causal profiling

PBS Space Time explains how spacetime geometry and light cones determine the order of events and what can cause what. It visualizes causality in special relativity.

Emery Berger explains why performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern hardware, showing how code layout and alignment can swamp optimization effects. He presents Stabilizer for statistically sound evaluation and Coz, a causal profiler.

Emery Berger's CppCon 2020 plenary on why performance is hard on modern hardware after the end of Dennard scaling. It covers benchmarking pitfalls and introduces new profiling tools for finding real bottlenecks.

A four-minute minutephysics video arguing that causal models and causal networks let statistics infer causation from correlation. It touches on Reichenbach's principle, common causes, feedback and quantum causal discovery.

A silent PLOS ONE video of New Caledonian crows solving Aesop's Fable puzzles by dropping objects to raise water and reach food. It shows example trials from experiments testing causal understanding of water displacement.

PBS Space Time argues that the speed of light is better understood as the speed of causality, the universal limit on how fast cause and effect propagate. Light travels at that speed because it is massless, but the limit itself is a property of spacetime.

PBS Space Time explains the quantum eraser experiment, in which erasing which-path information appears to reverse causality in a double-slit setup. It discusses what this means for quantum mechanics.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains the delayed choice quantum eraser and argues it does not rewrite the past, as popular accounts claim. She walks through what the experiment actually shows.

A PBS Space Time episode hosted by Gabe Perez-Giz on the nature of spacetime and whether space and time are fundamental. It builds up reference frames and causality in a short, dense format.

A Wendover Productions explainer on how airport security is designed, covering screening layers, x-ray scanning, and the contrast with Israel's profiling-based approach. It walks through the logic behind why security works the way it does.

A one-minute clip from The Simpsons in which Lisa demonstrates the Anti-Tiger Rock to Homer, showing that the rock keeps away tigers because no tigers are around. It is a short comedic scene about faulty causal reasoning.

The first lecture in Martin Kleppmann's 8-lecture distributed systems series from the University of Cambridge undergraduate course. It introduces the subject, and accompanying lecture notes are available.

Emery Berger argues that performance is hard to measure and deliver on modern systems, showing how code layout and link order can swamp optimization effects. He presents tools that evaluate performance more reliably.

David Schachter describes how he made a data-collection Python program run 114,000 times faster, drawing on decades of experience. The talk covers pipelining, cache effects and other optimization lessons.

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

A PBS Space Time episode explaining why faster-than-light travel is equivalent to travelling back in time, using relativity and Minkowski diagrams for different observers.

A VICE documentary profiling Wim Hof, the Iceman, covering his feats of cold endurance, his breathing and meditation method, and scientific studies of his control over his autonomic and immune systems.

A short NYT Op-Doc by Laura Poitras profiling NSA veteran William Binney, who says a program he helped design collects Americans' personal data.

A satirical CBC Radio This Is That sketch profiling a Vancouver artisanal firewood company that sells bundles of kindling for $1000.

Rasmus Lerdorf marks 25 years of PHP at phpday 2019 with a look at the highlights and lowlights of the language. He argues for upgrading PHP versions, covering performance, static analysis, zero-cost profiling and dead code elimination.

A New York Times Op-Doc by Laura Poitras profiling William Binney, a 32-year NSA veteran who helped design a secret program he says collects Americans' personal data.