e-drive

A one-minute clip from SSI showing its Quad shredder destroying computer hard drives and electronic scrap.

A Hitachi promotional cartoon in the style of Schoolhouse Rock explaining perpendicular magnetic recording for hard drives.

A two-minute 2008 clip from Sun's Fishworks team in which Brendan Gregg uses DTrace to show disk latency spiking while he shouts at a rack of drives. Bryan Cantrill narrates the demonstration.

Top Gear segment in which Richard Hammond drives a Renault R25 Formula 1 car around Silverstone for two laps. He struggles with the car's demands.

James Houston's entry to Radiohead's Nude remix contest, performing the 6/8, 63bpm song on obsolete hardware such as hard drives, a dot matrix printer, a scanner and a ZX Spectrum.

Peter Schiff, during his 2010 Senate campaign, argues that government loan programs and subsidies push college tuition up.

A Samsung-backed viral demo that builds a fast computer from 24 256GB MLC SSDs in a RAID 0 array and shows the throughput results.

A short 2001 Tom's Hardware clip that runs Quake 3 on several popular CPU and motherboard combinations of the era, then removes the CPU cooler to see which chips survive. It shows how different processors handle losing their heatsink or fan.

A motorcycle safety video on the SMIDSY (sorry mate, I didn't see you) accident, explaining the perception and optical illusion that makes drivers fail to see riders, and how riders can spot the signs and avoid it.

Peter Norvig's 2007 Google talk on theorizing from data, covering what huge datasets can do for language understanding, translation, information extraction and inference. It argues that more data often beats cleverer models.

Peter Norvig, then Director of Research at Google, talks at Startup School 2008 about leveraging large amounts of data and about technical challenges in Google projects such as image search. A central idea is that data can beat hand-written programming.

Robert Lustig of UCSF lectures on the biochemistry of sugar, arguing that fructose and lack of fiber drive the obesity epidemic via insulin. It is the widely viewed 90-minute talk that popularized the anti-sugar case.

Elizabeth Warren's 2007 Berkeley lecture, when she was a Harvard law professor, on why middle-class families are under growing financial strain. She draws on bankruptcy research to examine rising costs of housing, health care and education.

A two-minute John Cleese monologue showing the pathology of extremism, explaining why it feels good and how it drives out moderates.

David MacKay's 2007 Google Tech Talk presents Dasher, a text-entry system driven by continuous gestures and a language model, reaching about 35 words per minute with one finger and 25 hands-free. It explains the information-theory reasoning behind the design.

In this TED talk, Hans Rosling uses animated statistics to debunk myths about the developing world, showing how health and income have improved across countries.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo explains how ordinary people can be pushed into doing evil by situations and systems. He draws on the Stanford prison experiment and unseen Abu Ghraib photos, then turns to the opposite case: how ordinary people can become heroes.

In Top Gear's second part, racing driver Sabine Schmitz tries to lap the Nurburgring in a Ford Transit van in under ten minutes. She finishes just over the mark.

Robotic Liberation by PWP is a music video demo performed entirely by an unexpanded Commodore VIC-20 and a 1541 disk drive, using only a few kilobytes of RAM and a 16 KB disk. It uses demoscene effects to tell a story.

A short clip of a Renault F1 engine playing God Save the Queen by precisely controlling its RPM, recorded at Goodwood. It demonstrates how finely the drivetrain can be controlled.

A short clip of Oracle CEO Larry Ellison, speaking to financial analysts in September 2008, questioning what cloud computing even means. He calls it a fashion-driven buzzword.

A one-minute New Scientist clip showing a Japanese experiment in which drivers on a circular track produce a spontaneous traffic jam that travels backward. It illustrates phantom traffic jams without any obstacle.

A short demo showing slow 2D drawing in the Windows 7 GUI compared with XP. It attributes the slowdown to the display driver model lacking hardware accelerated GDI.

'Pipe Dream' is the best-known piece from the first Animusic DVD, a computer-animated music video in which fantastical machines play music. The animation is driven by MIDI data.

An IIHS crash test pitting a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air against a 2009 Malibu in a frontal offset collision for the institute's 50th anniversary. The old car's occupant space collapses while the modern car's protects its driver.

A three-minute student film from Campus MovieFest showing drivers in every lane holding exactly the speed limit on an Atlanta-area interstate and the traffic jam that results.

A 2009 satirical news segment from The Onion's 'In The Know' in which pundits adjust their on-air opinions in real time according to a live viewer poll. It lampoons pandering media and politics.