2011

Home video of the 11 March 2011 Japan earthquake, filmed as an early warning system detected the P wave and gave seconds of notice before the shaking began. The raw footage shows the warning in action.

Paul Irish and Pavel Feldman present the newest Chrome Dev Tools features at Google I/O 2011, including live CSS editing, saving changes, breakpoints and network analysis. It also covers remote debugging.

Rich Hickey's Strange Loop 2011 keynote distinguishing 'simple' (not intertwined) from 'easy' (familiar or near at hand). It argues that software complexity comes from complecting things and that we should pick simple constructs.

Robert C. Martin's Ruby Midwest 2011 keynote argues that software architecture should express the application's intent rather than its framework. He covers separating entities, interactors and boundaries so the web, database and framework are details.

Rich Hickey's Strange Loop 2011 keynote separates 'simple' (not intertwined) from 'easy' (familiar or near at hand) and argues that software complexity comes from complecting things. It offers a vocabulary for judging designs and abstractions.

Moxie Marlinspike's BlackHat 2011 talk examines weaknesses of SSL and the certificate authority system and proposes Convergence, a decentralized notary approach with trust agility.

A clip from the 2011 film Margin Call in which senior partners hold an emergency meeting and decide to sell off toxic assets immediately. It is set at the start of the 2008 financial crisis.

Gerald Sussman's 2011 Strange Loop keynote argues we still do not know how to compute, comparing biological systems with how we program machines. It touches on propagators, constraint programming and robustness.

A clip from the 2011 film Margin Call in which a firm's CEO, played by Jeremy Irons, tells a senior executive about the cycles of financial crashes. Kevin Spacey's character says he wants out, and the scene ends on the line that it is just money.

David Crane, designer of Pitfall for the Atari 2600, gives a GDC 2011 postmortem on the game's design challenges. He covers how he fit a large world into the console's tiny memory. The session ends with Q&A.

A 2011 remix of over six hours of talks by Kirk Sorensen and other thorium advocates, explaining thorium as a nuclear fuel and the liquid-fluoride thorium reactor (LFTR). It argues LFTRs could produce energy without long-lived transuranic waste.

Salman Khan's TED 2011 talk on Khan Academy. He shows that it goes beyond video lectures to self-paced practice and analytics for teachers, and argues for filling gaps in understanding.

Travis Kalanick's talk at FailCon 2011 about his earlier failed startups, given as a case study before Uber's rise. It describes lessons from those ventures.

John Carmack's keynote at QuakeCon 2011, an hour and a half of wide-ranging talk about id Software, Rage, engine open-sourcing, patents and programming practices.

Chuck Moore, creator of Forth, gives his annual Fireside Chat at Forth Day 2011 at Stanford. He talks about his multi-core GreenArrays chip design and demonstrates code running on it.

Corning's 2011 concept video showing a future where specialty glass surfaces and touchscreens are woven into everyday life.

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, presents Duolingo at TEDxCMU 2011. The idea is to have millions of people translate the web for free while learning a language, an example of human computation.

Josh Bloch and Jeremy Manson present the eighth installment of Java Puzzlers at Google I/O 2011, a set of surprising corner cases in the Java language and libraries. It includes puzzlers on traps such as regular expression performance.

Google I/O 2011 session by Ray Cromwell and Philip Rogers on writing 2D and 3D games with HTML5 and GWT. It covers porting game libraries and physics engines, sharing code with Android, and publishing to the Chrome Web Store, and showcases the ForPlay library.

A four-minute Velocity 2011 talk in which Artur Bergman, then at Wikia, argues bluntly and with profanity that SSDs should replace spinning disks in servers.

Amazon's Jon Jenkins at Velocity 2011 on how operations can drive revenue and on Amazon's highly available, autonomous architectures. It includes details on deployment frequency and Amazon's move to AWS.

Eben Moglen's 2011 Personal Democracy Forum talk on the loss of anonymity and privacy on the internet. He proposes building an alternative net of personal servers, the idea behind FreedomBox.

Aaron Patterson's RailsConf 2011 talk on Rails 3.1 performance, showing why deeper Rack middleware stacks slow Rails and how a shallower pipeline helps. It also touches on Rack API design.

Steve Yegge's OSCON Data 2011 talk imagines what you could do with Google-scale storage and compute a decade later. He argues smart people should work on hard problems such as biology rather than cat pictures, and the talk ends with a moment many took as him quitting Google.

A Google I/O 2011 talk by Andrew Gerrand and Rob Pike on building and deploying a web application in Go. It argues that Go offers speed, reliability and simplicity together.

Euclideon's 2011 technology preview of Unlimited Detail, a rendering approach claiming unlimited geometric detail in real time via point-cloud style data. The company promised more to come while keeping most work secret.

Scott Forstall demonstrates Siri on stage at Apple's October 2011 iPhone 4S event, showing the voice assistant handling natural requests like checking the weather and getting things done by asking.

A clip from the 2011 film Margin Call in which an analyst explains to the firm's executive the dire state of their investment firm at the onset of the 2008 financial crisis.

Bryan Cantrill of Joyent describes the experience of porting KVM to SmartOS, an Illumos-based OS, at KVM Forum 2011. He covers the process, the pain points and how DTrace helped.

Lennart Augustsson's CUFP 2011 keynote covers using Haskell commercially at Standard Chartered Bank. He discusses non-standard Haskell implementations, including a strict dialect, and weighs strict against lazy evaluation.

Karen Sandler, then Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, talks at OSCON 2011 about the risks of proprietary, closed-source software in implanted medical devices like her own pacemaker-defibrillator.

A six-minute clip of Adobe's MAX 2011 sneak peek showing a Photoshop prototype that removes motion blur from photos. The audience reacts with astonishment as blurry images become legible.

A scene from the 2011 film Margin Call in which risk head Eric Dale is laid off by HR and hands a USB stick to a young analyst. It shows a scripted, impersonal corporate firing.

Part 3 of Kirby Ferguson's Everything is a Remix series, using Apple and the iPhone to show how invention builds on copying and combining prior ideas. It argues that creativity and innovation are inseparable from copying.

Richard Ankrom's account of his 2001 guerrilla project, in which he painted and installed a missing freeway exit sign on a Pasadena freeway. The sign matched official standards and stayed up for years before being discovered.

A Danish university math revue music video that parodies Barbra Streisand to explain the Banach-Tarski paradox, with oranges multiplying on stage.

A Margin Call clip in which Will Emerson tries to persuade Eric Dale to return to the firm, and Dale recounts calculating the lifetimes saved by a bridge he helped build.

Amateur footage of a Japanese coast guard boat riding up and over large tsunami waves after the March 2011 Tohoku earthquake. It is short and unedited.

The official music video for Rebecca Black's 2011 viral pop song Friday.

A short clip of Hillary Clinton reacting to news of Muammar Gaddafi's death with 'We came, we saw, he died', as reposted by a news channel.