course

Cliff Click walks through a small performance example on a modern out-of-order CPU. He covers pipelining, ILP, CISC vs RISC, multicore, and why cache misses and the memory subsystem dominate performance.

A 27c3 talk on the Linux desktop (GNOME) by Wolfgang Draxinger, repeatedly interrupted and corrected by Lennart Poettering from the audience. The description notes much of the talk's content is disputed.

Gor Nishanov's CppCon 2018 talk on using tiny C++ coroutines to hide memory latency, interleaving useful work while prefetches bring cache lines in from main memory.

David MacKay, scientific advisor to the UK energy department, gives a Harvard talk on sustainable energy at macro and micro scale, drawn from his book Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air. It stresses the land area renewables require.

Jon Purdy's Stanford EE380 seminar giving an overview of concatenative programming, from function composition theory and history down to low-level implementation and correctness benefits.

Tom LaGatta's talk on category theory at a 2014 LispNYC meetup, covering objects, morphisms and the basic ideas in an informal, conversational style. It runs about 97 minutes.

Geoff Hinton's 2010 Google Tech Talk on deep belief networks, learning layers of representation one at a time from unlabeled data, and extending them with multiplicative interactions.

Jon Gjengset's 2020 PhD dissertation presentation at MIT on partial state in dataflow-based materialized views, the idea behind the Noria database. The Q&A is cut out.

Physicist Geoffrey West speaks at an FQXi conference on time about complexity and scaling laws. He covers how metabolism, growth and lifespan scale across organisms and how the same mathematics applies to cities and companies.

Max Tegmark's MIT CBMM talk on why deep learning works so well. He argues that the laws of physics and the symmetries in physical data make it compressible into small neural networks, tying physics to network structure.

Retired Boeing Technical Fellow Doug McLean walks through common misconceptions in aerodynamics, drawing on his book Understanding Aerodynamics. He critiques popular explanations of wing lift and rocket thrust and argues for arguing from the real physics.

Robert Bussard's 2006 Google Tech Talk on inertial electrostatic confinement fusion, a compact approach he argued could be cheap and clean, using boron-hydrogen fuel without neutron radiation. It runs about 93 minutes and covers the physics, funding history and his proposed development path.

A 2015 talk by David Deutsch with slides and audio about constructor theory and how physics, in particular the many-worlds interpretation, can be framed without probability.

Colin Smith introduces Structure and Interpretation of Classical Mechanics and his Clojure port, sicmutils. He shows how higher-order functions and a symbolic algebra system can represent Lagrangian mechanics.

Theoretical physicist Nima Arkani-Hamed gives a public talk on why spacetime may not be fundamental and what might replace it, including newer approaches to scattering amplitudes.

Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography, a technique that captures a trillion frames per second, fast enough to show light itself moving through a scene. He discusses possible uses such as cameras that see around corners or inside the body.

The 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, in which a panel of physicists and philosophers debates whether the universe is a simulation. Participants include David Chalmers, Zohreh Davoudi and James Gates.

John Ousterhout, Stanford professor and creator of Tcl, presents the ideas of his book A Philosophy of Software Design in a Talks at Google session. He covers managing complexity, deep modules and interfaces, and what he teaches in his Stanford software design course.

Tom Scott's Royal Institution discourse on science communication in the age of social media, how recommendation algorithms shape popularity, and why view counts can matter more than truth. It includes a segment on parasocial relationships.

A short Portuguese-language excerpt of Gerald Sussman's 2016 NYC Lisp Meetup talk explaining why MIT replaced the Scheme-based 6.001 (SICP) course with Python courses. The full talk is linked in the description.

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.