central pattern generator

An old lab video of a decerebrate cat walking on a treadmill and shifting between gait patterns as the speed changes. It is used to illustrate that much locomotion control comes from the spinal cord and body mechanics rather than the brain.

Christopher Alexander's keynote at OOPSLA 1996 on patterns in architecture, addressed to the software community. He moves beyond patterns toward deeper ideas of wholeness and living structure.

Alex Martelli's Google Developers Day talk on classic design patterns (creational, structural and behavioral) and how they appear in Python. He stresses that patterns must be studied in the context of the implementing language.

Full-day livestream of the 2016 Decentralized Web Summit at the Internet Archive, with speakers including Vint Cerf, Tim Berners-Lee, Brewster Kahle, Cory Doctorow and Mitchell Baker. It explores the technology and impact of a decentralized web.

Dan Olson of Folding Ideas spends months in the virtual world Decentraland and delivers a long critique of the metaverse, NFTs and DAOs, and why virtual worlds fail as places.

Michael Oswald's documentary, based on Richard Werner's book, argues that Japan's 1990s crash was engineered by the central bank and powerful interests. It focuses on the Bank of Japan's hidden influence over the economy.

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.

Chris Boden shows how an operator starts a large hydroelectric turbine generator and manually synchronizes it to the grid using a needle phase meter.

Huygens Optics explains the Fourier transform and shows how a lens performs one optically. A DLP projector is used as a Fourier filter to do simple pattern recognition on lithographic character patterns.

Stuart Halloway's satirical talk describes how to protect yourself from industry change by spreading complexity through systems while following idiomatic practice. It uses this inversion to catalog software design anti-patterns.

Bryan Cantrill's talk on corporate open source anti-patterns, first given at FISL 2012 and again at the Liferay Symposium. He lays out the mistakes companies make when open sourcing code, such as announcing future open sourcing, and discusses licenses.

A 1984 AT&T film showing the live cutover of a Glendale, California central office from step-by-step switching to an electronic switching system. Installers prepare the site and then cut cables in a coordinated operation.

Matt Parker's LMS popular lecture on how seemingly incredible results can be meaningless random patterns. He ranges from ancient Woolworths civilisations to shoelaces and DNA.

Rick Houlihan's AWS re:Invent 2018 deep dive on advanced DynamoDB design patterns. It covers index overloading, GSI sharding, composite keys, graph processing and transactions.

James Powell's nearly two-hour PyData talk builds up Python's data model, decorators, generators and context managers, coding live in Vim. It aims to take intermediate programmers toward real Python expertise.

Aaron Hsu discusses design patterns and anti-patterns in APL and why the language is productive despite its write-only reputation. He argues that idioms matter more than libraries in array languages.

Veritasium explains how Penrose tilings and quasicrystals overturned the belief that 5-fold symmetry and non-periodic crystals were impossible, including an interview with Paul Steinhardt.

Mathologer shows how times table diagrams on a circle produce cardioids and other curves connected to the Mandelbrot set. He explains the patterns and links to a tool for making your own diagrams.

Mathematician Colin Wright demonstrates juggling and explains the mathematics of juggling patterns, including notation that led to new throwing patterns. It is a public presentation at the Museum of Mathematics aimed at a general audience.

Huygens Optics experiments with etching tiny patterns in glass, covering hydrofluoric acid risks, buffered oxide etch, photoresist and chromium masks, and laser-induced etching. It ends with attempts at microscopic Tesla valves.

The first episode of Adam Curtis's 1992 BBC series Pandora's Box, on the engineers' plot, examining communism in the Soviet Union and the rise and limits of technocratic central planning.

Moxie Marlinspike's 36C3 talk examines why distributed and decentralized technology is hard to build into consumer products, from the perspective of developing Signal. It argues that ecosystems move slowly and federation causes problems.

A panel conversation with Stewart Brand at Ethereum's Devcon4, where he recounts his life and work 'hacking civilization' and discusses the role of institutions in decentralization.

A two-minute clip in which Milton Friedman uses a humble pencil to show how thousands of strangers across many countries cooperate, without central direction, to make a simple product. It is a short visual version of the 'I, Pencil' essay's argument about free markets and dispersed knowledge.

An AWS re:Invent 2019 session for advanced DynamoDB users on design patterns used by large customers, including Amazon retail. It covers GSI sharding, index overloading, graph processing, composite keys and transactional workflows.

Dr Mike Pound explains the suspected backdoor in the Dual_EC_DRBG random number generator and how elliptic curve constants could let someone predict its output.

A short demo video for NVIDIA's StyleGAN paper, which proposes a style-based generator for GANs. It shows face synthesis with style mixing and scale-specific control over attributes like pose and freckles.

Rob Pike's Google I/O 2012 talk shows how goroutines and channels solve tricky concurrency problems with simple Go code. It features a playful goroutine demo with gophers passing messages and a search engine example.

Veritasium examines which experts have real expertise, drawing on chess research and work by Klein and Kahneman. It explains that expertise comes from pattern recognition built through deliberate practice in valid, feedback-rich environments.

Vox explains the Berlin and Kay research showing that languages around the world tend to invent color words in the same order. It walks through the hierarchy and the debate around it.

Ben Felix explains how central bank money creation and quantitative easing actually work, and what they do and do not imply for asset prices and currency. He addresses the common belief that the Fed prints unlimited money and props up markets.

Bob Nystrom, author of Game Programming Patterns, gives a Roguelike Celebration 2018 talk questioning whether entity component systems are the only way to structure a game. He walks through alternative architectures drawn from roguelike development.

An episode of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj exposing how tax-prep companies like TurboTax make filing confusing and costly even though many Americans can file for free. It combines comedy with reporting on lobbying and dark patterns.

RimWorld creator Tynan Sylvester explains at GDC 2017 how Ludeon framed the game as a story generator rather than a game. He covers the design methods that came out of that frame.

C J Silverio, former npm CTO, explains how the JavaScript package commons ended up in the hands of a for-profit company with no accountability. She discusses the cost of running a registry and what the community should do next.

Raymond Hettinger explains Python's dataclasses module, showing the problem it solves and its key design decisions. He places it in a progression from tuples and dicts through named tuples and attrs.

Paul Irish walks through the jQuery source code and shares ten lessons and interesting techniques from it, aimed at JavaScript developers who want to learn from a widely used library.

Dan Callahan presents Mozilla Persona, a decentralized, cross-browser authentication system that removes site passwords, at PyCon 2013. He explains how the protocol works and how to add it to a Python site.

A three-minute excerpt from Milton Friedman's Free to Choose in which he uses a pencil to show that no single person knows how to make it. He argues that the free market coordinates countless strangers peacefully.

Martin Fowler's GOTO Chicago 2017 talk on the different things people mean by event-driven architecture. He identifies four patterns, including event notification and event-carried state transfer.