computer science

An excerpt from Hal Abelson's opening SICP lecture introducing computer science and contrasting declarative and imperative knowledge. He argues that computer science is not really a science and is more like magic or engineering of ideas.

First lecture of MIT 6.00, an introductory computer science course taught in Python by Eric Grimson and John Guttag. It covers the goals of the course, what computation is, and data types, operators and variables.

A full-day recording of the University of Utah computer science department's 50th anniversary event with panels, keynotes and talks by alumni and pioneers. It includes Ivan Sutherland's presentation on single flux quantum electronics.

The first lecture of MIT 6.042J Mathematics for Computer Science, taught by Tom Leighton, introducing mathematical proofs. It covers propositions, implication and basic proof methods.

Joe Armstrong's GOTO 2018 talk contrasts the problems computer scientists study with the problems users have. He revisits forgotten great ideas such as tuple spaces, flow-based programming, Xanadu and Unix pipes, with anecdotes.

A lecture by Richard Feynman on how computers work, using the analogy of a filing clerk that becomes progressively dumber and faster. It also covers heuristics and how computers handle data and solve problems in finite time.

Tom Wildenhain's guest lecture for CMU's Esoteric Programming Languages course shows that PowerPoint transitions and slides are Turing complete without macros, building up to a mind-bending fractal ending.

Erlang co-creator Joe Armstrong's Code BEAM SF 2018 keynote revisits good ideas from the history of computing that were dropped, and asks which should be revived. It also touches on Erlang and Elixir.

Brian Kernighan gives a talk at the University of Nottingham on how to succeed in language design without really trying. He draws on his experience with awk and other languages.

A one-minute clip from Barack Obama's 2008 Google visit in which Eric Schmidt asks him the most efficient way to sort a million 32-bit integers. Obama answers that bubble sort would be the wrong choice.

A Computerphile video in which Mark Jago of the University of Nottingham explains Turing's halting problem and how it led to the blueprint for the modern computer.

Michael Steil and Christian Hessmann's 34C3 talk explaining the Apollo Guidance Computer end to end: hardware design, operating system, and mission software.

A Berkeley Lab Distinguished Lecturer talk on building science, with an expert covering control layers, insulation and vapour barrier placement, and how buildings fail. The delivery is humorous.

A short clip of Neil deGrasse Tyson answering a question about why there are not more women in science. He describes the resistance he faced as a Black kid pursuing science and the systemic barriers many people encounter.

A showcase of the author's fifth-generation quad-core computer built entirely from Minecraft redstone, after two years of development. It features cache, a hardware stack, a GPU driving a 15x15 display, and serial I/O ports.

A two-minute clip of Richard Feynman on the social sciences, discussing what counts as real science versus pseudo science.

A John Oliver Last Week Tonight segment on how forensic science used in criminal trials is often unscientific. It looks at unreliable methods and lab malpractice, and ends with a joke about a TV procedural that might change public perception.

Neuroscientist Anil Seth gives a Royal Institution lecture on the science of consciousness. He separates conscious level, content and self, and argues that experience arises from the brain's predictive inference.

Berkeley sleep scientist Matthew Walker presents the science of sleep and dreams and how sleep affects health and lifespan, based on his book Why We Sleep.

Lex Fridman interviews Bryan Johnson, founder of Kernel and previously Braintree, about brain-computer interfaces and Kernel's non-invasive brain monitoring hardware. It covers what the devices can do today and the company's plans.

David Patterson's talk on the history of computer architecture, from RISC and superscalar designs to the end of Dennard scaling and Moore's Law. It argues that domain-specific architectures and open instruction sets open a new golden age.

A Capella Science parody of Ed Sheeran's Shape of You, rewritten about molecular bonding and orbitals and sung a cappella.

Ben Eater's short update announcing his plan to build another 8-bit computer from scratch on camera. It kicks off the breadboard computer series that became widely known.

Robert Wills of TNMoC explains the Apollo Guidance Computer hardware and software, then walks through the Apollo 11 landing procedure step by step, including the 1202 alarms.

A 1953 US Navy training film explaining the basic mechanisms in mechanical fire control computers aboard ships. It shows how gears, differentials and cams solved mathematical problems in permanent mechanical form.

The first lecture of MIT's 1986 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, given by Harold Abelson, introducing Lisp and the idea of computer science as the study of process.

A 1953 US Navy training film on the basic mechanisms in fire control computers: shafts, gears, cams and differentials. It shows how these mechanical parts compute ship and target firing solutions.

Physicist Angela Collier's roughly hour-long video on how string theory was hyped to the public and what that did to science communication. She traces the history of the theory as a narrative and argues it is interesting but was oversold.

Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris, in which a psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a planet with an alien intelligence and meets his dead wife there. It is the full movie, uploaded by Mosfilm.

CuriousMarc's Apollo Guidance Computer restoration series looks at core rope memory, the ROM that held the Moon landing programs. Mike Stewart builds a custom reader to recover lost AGC programs.

Freeman Dyson's 2005 Boston University talk on heretical views about science and society. He questions prevailing dogmas, including his argument that climate and CO2 are a land management issue.

A 1969 BBC Tomorrow's World segment about Nellie, a school computer used by pupils at Forest Grammar School to solve equations and play music. Students learn programming and maintenance, and act out binary arithmetic.

A Symphony of Science music video that auto-tunes samples of Carl Sagan, Richard Feynman, Neil deGrasse Tyson and Bill Nye into a song about the wonder of the universe.

Bobby McFerrin uses audience participation at a World Science Festival event to demonstrate how instinctively people follow the pentatonic scale.

Joe Rogan interviews Matthew Walker, Berkeley neuroscience professor and author of Why We Sleep. They discuss what sleep does for the brain and body, the effects of sleep deprivation, and sleep myths.

UCLA professor Dario Nardi presents brain-imaging research suggesting that different Myers-Briggs personality types use their brains in different ways. He discusses how each type can reach a state of creative flow. It is aimed at a general audience.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why handling time and timezones in code is so hard, walking through a simple web app that computes how long ago something happened. It covers the quirks of timezones and calendars and ends in an exasperated rant.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why electronic voting is a bad idea, arguing that paper ballots are transparent, auditable and hard to tamper with at scale. He covers why moving voting to phones, tablets or computers undermines trust and verifiability.

Mike Pound explains the discrete cosine transform and how it underpins JPEG compression. It is part two of Computerphile's JPEG series.

A Capella Science parody of Despacito that sings through evolutionary developmental biology, explaining how a single cell becomes a body, including body-axis genes and dormant snake leg DNA. It runs about four minutes.