direct manipulation

Bret Victor's talk on Drawing Dynamic Visualizations. It argues that visualization tools offer either the directness of hand drawing or the dynamics of programmed graphics, and shows a tool that combines both.

A 12-minute demo of the Alternate Reality Kit, built by Randall Smith at Xerox PARC in 1986. It is a simulated physical world in which users manipulate objects and program by direct interaction.

Bret Victor's closing keynote at UIST and SPLASH 2014 argues that our tools for thinking ignore most of human sensory and motor capability. He sketches representations that engage more modalities beyond screens and keyboards.

A three-minute clip of magician Ricky Jay performing a card manipulation routine, including table faro shuffles. The routine builds in intensity and ends with a surprising finish.

Investigative journalist Sharyl Attkisson explains how astroturf, fake grassroots campaigns funded by corporate or political interests, manipulates media messages. The TEDx talk is about 11 minutes.

Smalltalk pioneer Dan Ingalls presents the Lively Kernel at JSConf US 2012, a live, direct-manipulation programming environment running in the browser. He shows drag-and-drop building of live objects on the web.

A 1995 Sun Microsystems film about the Self programming language, a prototype-based Smalltalk relative, showing its live, graphical programming environment.

Second half of a demonstration of the 1982 Xerox Star user interface. It shows how the Star differed from the later Lisa and Mac interfaces, with strengths in networking and printing and little direct manipulation.

CGP Grey explains why European diseases devastated the Americas while few deadly diseases traveled the other way. He ties it to livestock domestication, dense cities, and the ideas of Guns, Germs and Steel.

A 1985 interview by G. Edward Griffin with former KGB operative Yuri Bezmenov. He describes long-running Soviet efforts at ideological subversion and manipulation of US public opinion.

The Thought Emporium shows how to receive clear images directly from GOES-15, 16 and 17 and Himawari 8 geostationary weather satellites with software-defined radio. It covers the extra effort needed to receive GOES data.

Sacha Arnoud, Waymo's Director of Engineering, gives a lecture in MIT's 2018 deep learning for self-driving cars course on the rise of machine learning in autonomous vehicles. It covers how Waymo uses deep learning and how it handles tricky driving situations.

Psychologist Robert Epstein presents a Stanford EE380 colloquium on how internet algorithms such as search rankings can manipulate opinions, purchases and votes at massive scale. He also describes a new monitoring system for tracking such influence.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day investigates manipulation on Facebook, interviewing the company's team about content moderation. It is the third video in his series on social media manipulation.

The official video for Carpenter Brut's Turbo Killer, directed by Seth Ickerman, with psychedelic 1980s-styled visuals set to rock-leaning synthwave.

Maciej Ceglowski's Web Directions 2015 keynote on website bloat, arguing that pages have grown far heavier than their content justifies. This is a re-upload of the original talk.

A TiVo-captured clip of the notoriously repetitive 2006 Head On headache remedy commercial, with its 'apply directly to the forehead' jingle.

A trader channel clips Jim Cramer describing market manipulation techniques hedge funds use. The clip is framed as context for odd short-term market moves.

Bret Victor's talk from Dropbox's DBX conference about living by a guiding principle, in his case that creators need an immediate connection to what they are making. He shows live-coding and time-manipulation demos that let ideas take form at the speed of thought.

The famous 1984 Apple Macintosh Super Bowl commercial, directed by Ridley Scott and based on Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. It casts the Mac as a force freeing individuals from a Big Brother figure, widely read as aimed at IBM.

A 2008 CES demo of the original Microsoft Surface, a smart table with multi-touch interaction. It shows touch manipulation of photos and objects on a tabletop display.

A ten-minute card-magic act by Dani DaOrtiz performed on Penn & Teller: Fool Us in 2022. It is built on timing, misdirection and psychology, and the method defeated the show's hosts.

CGP Grey explains that postal codes are routing instructions for mail rather than geographic regions. He looks at the quirks and problems this causes.

An RSA Animate in which Steven Pinker explains how the mind builds infinite meanings from finite language, and why people often speak indirectly. It covers ambiguity, politeness and mutual knowledge, including the emperor's new clothes example.

A 20-minute S3 episode touring Terraform Industries, a startup making synthetic natural gas from air and solar power. It walks through the reactor, injection system, direct air capture and electrolyzer, plus the company's cost goals and next milestone.

FortNine explains the economics of the dealership model, arguing that dealers absorb inventory risk and help manufacturers' finances. It looks at whether cars and motorcycles could be sold more cheaply without them.

A documentary following Robert Zubrin and the Mars Society as they push the Mars Direct plan for sending humans to Mars using current technology and local resources. It also covers the clash with NASA's more expensive approach.

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.

Part 1 of Smarter Every Day's three-part series on manipulating the YouTube algorithm. It features Renee DiResta and examples of how social media platforms can be manipulated.

A 1947 US military film that deconstructs how the Nazi regime used divisive propaganda and prejudice to split and control a population. It teaches viewers to recognise demagoguery tactics.

Steven Pinker presents his book The Stuff of Thought at Google in 2007. He covers language as a window into human nature, including taboo words, swearing and the psychology and game theory of indirect speech like bribery.

Dan Wahlin's hour-long beginner course on AngularJS builds a small single-page app while covering SPAs, directives, filters and data binding. It gives an initial grounding in Angular 1.

A short Tesla clip showing the Optimus humanoid robot sorting objects autonomously and doing yoga-style stretches. Tesla says its neural network is trained end to end, from video in to controls out.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day examines how bad actors and bots use Twitter, drawing on the released Russian IRA dataset and interviews. It asks why interactions on the platform turn hostile.

IBM's record-setting stop-motion film made by moving individual carbon monoxide molecules with a scanning tunneling microscope, illustrating atomic-scale memory research.

Boston Dynamics shows its humanoid robot Atlas picking up and manipulating objects, and altering the obstacle course to reach its goal. The clip demonstrates locomotion, sensing and athletic manipulation.

A short Boston Dynamics demo of Handle, a wheeled mobile manipulation robot that builds and unloads mixed-box pallets in a warehouse. It uses vision to find boxes and force control to place them against neighbors.

A short clip from Microsoft's 1995 Judgement Day event in which Bill Gates is inserted into Doom as a promo for Windows 95 and DirectX gaming. It was never publicly released at the time.

A Yes, Prime Minister scene in which Sir Humphrey shows how leading questions can make a poll produce either answer on national service.

Toyota Research Institute presents an approach for teaching robots new dexterous behaviors from human demonstration. It explains why this capability matters and what advances made it possible.