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Larry Lessig's TED talk argues that copyright law chokes creativity, drawing on John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights and the ASCAP cartel to make the case for reviving remix culture.

A short film about the Erlang language, showing telecom systems built from lightweight processes and demonstrating hot code swapping. It is an edited version of the original Ericsson video.

The first episode of Michael Sandel's Harvard course on moral reasoning, opening with the trolley problem and the choice between killing one to save five. Sandel draws out student arguments and introduces utilitarian and other approaches to justice.

Elizabeth Warren's 2007 Berkeley lecture, when she was a Harvard law professor, on why middle-class families are under growing financial strain. She draws on bankruptcy research to examine rising costs of housing, health care and education.

A condensed film of Dick Proenneke's footage of building a cabin and living alone in the Alaskan wilderness, using hand tools and local materials. It draws on the 8mm films he shot himself.

Douglas Adams gives a talk at UCSB, recorded shortly before his death, about the odd lives of animals and what they suggest about humanity's future. It draws on his Last Chance to See work and is funny and wide-ranging.

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.

Kirk Sorensen's Google Tech Talk on liquid-fluoride thorium reactors, a design that could burn nuclear waste and use thorium as fuel. It draws on Oak Ridge National Laboratory work from the 1950s and 60s.

Tony Schwartz of The Energy Project speaks at Google about managing energy rather than time. He draws on The Power of Full Engagement and his work on stamina and sustained performance.

Kirk McKusick gives a narrative history of BSD from its start at UC Berkeley in the late 1970s through the 1980s releases and the lawsuit that led to 4.4BSD-Lite in 1992. It is full of anecdotes from a key developer.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo explains how ordinary people can be pushed into doing evil by situations and systems. He draws on the Stanford prison experiment and unseen Abu Ghraib photos, then turns to the opposite case: how ordinary people can become heroes.

A short BBC clip in which David Attenborough shows a lyrebird imitating sounds, including camera shutters, car alarms and chainsaws. It comes from the BBC natural history series Life on Earth.

Sean Parent of Adobe argues that object-oriented frameworks ultimately fail to deliver scalable, high quality software and proposes combining generic and declarative programming instead. It draws on Stepanov's Elements of Programming.

A Whitest Kids U Know sketch built around the idea that saying certain things about the President is illegal.

Malcolm Gladwell's TED talk on how Howard Moskowitz found that there is no single perfect spaghetti sauce. He draws a larger point about choice, preference and happiness.