counting

Lecture 1 of Harvard's Statistics 110 with Joe Blitzstein, introducing sample spaces, the naive definition of probability, counting, binomial coefficients and the sampling table.

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.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2016 talk on lifetime safety in C++, aiming for code free of leaks and dangling pointers by default. It covers smart pointers, ownership, reference counting pitfalls and deferred reclamation resembling garbage collection.

Miguel de Icaza's GodotCon 2023 talk on Swift bindings for Godot. He argues that garbage-collector pauses in C# are a persistent problem and that Swift's reference counting avoids them.

An excerpt from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman describes how he and a mathematician friend counted in their heads in different ways, one verbally and one visually. It shows that people can reach the same goal through quite different mental methods.

Numberphile visits YouTube to learn why view counts on new videos used to freeze at 301. It explains that YouTube holds counts while it verifies views aren't from bots or fakes.

Short clip of Donald Rumsfeld's 9/10/2001 speech acknowledging that $2.3 trillion in Pentagon transactions could not be tracked.

Michael Steil's 33c3 talk explains essentially everything about the Game Boy: CPU, video hardware, peripherals, and the tricks used by games and demos. It revives the era of counting clock cycles around hardware limits.

Donald Knuth's 2017 Christmas Tree Lecture at Stanford about a combinatorial geometry problem whose computed numbers matched a striking formula. He tells the story of the conjecture and its sequel.

MinutePhysics, with 3Blue1Brown, explains Bell's theorem using a Venn diagram paradox and polarizing filters. It shows why no local hidden variable theory can reproduce quantum correlations.

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.

SsethTzeentach reviews Space Station 13, the chaotic multiplayer game, by recounting absurd stories of singularities, malfunctioning AIs and plasma fires.

Dr. Jason Fung lectures on why obesity became an epidemic since the 1970s, arguing insulin and hormones rather than calories drive weight gain. He explains why calorie counting fails and touches on low-carb eating and fasting.

A WGBH/NOVA re-enactment of Clifford Stoll's hunt for KGB-linked hacker Markus Hess, based on his book The Cuckoo's Egg. It starts from a 75-cent accounting discrepancy at Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory.

3Blue1Brown, in collaboration with minutephysics, introduces the math of superposition and quantum states using polarized light. It builds up the quantum behavior of photons as a simple counting and probability problem.

A one-minute Sesame Street animation of a counting pinball game focused on the number 12, set to Pointer Sisters music.

Tom Scott explains YouTube's 11-character video IDs, which are base-64 encoded 64-bit numbers, and whether YouTube could ever run out of them. It covers counting systems and base 64 briefly.

Casey Neistat's short New York Times op-doc investigating how accurate restaurant and packaged-food calorie labels really are. He gets items from chains like Chipotle, Starbucks and Subway measured by nutrition researchers and compares them to the printed numbers.

Vsauce asks whether music will ever run out of new melodies. It counts the possible note combinations and discusses how common chord progressions and remixing affect originality.

Thunderf00t critiques the MIT and Berkeley metal-organic framework device that claims to pull water from air using only solar heating. He argues the energy accounting does not work and that such devices are essentially fancy dehumidifiers.

A clip from Mr. Show season 3 in which characters insist that 24 is the highest number. It is a short absurdist sketch about counting.

A subtitled 1958 clip of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser recounting, with laughter, a Muslim Brotherhood suggestion that women be required to wear a head covering.

A one-minute clip of Steve Ballmer explaining IBM's obsession with counting thousands of lines of code (KLOCs) as a measure of programmers. He explains why that metric is useless.