call stack

Joel Spolsky's 2009 Google Tech Talk on why StackOverflow was built, how it addresses the mess of searching for programming help, and the community design behind it. He also takes jabs at paywalled answer sites.

A two-minute clip from the film Fight Club in which the narrator, a former recall coordinator, explains the formula companies use to decide whether a recall costs more than paying out settlements.

Clifford Stoll's energetic TED talk, a wandering mix of anecdotes, a science experiment and thoughts on curiosity, education and technology. He is the author of The Cuckoo's Egg.

A short TV segment on Jill Price, a woman with highly superior autobiographical memory who recalls nearly every day of her life. She describes the good and bad sides of never forgetting.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk in which Slava Pestov introduces Factor, a concatenative language influenced by Forth, Lisp and Smalltalk. It covers the interactive environment, metaprogramming, and the language's modern high-level features and libraries.

A score-following video of Iannis Xenakis's 1950s orchestral piece Metastasis, showing his graphic, mathematically derived notation as the music plays. It is a landmark of post-war modernist composition.

Ed Catmull of Pixar speaks at Stanford's 2007 Entrepreneurship Conference on running a creative company. He argues for surfacing small problems early and building good teams, with stories like the Toy Story 2 crunch.

Steve Jobs' 2005 Stanford commencement address, told through three stories: connecting the dots, love and loss, and death. It includes the calligraphy class and the 'stay hungry, stay foolish' close.

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.

Carl Sagan's narration of the Pale Blue Dot passage, reflecting on the Voyager photograph of Earth as a tiny speck in space. It is a short meditation on humanity's smallness and shared home.

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 original five-minute Dropbox demo video, which presented the product's features before a finished product existed. It was aimed at technical early adopters and became famous as a launch strategy.

A short clip from Carl Sagan's Cosmos in which he explains how Eratosthenes measured the circumference of the Earth using shadows in two Egyptian cities. It is a clear, visual account of an ancient scientific feat.

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.

A 1080p widescreen capture of the Deus Ex conversation between JC Denton and the AI Morpheus. It is a philosophical exchange that includes surveillance as a replacement for God.

A one-minute clip of Slavoj Zizek showing what he calls the official geographical limit between the Balkans and Central Europe, standing at a river in Ljubljana. It is a short, absurd and funny piece of cultural geography.

The main theme from Eduard Artemyev's score to the 1979 Soviet film Siberiade, an electronic piece that features the ANS synthesizer.

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.

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.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk making the case for the liquid fluoride thorium reactor as an abundant, safe source of electrical power. It covers the technical motivations and design of thorium molten-salt reactors.

The official video for Brother Ali's 'Uncle Sam Goddamn', a politically charged rap song critiquing the United States, produced by Ant.

The original Amiga Boing Ball demo, written at the Winter CES in January 1984 to show off the Amiga's hardware, with a bouncing, spinning checkered ball running while the system multitasked. It became the Amiga's unofficial emblem.

A short clip of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, speaking to financial analysts in September 2008, questioning what cloud computing even means. He calls it a fashion-driven buzzword.

A short Adam Curtis clip on what he calls oh dearism, the habit of news reporting that presents events as a stream of sad, inexplicable happenings. He argues this leaves viewers passive and unable to imagine action.

Lin-Manuel Miranda performs an early version of the Hamilton idea, then called "The Hamilton Mixtape", at the White House poetry and spoken word evening in May 2009. He is accompanied by Alex Lacamoire and the audience laughs along at the premise of a hip-hop song about Alexander Hamilton.

Honda's 2003 'Cog' commercial for the Accord, a two-minute Rube Goldberg chain reaction of car parts. It was filmed practically rather than with CGI.

A short PCWorld news clip from WWDC 2007 in which Steve Jobs announces Safari as the development platform for iPhone apps. Developers could build web apps with access to calling, maps and email.

A clip from BBC's Last Chance to See in which Stephen Fry and Mark Carwardine meet Sirocco, a kakapo, who famously tries to mate with Carwardine's head. The kakapo is a critically endangered flightless New Zealand parrot.

Short clip of Honda's ASIMO humanoid robot falling down stairs during a live demonstration.

A one-minute 2007 clip of Barack Obama, during his campaign, opposing warrantless wiretaps. It was later reposted with a campaign call to action.

A sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Sound in which a caller learns that identity theft is, in effect, a bank robbery in which the bank blames the customer. It runs about two minutes.

Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept video imagines a conversational voice assistant, multi-touch tablet and video calling used by a professor. It was made years before the graphical web existed.

A spectrogram analysis of Aphex Twin's track commonly called [Equation] from Windowlicker, rendered from a lossless version. At about 5:30 the spectrogram reveals an image of Richard D. James's face.

A 2007 video of someone trying to write Perl scripts using Windows Vista speech recognition, with comically bad results. The footage shows the recognizer repeatedly mangling commands.

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

A short Apple Get a Mac ad that mocks Windows Vista's constant security pop-up prompts.

Footage of Airbus's 2006 certification evacuation trial of the A380, in which 873 people left the aircraft within the required 90 seconds using half of the 16 doors. The test was supervised by EASA and the FAA, and one passenger broke a leg.

A short Supernova 2007 provocation in which Clay Shirky uses a 1300-year-old Japanese shrine, rebuilt periodically, as a metaphor for how networks change business and collective creativity.

A Spike Jonze-directed Ikea commercial in which a discarded lamp is treated sympathetically, until a twist undercuts the sentiment. It is a short, well-known piece of advertising.

A 2-minute scene from the film Amadeus in which the emperor says Mozart's opera has simply too many notes and Mozart asks which few to cut.