charles babbage

Historian Doron Swade tells the story of Charles Babbage's quest to build the Difference Engine and the construction of Difference Engine No. 2 at the Science Museum. The talk covers Babbage's motivation, his machines and Ada Lovelace's insight into the Analytical Engine.

Charles Marohn of Strong Towns presents, in a Talks at Google session, the ideas from his book on why many North American towns struggle financially despite decades of growth. He argues for incremental, bottom-up city building as a path to local prosperity.

Charles Stross's 34C3 talk on how science fiction gets the future wrong. He argues that corporations are slow, human-powered AIs that optimize for profit, and that regulation lags behind accelerating technology.

A roughly ten-minute demo of Microsoft's Intentional Programming research system, showing its editor and an unusual way of working with code. It is the first of two clips cut from a longer video.

A SIGGRAPH 2019 course on geometric algebra. Charles Gunn gives an intro, then Steven De Keninck gives a programmer-focused course with live examples in ganja.js.

The full 2010 documentary Inside Job, directed by Charles Ferguson, examines the causes of the 2008 global financial crisis. It traces the story through interviews with key financial and political players across several countries.

A short clip from Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown in which he and chef Sean Brock end a long night of drinking at a Charleston Waffle House. It celebrates the unpretentious, welcoming late-night diner. Bourdain's remark comparing the meal favorably to the French Laundry is what people remember.

A 1982 Xerox PARC film, presented at CHI '90, in which Star designers David Canfield Smith and Charles Irby give an overview of the Xerox Star interface. It shows the document-centric, icon-and-window office system.