an operating system for the mind, set to imagery and music. It touches on psychedelics and how they change thinking.

Peter Schiff, during his 2010 Senate campaign, argues that government loan programs and subsidies push college tuition up.

A short clip from Animal House of Kevin Bacon's character at a fraternity paddling, saying 'Thank you sir, may I have another?'

Harvard physicist Eric Mazur explains how he realized his students were memorizing rather than understanding, and how he changed his teaching. He presents peer instruction and data showing improved student performance.

Misko Hevery's Clean Code Talk shows how to use object-oriented techniques such as polymorphism to remove repeated if and switch statements. The result is code that is easier to test, understand and maintain.