big clive

BigClive tears down and tests a germicidal UVC lamp from eBay that floods a room with narrow-band ultraviolet and ozone. He warns of the eye and skin hazards.

Database pioneer Michael Stonebraker argues that 'big data' is really at least four different problems: big volumes with small analytics, big analytics, velocity, and variety. He comments on where each market is heading.

Big Clive tears down the Dubai lamp, a Philips LED bulb developed with Dubai's ruler for maximum efficiency and long life. He examines its construction and circuitry, including underrun LEDs and many filament strips.

Big Clive does a complete teardown of a lithium phone battery, taking apart the protection circuit, case and the cell itself. He notes it was risky because the cell was not discharged first.

Big Clive tears down a smart meter with a wireless modem found among fly-tipped materials. He examines its internals and checks conspiracy claims about microphones, cameras and 5G.

BigClive tears down a heated electric shower head of the type common in some countries, often called a suicide shower. He examines the construction and the dangerous fault conditions, such as poor insulation and missing earthing.

Big Clive tears down a cheap eBay digital caliper, explaining its capacitive linear encoder and measuring its quiescent current. He finds it surprisingly accurate and repeatable for its price.

A two-minute Big Think clip of Slavoj Zizek arguing that happiness is a conformist, even unethical goal. He asks why one would want to be happy when one could be interesting.

A short George Carlin routine in which he says the owners of the country run a big club and ordinary people are not in it.

Boston Dynamics' March 2008 video of BigDog, a four-legged robot, walking on ice and snow, climbing rubble and recovering from slips and kicks.

Alexander Nix of Cambridge Analytica presents at the 2016 Concordia Summit on using big data, psychographic profiling and behavioral microtargeting in elections.

Bryan Cantrill presents Manta, an object store with in-situ compute that lets tools like grep, awk, and sed run map-reduce style over huge data. He frames it as bringing the Unix philosophy to big data.

A PBS Space Time episode asking whether time began at the Big Bang. It explains that the Big Bang is not what most people were taught and what 'start' of the universe really means.

A clip from the 2015 film The Big Short in which FrontPoint Partners investigate mortgage lending in Florida and place their first trade. It shows brokers and a stripper-adjacent loan scene illustrating subprime lending to unverified borrowers.

Boston Dynamics' 2010 demo of BigDog, a quadruped robot that climbs through woods, recovers from kicks, slips on ice and jogs at 5 mph. It was an early showcase of dynamic legged locomotion.

A clip from the 1998 film The Big Hit featuring the 'trace buster buster buster' scene, where characters try to defeat a phone trace.

A video essay from Pop Culture Detective arguing that The Big Bang Theory normalizes sexism and toxic masculinity through its portrayal of nerd men. It analyzes recurring tropes in how the male leads treat women.

The 4K, 60fps version of Big Buck Bunny, the Creative Commons-licensed animated short film from the Blender Foundation.

A short parody that removes the laugh track from The Big Bang Theory to show how unfunny the scenes are without it.

A five-minute clip from The Big Short (2015) in which FrontPoint Partners confront Morgan Stanley risk assessors and an S&P ratings representative about inflated mortgage bond ratings.

A scene from The Big Short in which Jared Vennett pitches credit default swaps on mortgage bonds to a hedge fund team, using a Jenga tower to illustrate collateralized debt obligations.

A Big Think talk in which hedge-fund manager William Ackman goes through the basics of finance and investing in under an hour. It is pitched as a crash course on the most important concepts.

David Kriesel's FrOSCon talk on how Xerox scancopiers, due to JBIG2 compression, silently replaced digits in scanned documents. He walks through how he discovered the bug and why it is so dangerous.

Electronics hobbyist bigclivedotcom tears down a cheap USB power supply with a manufacturing fault that carries full mains voltage to the USB ports, showing the risk of electric shock.

Big Clive gives a 38-minute beginner's guide to identifying common electronic components and what they do. He keeps the maths minimal and aims to fill gaps for people just starting out.

Big Clive shows how to pick up discarded disposable vape devices from the roadside and extract the rechargeable lithium cells inside. He explains why these devices contain the same circuitry as rechargeable ones and how to reuse the cells.

Big Clive takes apart an IKEA Koppla USB power supply to assess its safety, looking at isolation and transformer construction.

BigClive explains why microwave oven transformer projects are extremely dangerous, since the high voltage and high current can kill. He contrasts them with spot welder builds where the secondary is replaced by low-voltage heavy wire.

Sean Carroll introduces his video series on the biggest ideas in physics, such as symmetry, space and matter, as informal discussions with follow-up Q&A videos. This is the short opening video of the series.

Wendover Productions explains why Boeing's efficient 787 beat Airbus's giant A380, contrasting hub-and-spoke with point-to-point routes. It covers the economics of long-haul flights.

Numberphile's James Grime explains Cantor's result that some infinities are bigger than others, including why the reals outnumber the integers. It is a short, accessible introduction to countable and uncountable infinity.

A long video essay by Kraut arguing that Trump's biggest failure was his handling of China. It spends much of its length on Chinese history, culture, the trade war, and the rise of a communist superpower.

A philosophy lecture by Professor Moeller on the philosophy of identity. It builds on a discussion of Abigail Thorn's video and covers authenticity, sincerity and how online profiles reshape identity.

Technology Connections explains why North American tail light rules, which allow red turn signals and flashing brake lights, make signals ambiguous. He argues for amber signals and cites studies showing a safety benefit.

A clip from George Carlin's 2005 special Life Is Worth Losing, in which he argues that the powerful don't want an educated public capable of critical thinking.

Kurzgesagt explores the idea that black holes could create universes and that we might live inside one. It builds up the physics of how density falls as black holes get larger.

Numberphile explains the long and short scales for naming large numbers, covering millions, billions, trillions, milliards and the Greek myriad, with James Grime and Tony Padilla.

Apple's famous 1984 Macintosh television commercial, which casts the company as a rebel breaking a Big Brother-style conformity.

Bill Gross, who has founded and incubated many start-ups, ranked hundreds of companies on five factors. He presents the one factor that stood out as the biggest predictor of success.

A short scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian in which a Roman centurion cannot keep a straight face over the name Biggus Dickus.