construction zone

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.

Bryan Cantrill's Papers We Love talk on FreeBSD Jails and Solaris Zones, tracing how OS-level virtualization grew out of chroot and the limits of the traditional UNIX security model.

Time-lapse of Broad Group erecting a 30-story prefabricated hotel (J57) in Changsha, China in about 15 days. The description touts modular construction's precision, speed and low waste.

Jack Gallant's lab demonstrates reconstructing movie trailer clips a subject watched from fMRI brain activity, using regression models trained on hours of viewing data. The video shows the original clip beside the reconstruction.

A local TV news investigation showing that many SUVs and trucks have a large blind zone directly in front, hiding children from the driver. It includes a demonstration lining kids up in front of a vehicle.

A short amateur clip of a Tesla Model S on Autopilot failing to follow a lane shift in a construction zone and hitting a concrete barrier. The uploader uses it to argue against driverless trucks.

A short GRASP Lab (University of Pennsylvania) demo in which teams of quadrotors autonomously assemble tower-like cubic structures from modular parts. The drones are given the target structure and work out the assembly plan themselves.

Anders Hejlsberg whiteboards how compilers are taught versus how modern ones are actually built. He explains the shift to compilers as services with incremental, error-tolerant, IDE-oriented design, as in Roslyn and TypeScript.

Builders Matt Risinger and Jordan Smith visit a Swiss cross-laminated timber factory that makes thick all-wood walls with no traditional insulation and wooden nails instead of glue or chemicals. The video is sponsored by Siga.

An episode of the Well There's Your Problem podcast on five-over-one buildings, wood-frame floors atop concrete bases, with engineering background and some oil industry news. It is long, rambling and has NSFW language.

Alexander Rose of the Long Now Foundation describes the design and construction of the 10,000 year clock conceived by Danny Hillis. He covers the project's history, methods, and how different cultures built things to last millennia.

Essential Craftsman announces the start of a spec house build on a scenic lot, kicking off a long series. The channel covers every step of building a house from the viewpoint of a general contractor.

A half-hour television special on the 2007 fiery collapse of a connector in the Bay Area's MacArthur Maze and its rebuilding in 26 days. It was produced for the Professional Engineers in California Government.

Seattle Police Department compilation of open-source video of violent incidents in the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (CHOP) zone in 2020, released around the July 1 emergency proclamation.

A three-minute demo of ProFORMA, a system from Cambridge that builds textured 3D models live from a video of an object.

Adam Savage and engineer Zach Radding examine Lumafield CT scans of Apple's $130 Thunderbolt 4 cable alongside cheaper USB-C cables. They explain the internal components that distinguish Thunderbolt from ordinary USB-C.

A one-minute IIHS demonstration crash test of a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air against a 2009 Chevrolet Malibu, showing how much better the modern car protects its occupants.

Tom Scott stands by a construction site and explains why reversing vehicles now use a white-noise hiss instead of beeping. The sound is easier to locate directionally and less annoying to neighbours.

An Odd Lots podcast episode on why converting empty office buildings into apartments is hard. A managing director at Vanbarton Group walks through the zoning, financing and construction obstacles, mostly in New York.

Huygens Optics shows how DIY photon sieves shape a laser's wave front, explaining how they differ from zone plates and how aperture count affects the focal point, with time-resolved visualizations of the diffraction.

Tracy Young, a former construction engineer and cofounder of PlanGrid, speaks at the 2015 Y Combinator Female Founders Conference. She talks about building software for construction superintendents and about customer success.

Bryan Cantrill's illumos Day 2014 talk on running Linux containers on an illumos kernel via LX-branded zones. He covers emulating Linux syscalls on SmartOS and compares Linux and Solaris-derived systems.

Practical Engineering gives a short introduction to concrete, covering the difference between concrete and cement, the ingredients, and reinforcement. It includes a hydraulic press demonstration of compressive strength.

James Hamilton, AWS VP and distinguished engineer, gives an insider view of the innovations behind the AWS cloud at re:Invent 2014. He covers custom hardware, networking, regions and availability zones, and infrastructure at scale.

The ADVChina hosts tour a villa neighborhood in southern China that was built only three years earlier and is already empty and deteriorating. They use it to discuss ghost cities, building quality and the real estate bubble.

CGP Grey explains the mess of Daylight Saving Time, including its dubious energy savings and the odd cases like Arizona that opt out. It is a short, simple explainer.

BigClive tears down and tests a germicidal UVC lamp from eBay that floods a room with narrow-band ultraviolet and ozone. He warns of the eye and skin hazards.

A short video of a man moving a 20 ton stone block by himself using wood and levers. It is part of a pyramid-mysteries channel.

Andy Keep's Clojure/Conj talk on writing a nanopass compiler, built from many single-task passes with formally defined intermediate languages. It covers the framework's origins in a compiler teaching course at Indiana University.

A Consumer Reports and IIHS crash test pitting a 2009 Chevy Malibu against a 1959 Bel Air. It shows how much better modern cars protect occupants.

The Geopolymer Institute presents Joseph Davidovits's theory that the Egyptian pyramids were built from cast artificial limestone, a geopolymer concrete, rather than carved blocks. It demonstrates how few people could make blocks.

A one-minute scene from the film Enemy of the State showing absurdly implausible image enhancement, with freezing, rotating, zooming and focusing on a video.

A YouTuber explores the Chernobyl zone in 2013, takes a gamma spectrum of a hot reactor fuel fragment, and jokes about a radioactive ant bite. It is a hands-on amateur look at radiation in the exclusion zone.

NFPA video in which wildfire researcher Jack Cohen explains that embers (firebrands), not the flame front, are the main cause of homes igniting in wildfires. He shows how landscaping and removing debris around the home reduce risk.

The first episode of Clickspring's series on reproducing the Antikythera Mechanism by hand, laying out the plan and the history. The series follows a machinist building the ancient Greek device with traditional tools and methods.

A professor from Illinois compares the cost of building, fueling and operating a nuclear plant against a natural gas plant, using visual charts. It shows how construction time and interest rates dominate, when the investment pays off and when costs cross over.

A long documentary-style video arguing that slavery in the US effectively continued through convict leasing and the prison system until around 1942. It covers the constitutional carveout and the history of neoslavery.

Joe Rogan interviews David Goggins, a retired Navy SEAL and ultramarathon runner, about his path from overweight to elite endurance athlete and pushing beyond comfort zones.

Jim Pavloff rebuilds The Prodigy's 'Voodoo People' in Ableton from its listed samples. The video shows how the track is assembled and how close a handmade reconstruction can sound.

An eight-minute excerpt of a 1983 video featuring Seymour Papert, creator of Logo, on children learning programming and abstract ideas through embodied play. It shows kids acting out the Logo turtle.