cosmic events

Terence Tao and Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown walk through the cosmic distance ladder, showing how humans measured distances from the Earth to the Moon, Sun, planets and beyond. It includes animations and the history behind each step.

Terence Tao's AMS Einstein Public Lecture at UCLA on the cosmic distance ladder, the chain of methods astronomers use to measure distances from the Earth to distant galaxies. It is aimed at a general audience.

Veritasium explains how cosmic rays and other particles flip bits in computer memory, with examples including a Belgian election count error, plane incidents and game glitches. It is inspired by a RadioLab episode on bit flips.

A short Stanford video in which Chao-Lin Kuo surprises Professor Andrei Linde with BICEP2 evidence supporting cosmic inflation, the first apparent images of primordial gravitational waves.

A Kurzgesagt animation on supernovae, the most powerful explosions in the universe. It explains their role in creating elements and what would happen to Earth if one occurred nearby.

A visual scale comparison of stars and cosmic objects, from planets up to some of the largest known stars, set to music. It is meant to convey the vastness of the universe.

A three-hour Joe Rogan podcast with Randall Carlson, builder and geomythologist, on catastrophic geological events, cosmic impacts and climate at the end of the last glacial period.

A PBS Space Time episode asking what black holes really are and whether events can happen inside them. It covers event horizons, time dilation and common misconceptions about black holes.

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.

Megan McArdle's AEI Vision Talk 'Capital and Poverty' argues that social and financial capital work differently in low-income communities, and that this explains barriers to reaching the middle class.

Kurzgesagt explains why, even with science-fiction technology, most of the universe is permanently out of reach because of cosmic expansion and finite resources.

Greg Young, who coined CQRS, gives an in-depth GOTO 2014 talk on what event sourcing is, when it is valuable and when it is not, along with its trade-offs and common misconceptions.

The Eames Office's 1977 film Powers of Ten starts at a picnic in Chicago and zooms out by a factor of ten every ten seconds to the edge of the universe. It then zooms inward to a proton in a carbon atom.

Carl Sagan's narration of the Pale Blue Dot passage, reflecting on the Voyager photograph of Earth as a tiny speck in space. It is a short meditation on humanity's smallness and shared home.

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.

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2017 talk on leadership and organizational principles, ranging from the Gettysburg Address to Uber and Amazon. He argues for the difference between principles and values and criticizes vague corporate principles.

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2016 talk on how software engineers pass knowledge down through oral tradition, from folk rhymes to programmer lore and stories like why C lacks a logical XOR. He argues for writing software with future generations in mind.

Thomas Ricks's Nimitz Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley asks why US generals did better in World War II than in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq and Afghanistan. A central point is the WWII practice of quickly reassigning or relieving underperforming generals.

Bryan Cantrill's Craft 2019 talk on the ethical dilemmas software engineers face as software eats the world. He explores cases where engineering thinking conflicts with the law or personal morals, including Facebook's news feed experiments.

Chris Stucchio presents the ethical principles behind algorithmic decision making and shows with examples from lending, criminology and education that they cannot all be satisfied at once. The talk frames AI fairness as a set of quantitative tradeoffs.

Seymour Cray's only surviving recorded talk, introducing the Cray-1 supercomputer in 1976. He describes the machine's design, including its vector architecture and cooling through the frame.

An AWS re:Invent 2019 session for advanced DynamoDB users on design patterns used by large customers, including Amazon retail. It covers GSI sharding, index overloading, graph processing, composite keys and transactional workflows.

An AWS re:Invent session explaining Amazon's Working Backwards process, where teams start from customer needs and write a press release and FAQ (PR-FAQ) before building. It covers the five customer questions that frame the process.

Bryan Cantrill's Monktoberfest 2023 talk takes on AI doomerism, weighing the theoretical existential risks against the reality on the ground. He takes a skeptical but thoughtful view of how to balance AI's potential against its risks.

Lawrence Krauss's 2009 talk on the current picture of the universe, how it will end and how it could have come from nothing. It covers the expanding universe, cosmic background radiation and the cosmological constant.

A 2007 Channel 4 documentary by Martin Durkin arguing that human-caused global warming is overstated or a scam. It features contrarian scientists such as Richard Lindzen and promotes sunspot and cosmic-ray explanations for temperature change. Its claims are rejected by mainstream climate science.

Geologist Nick Zentner of Central Washington University gives an hour-long public lecture on the great earthquakes of the Pacific Northwest, including the Cascadia subduction zone and the evidence for past megaquakes. It is part of his Downtown Geology Lecture Series, recorded in Ellensburg in 2016.

Dan Robinson, then CTO of Heap, explains how Heap runs its product analytics backend on PostgreSQL and CitusDB. It covers conversion funnels, retention and cohort queries across tens of billions of events and 50 TB of data, plus Postgres and Kafka together and the indexing strategy.

The full 1984 interview with Yuri Bezmenov, a former KGB operative, in which he lays out four stages of ideological subversion. It is a long interview with G. Edward Griffin.

Part 4 of John Carmack's QuakeCon 2013 keynote, covering OpenGL, functional programming, Haskell, Lisp and Scheme, typing, multithreading, events and garbage collection.

NASA JPL engineers explain the final minutes of the Curiosity rover's entry, descent and landing on Mars, which combined aerobraking, a parachute and a skycrane. It lays out the tight sequence of events that all had to work automatically.

A Netflix JavaScript talk on using Reactive Extensions (Rx) for asynchronous UI code. It covers Observables, composing events such as drag and drop, and sequencing Ajax requests.

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.

Jon Bois tells the story of the 1904 St. Louis Olympic marathon, a chaotic race involving fraud, rat poison, brandy, feral dogs and near-deaths. It is an episode of his show Pretty Good.

Veritasium tells how Kodak film was fogged by radioactive fallout from the first atomic tests, letting the company detect nuclear testing before anyone announced it. The video also covers the deal to keep it quiet and how fallout contaminated packaging.

A fast, absurdist 19-minute animated run through the history of the whole world, narrated and scored by Bill Wurtz in his distinctive style. It compresses millennia of events into jokes, songs and quick visuals.

PBS Space Time explains how spacetime geometry and light cones determine the order of events and what can cause what. It visualizes causality in special relativity.

Rob Miles explains on Computerphile why implementing an off switch for a general AI is hard. A capable agent would resist being stopped because shutdown prevents it from achieving its goal.

Veritasium explains Bayes' theorem with examples and introduces the 'Bayesian trap', where repeated events get mistaken for inevitable ones. It discusses how priors shape our expectations and behavior.

Rational Animations explains Robin Hanson's grabby aliens model, which argues that humanity looks suspiciously early in cosmic history. Expanding civilizations set a deadline that explains our timing and bears on the Fermi paradox.