complex systems

Richard Cook's short Velocity 2013 talk on resilience in complex adaptive systems, arguing systems operate near the edge of failure and that the surprise is how rarely they fail. He presents a model of how pressures push systems toward failure boundaries.

An 11-minute animated introduction to P vs. NP and the wider landscape of complexity classes, inspired by the Complexity Zoo wiki. It assumes no background in computer science.

Sabine Hossenfelder asks whether complex numbers are just a convenient tool or necessary in physics. She discusses a recent paper arguing that quantum mechanics cannot be done with real numbers alone.

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.

A high-quality recording of President Eisenhower's January 1961 farewell address, including his warning about the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex. The uploader marks the key passage at 8:41.

Primer uses simulations to compare voting systems such as first-past-the-post, approval, ranked choice and others. It shows how each system behaves and can be manipulated, with links to further voting theory resources.

A 1994 talk by systems thinker Russ Ackoff, who knew W. Edwards Deming, on continuous versus discontinuous improvement. It ends with an unexpected lesson.

Jiahao Chen's JuliaCon 2017 talk argues that vector transposes should be taken seriously in type systems and linear algebra libraries. It explains why treating vectors as matrices causes trouble in languages.

Tom Murphy's satirical SIGBOVIK 2007 presentation, delivered under a pseudonym, proving that generalized Super Mario Bros. is NP-complete. It is a short, deadpan take on a complexity theory result.

Adam Neely tests the claims for tuning to A=432 Hz by trying the unusual tuning systems that its proponents' numerology requires. He compares how they sound against standard tuning and temperaments.

Milton Friedman explains why the US tax code is enormously complex and why meaningful reform is unlikely. He argues that politicians profit from the complexity, since tax breaks are products they sell and the code works as a tool of reward and punishment. The clip is about 14 minutes from his lecture series.

Musician Adam Neely examines whether certain keys sound sadder than others, looking at the history of tuning systems and temperaments and at how instrument timbre shapes the emotional character we hear. It draws on historical aesthetics writing and audio examples.

An excerpt from Richard Dawkins's lecture on Climbing Mount Improbable demonstrating how a complex eye can evolve through incremental steps. It answers the creationist irreducible complexity argument.

WonderWhy surveys complex international borders, including enclaves like Vatican City, San Marino and Lesotho, the enclave-within-enclave town of Baarle, and the India-Bangladesh Cooch Behar region.

CGP Grey explains first-past-the-post voting and why it pushes elections toward two dominant parties. It is the first in his series on electoral systems.

The first part of Welch Labs' series on imaginary numbers, presenting them as the natural extension of the number line into two dimensions. It covers the history and the math with strong visuals.

An animated simulation comparing single-winner voting methods such as plurality, instant runoff and STAR. Colored regions show which candidate wins as a randomized electorate shifts across a two-dimensional political space, building on Ka-Ping Yee's earlier diagrams.

A PBS Infinite Series episode explaining the mathematics of quantum computers, including how qubits store complex numbers and how quantum computation differs from classical computation. Hosted by Kelsey Houston-Edwards.

A short Healthcare Triage episode by Aaron Carroll arguing that milk gets an undeserved pass in efforts to improve diets. It examines claims about calcium and bone strength and concludes you don't need to drink milk.

Numberphile's James Grime introduces quaternions, a type of number beyond the complex numbers, building up from real and complex numbers and explaining why they are useful.

A Vox Borders episode with Johnny Harris explaining how China is gradually erasing the line between mainland China and Hong Kong since the 1997 handover. It describes the one country, two systems arrangement and its expiration date.

Historia Civilis explains the origins and governing system of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy. It covers the Great Law and the league's surprisingly intricate legal and political structure.

In an 11-minute TED talk, Ralph Langner explains how his team reverse-engineered the Stuxnet worm and worked out that it targeted industrial control systems, with a covert state origin. It is a compact look at cyber-forensics.

Jake Thackray performs the folk song Molly Metcalfe, which opens with an explanation of the traditional northern English sheep-counting system (yan, tan, tethera). It is a short, witty piece of British folk songwriting.

VICE's Oobah Butler spends eight months using fake reviews to push a nonexistent restaurant, The Shed at Dulwich, to number one on TripAdvisor in London. The short documentary shows how easily review systems can be gamed.

A six-minute explainer from Undefined Behavior on range (score) voting. It follows an earlier video on Arrow's Theorem and shows how range voting seems to satisfy the criteria Arrow's Theorem says no ranked system can.

Smarter Every Day host Destin Sandlin tries to hover a helicopter and finds it very hard. The video shows how the constant coordinated corrections across several control axes feel at first and how learning makes them automatic.

First part of a six-part recording of the 1973 Lighthill debate on AI, where Sir James Lighthill's critical report on AI research was contested by figures including McCarthy and Michie.

Yuta, a Japanese YouTuber, explains whether Japanese speakers can read Chinese text. He shows how shared kanji let people guess meanings while the two languages remain completely different.

A short clip from an ACM and Computer History Museum interview in which Leslie Lamport discusses writing his paper on time, clocks and the ordering of events. He explains its link to special relativity.

Veritasium explores how synchronization arises spontaneously in nature, with metronomes, fireflies and bridges, drawing on Steven Strogatz's work on chaos and complexity.

A short demo of Sun Microsystems' Looking Glass, a 3D desktop GUI concept for a future operating system.

CGP Grey explains the Single Transferable Vote, a proportional ranked-ballot system, and why politicians have little incentive to adopt it. It is a short animated explainer of how multi-winner ranked voting works.

Symbolics developer Kalman Reti gives a short introductory demo of a Symbolics Lisp Machine running Genera in an emulator. It shows the context-aware command line, typed on-screen objects, and the live-editable system, including swapping in a C-compiled JPEG decoder.

The opening lecture of Steve Brunton's Control Bootcamp, covering the kinds of control and why closed-loop feedback matters. It starts a series that follows the control chapter of the Brunton and Kutz data-driven science book.

CGP Grey explains Mixed-Member Proportional representation, the system used in New Zealand where voters get two votes. It covers how it differs from first-past-the-post.

jan Misali presents an humorous but earnest case for counting in base 6 (seximal) instead of base 10 or 12, comparing the arithmetic advantages of each.

Bret Victor's talk proposing a new kind of maker space built for seeing and understanding a project's behavior: inside it, across time and across possibilities. It argues for scientific understanding over recipes and rules of thumb.

A short 3Blue1Brown video explaining Euler's formula e^(i*pi) = -1 through dynamics, treating velocity as the thing that moves a point to a new position. It builds geometric intuition for why an exponent with i produces rotation.

Polylog explains how algorithms can be turned into circuits and encoded as satisfiability problems, which lets you effectively run them backwards. It uses this to motivate breaking RSA, general reductions to SAT, and what P vs NP is really asking.