code as data

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.

A short video built around an animation of the roughly 10,000 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, placed at their measured redshift distances. It gives a brief history of deep field images and ends with a 3D fly-through.

David Spiegelhalter, Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, uses statistics to weigh everyday risks such as bacon sandwiches and cycling. The six-minute piece introduces micromorts as a way to compare the risk of dying.

Ward Cunningham explains the history and intent of the debt metaphor, which he coined while refactoring the WyCash product. He says debt means code reflecting an incomplete understanding of the problem, not sloppy programming.

A clip from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman explains heat as the jiggling of atoms and how we perceive it as hot and cold.

The first video in potholer54's climate series, giving a basic look at how climate scientists infer that man-made carbon gases are changing the climate. It is a short explainer meant to present the scientific evidence plainly.

Michael Wesch's five-minute video about Web 2.0, showing how the read/write web, XML and user-generated content change how people create and share information.

A 1937 GM-produced film explaining how the automobile differential lets wheels turn at different speeds around a corner. It uses clear animations and cutaway demonstrations to build the idea from first principles.

A short video from the trafficwaves.org site showing how traffic jams and standing waves form, including the fight between cheaters and blockers at an exit-lane backup. It also touches on how individual driving behavior affects the flow.

A PBS clip in which Richard Feynman explains the strange nature of light and electromagnetic radiation. He conveys how little of it we actually see and how radio waves are present everywhere.

Geoff Cumming uses a simulation to show how wildly the p value varies from one replication to the next because of sampling variability. He argues for estimation and confidence intervals over null hypothesis significance testing.

A US Chemical Safety Board video explaining how sugar dust explosions at the Imperial Sugar plant in Georgia killed fourteen workers in 2008.