dynamic range

A Foresight Institute workshop video with two talks: Shawn Douglas on nanoscale instruments for visualizing small proteins, and Bret Victor on Dynamicland. Victor's part shows biomolecular design built in his Realtalk system with physical objects.

Spencer Lisenby explains dynamic soaring, a technique that lets unpowered radio-controlled gliders reach speeds above 835 kph. He covers the physics and the design, build and flying challenges.

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.

A Microsoft Flight Simulator Feature Discovery episode in which CEO Sebastian Wloch explains the new aerodynamics simulation for the 2020 release.

Konrad Malawski's Strange Loop 2023 talk shows how the FoundationDB team adopted Swift incrementally in a C++ codebase. It covers Swift's C++ interoperability, which let them move single functions or entire types over one at a time.

Chris Granger presents Eve, a programming environment designed to be approachable for humans, at Strange Loop 2015. The talk covers the project's approach and design ideas.

An update from the Strange Parts YouTuber on his recovery from a brain injury caused by a metal pipe while filming, and his plans for the channel.

Boston Dynamics introduces Stretch, a prototype robot that moves boxes in warehouses and distribution centers. Its mobile base lets it unload trucks, build pallets and assemble orders.

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.

Erik Demaine's MIT 6.006 lecture introducing dynamic programming through Fibonacci numbers and shortest paths. It covers memoization, subproblems and optimal substructure.

Aging Wheels tests how towing trailers affects the range of electric trucks, including a Silverado EV. It shows that trailer aerodynamics matters far more than added weight.

Tech Ingredients explains the principles of magnetohydrodynamics and builds several demonstrations, including propelling liquid metal and electrolytes with magnets and a railgun-style setup.

Nathan Kutz presents the spatio-temporal dynamics of rotating detonation rocket engines, including combustion fronts that behave like solitons. He shows a bifurcation analysis of a multiscale model that captures the main features.

A six-minute explainer from Undefined Behavior on range (score) voting. It follows an earlier video on Arrow's Theorem and shows how range voting seems to satisfy the criteria Arrow's Theorem says no ranked system can.

A short MIT Math Lab video showing millimetric droplets bouncing and walking across a vibrating fluid bath, guided by their own pilot waves. These droplets show diffraction, tunneling and quantized orbits, which were once thought to belong only to quantum systems.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, examines how programming languages are funded. He looks at where compiler engineers' salaries come from, why Go has about 5 engineers while Dart has about 30, and how this limits language design.

Ian Piumarta's 2007 Stanford EE380 lecture on building a dynamic programming environment from the ground up, from the Viewpoints Research Institute's work. It covers the design of a language and system with a recursive design, parsing through code generation, and the COLA architecture.

Boston Dynamics' March 2008 video of BigDog, a four-legged robot, walking on ice and snow, climbing rubble and recovering from slips and kicks.

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 two-minute demonstration of the loudness war, showing how heavy dynamic range compression in CD mastering makes music louder while degrading sound quality. It uses audio examples so you can hear the distortion.

Richard Feldman's GOTO Copenhagen 2022 talk on why dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, PHP and JavaScript rose in the 1990s and why each now has a popular static type checker. It argues that modern static typing recovers the advantages that made dynamic languages attractive.

A 2001 panel with Paul Graham, John Maeda, Jonathan Rees and Guy Steele on programming language design, part of the Dynamic Languages Wizards Series.

Flanders and Swann perform 'First and Second Law', a comic song about the laws of thermodynamics, from their 1964 stage show At the Drop of Another Hat. It sets the first and second laws to a deadpan call-and-response routine.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science shows that a plain laser diode can measure sub-micron vibrations from centimeters away using self-mixing interferometry, and can also be used for range-finding.

The Doomsday Machine scene from Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, in which the Soviet doomsday device is explained.

A GoPro-recorded flight of an RC glider setting a 548 mph dynamic soaring speed record at Parker Mountain, California, using only wind gradients.

A one-minute clip of Spencer Lisenby setting a 545 mph speed record in an RC glider, the Transonic DP, using dynamic soaring. No motor is involved.

A three-minute clip from Dr. Strangelove in which Mandrake and Ripper (Peter Sellers and Sterling Hayden) discuss fluoridation and 'precious bodily fluids'. It is a famous Cold War satire scene.

A four-minute clip from Dr. Strangelove in which the President and General Turgidson argue over the 'mineshaft gap' after a nuclear war. Peter Sellers and George C. Scott play it as Cold War satire.

Adam Savage builds a Victorian-style rickshaw carriage for Boston Dynamics' Spot robot to pull, with him riding as passenger. The video covers the build and the engineering problems of pairing cutting-edge robotics with vintage transport, such as tuning the payload through Spot's API.

Jack Rusher's Strange Loop 2022 talk argues that most programming languages are still designed around punchcard-era assumptions. He makes the case for live, interactive programming environments, drawing on Lisp, Smalltalk and REPL-driven development.

Stephen Kell's Strange Loop talk argues that C and Unix already contain Smalltalk-like dynamism and introspection that can be exposed. He presents his liballocs research on bridging dynamic and compiled languages.

Guy Steele's Strange Loop 2010 talk argues that programmers should not have to think about parallelism, and that languages should support algorithms built on independence and divide-and-conquer. He also recounts fitting a program onto a single punch card.

Pokey Rule presents Cursorless, a spoken language designed for editing code by voice, built on tree-sitter parsing with smart structural and simple token-level primitives. The talk is from Strange Loop 2023.

Boston Dynamics' 2010 demo of BigDog, a quadruped robot that climbs through woods, recovers from kicks, slips on ice and jogs at 5 mph. It was an early showcase of dynamic legged locomotion.

Boston Dynamics shows its Atlas humanoid robot performing a gymnastics and parkour routine, using optimization-generated motions and a model predictive controller.

Physicist Jean-Pierre Petit gives a long technical commentary on Russia's newly announced weapons, including the Sarmat missile, a nuclear-powered cruise missile and a nuclear MHD-propelled submarine drone.

Rich Hickey's Strange Loop 2011 keynote distinguishing 'simple' (not intertwined) from 'easy' (familiar or near at hand). It argues that software complexity comes from complecting things and that we should pick simple constructs.

Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang, gives a funny and opinionated Strange Loop talk on the tangled state of software: build tools, package managers, entropy and the physical limits of computation. He argues for ideas like naming things by content hash and throwing away your first version.

Michael Hendricks of PriceCharting shares tricks and pain points from running Prolog in production for 18 months at Strange Loop. It argues Prolog is a productive modern language beyond logic puzzles, and includes a demo of changing code mid-execution.