commit log

Markus Triska tours Prolog's most distinctive features, including its use as a database and query language, rule processing, constraint solving and compile-time rewriting. It also covers concise meta-interpreters.

Technology Connections explains the early history of analog color television, from the 1954 start of modern color broadcasting, and how shadow masks work in CRTs. It is the first in a series on how analog color TV works.

Technology Connections takes apart the step-by-step electromechanical logic of a 1970s pinball machine. He shows how relays, steppers and switches track state and score without electronics.

A French-language documentary on the history of Prolog, created in Marseille by Alain Colmerauer in the early 1970s, with interviews of many people involved. It traces the origins of logic programming and later developments of the language.

Dave Jones of EEVblog tears down a Kollsman MD-1 Automatic Astro Compass, a mechanical analog computer from a B-52 bomber. It is part of a star-tracker inertial navigation system that computes altitude and azimuth.

Douglas Hofstadter's Stanford Presidential Lecture argues that analogy is the core of cognition, illustrating how concepts, categorization and thought arise from analogy-making.

Michael Hendricks of PriceCharting shares tricks and pain points from running Prolog in production for 18 months at Strange Loop. It argues Prolog is a productive modern language beyond logic puzzles, and includes a demo of changing code mid-execution.

Soil microbiologist Elaine Ingham speaks at the Oxford Real Farming Conference on how soil organisms cycle nutrients, unlock minerals from rock and air, and why pesticides and fertilizers harm soil life. Slides are linked in the description.

Veritasium explains why analog computing may suit AI workloads, covering old analog computers, The Analog Thing and Mythic's analog chips that use flash memory for neural network inference. It argues digital hardware is hitting limits.

Neil Postman's 1997 lecture at College of DuPage, based on his book, argues that Americans treat technology as a national religion and depend on it to solve larger human problems. It includes audience questions.

3Blue1Brown explains how holograms record a 3D scene on 2D film, using wave diffraction and phase. The video includes demonstrations of several real holograms.

A short excerpt from The Pervert's Guide to Ideology in which Slavoj Zizek analyzes John Carpenter's They Live. He uses the film's fight scene and sunglasses to explain how ideology works.

An Isaac Arthur episode on arcologies, self-sufficient habitats that could house whole cities, on Earth or on harsh worlds. It covers how such structures might work and what limits their size.

A video essay explaining hauntology, Mark Fisher's idea of lost futures, and 80s nostalgia. It uses the Fallout games and other media as examples of a retro-futurism that mourns futures that never arrived.

A PBS Space Time episode explaining the holographic principle: the idea that our 3+1 dimensional universe may be described by information on a lower-dimensional boundary. It walks through black hole entropy and the AdS/CFT correspondence.

Ben Eater shows how to build logic gates out of transistors, including NOR gates. It is part of his clear hardware-from-scratch teaching style.

Robert Sapolsky's Stanford lecture on the biological underpinnings of religiosity, from his human behavioral biology course. It covers theories linking religion to stress, and schizotypal traits.

Ben Heck modifies a keyboard with magnets, Hall effect sensors and an Xbox controller so the WASD keys give analog control. He walks through the hardware build.

Technology Connections shows a cheap method for capturing analog video: a composite-to-HDMI upscaler feeding an HDMI capture dongle, aimed at digitizing home movies and VHS tapes.

A Primitive Technology episode in which the creator builds a bow-drill-driven bark fan to blow air into a fire, using only natural materials. It shows the progression from fanning a fire by hand to a rotary forge blower.

Technology Connections explains how analog television produced moving images without computers, covering scanning, CRTs and standards like NTSC and PAL. It is part of a series on analog TV.

Martin Kleppmann argues that databases are global shared mutable state and proposes treating them as an ever-growing log of immutable facts. Derived data such as caches, indexes and views is then built by stream processors like Apache Samza. The talk draws on Kafka and LinkedIn's experience with commit logs.

Drew Berry shows scientifically accurate animations of molecular processes inside cells, such as DNA replication, at TEDxSydney.

Civilization creator Sid Meier's GDC 2010 talk on applying psychology to game design. He discusses player perception, randomness, and win states, and why designers must account for how players experience events.

The 1969 pitch film in which Saul Bass presents the Bell System logo redesign to AT&T, part of the largest corporate re-identity program in U.S. history.

A Wendover Productions documentary-style video on how Zipline delivers blood and medical supplies by drone in Rwanda. It covers the catapult launch, parachute drop and the logistics behind it.

A recording of Richard Feynman's talk on the possibilities of manipulating matter at very small scales, widely seen as an early vision of nanotechnology. This is a later version of his 1959 "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" lecture.

John Graham-Cumming of Cloudflare talks at dotScale 2015 about handling roughly 10 trillion log lines a month. The talk touches on Cloudflare's hardware, its logging stack and its use of Lua in Nginx.

A parody in the Downfall meme format where Hitler rages over confusing topology terminology about open, closed and clopen sets. It was made for a math summer program.

Technology Connections explains how LED traffic lights, which do not melt snow, drew complaints and were blamed for accidents. He uses it to illustrate the 'but sometimes' fallacy against new technology.

A long Technology Connections video arguing that public understanding of renewable energy is distorted. It covers solar economics, land use compared with ethanol corn, and battery myths such as cobalt.

The Primitive Technology channel shows the construction of a tiled roof hut in the bush using only primitive tools and materials made in earlier videos. It includes tiles, a kiln, clay walls and underfloor heating.

A Technology Connections video essay on how analog and digital clocks shape different mental models of time, with the minute hand acting as a progress indicator.

Primitive Technology shows building a cord drill from scratch and then upgrading it to a pump drill, using only primitive materials like a stone flywheel and cord.

Dave Jones of EEVblog looks at a sub-3-cent microcontroller from Padauk and other obscure Chinese manufacturers. He shows how to find such parts and where to buy them in stock.

EEVblog interviews Richard Stephenson of NASA's Canberra Deep Space Communications Complex about how the 70m DSS-43 dish is used to contact Voyager 2. It covers the ground antenna and low-noise receiver side of deep space communication. This is a 2023 re-release of a 2017 video.

Dave Jones of EEVblog tears down an Esinomed Infoview medical tablet computer built around an 800MHz AMD Geode board, exposing extremely shoddy construction and design.

The Primitive Technology channel shows the making of a stone axe (celt) using only primitive tools and materials, from shaping and polishing a basalt head to making the wooden handle and hafting it.

Dave Jones of EEVblog investigates why a 4K BenQ monitor switches itself off, tracing it to static discharge from an office chair. He uses an oscilloscope to examine the static impulses.

Dave Jones of EEVblog demonstrates that a frequency counter can detect gravity through the 2g tipover effect on quartz crystal oscillators. He shows the reading shift as the instrument's orientation changes.