early humans

Home video of the 11 March 2011 Japan earthquake, filmed as an early warning system detected the P wave and gave seconds of notice before the shaking began. The raw footage shows the warning in action.

A long interview with Elon Musk at Gigafactory Texas on Tesla's early days, covering why electric vehicles, who founded Tesla, founder departures, Roadster engineering and early funding.

A short clip from The Matrix in which Agent Smith tells Morpheus that humans behave like a virus. It is shared as a standalone monologue.

Sebastien Bubeck presents the Sparks of AGI paper at MIT, showing early experiments with GPT-4 across many domains and asking whether artificial intelligence has arrived. It includes the TikZ unicorn example.

Jake Archibald argues that URLs are nearly impossible for humans to interpret, especially for security. He walks through what browsers do about it, including highlighting the registrable domain, and floats a possible better design.

Disney Research presents Touche, a swept frequency capacitive sensing technique that recognizes complex hand and body configurations, and adds touch sensitivity to humans, liquids and everyday objects.

Kurzgesagt's animated overview of human origins and the vast prehistory before recorded history. It covers how modern humans emerged and spread.

Douglas Crockford's first Yahoo lecture puts JavaScript in historical context. He traces the language's structure and quirks back through the early decades of computer science and programming language history.

Planet of the Humans, a full documentary by Jeff Gibbs presented by Michael Moore, arguing that the green movement has been co-opted by corporate and wealthy interests and that techno-fixes are not enough.

Lucas Pope, creator of Return of the Obra Dinn, explains in Ars Technica's War Stories how localizing the game's logbook nearly sank the project.

Kurzgesagt explains black hole stars, a hypothesized kind of giant star with a black hole at its core that could be a route to early supermassive black holes.

A December 2005 guest lecture by Mark Zuckerberg in Harvard's CS50, discussing Facebook's early days, its technical choices and computer science. It captures him as a 21-year-old founder before Facebook's rise.

Cliff Stoll shows and explains his two Friden EC-132 electronic calculators for Numberphile. The video covers how these early machines worked, including their unusual acoustic delay line memory.

John Romero's 2016 GDC Europe talk recounts the early days of id Software and the programming principles behind Doom and Quake, including fast iteration and keeping the game bootable.

PBS Space Time examines the Silurian hypothesis, the idea that an industrial civilization could have existed on Earth before humans. It looks at what traces such a civilization might leave in the geological record.

A short clip of a young Steve Jobs preparing for an early TV appearance, amazed to see himself on a nearby monitor. It includes the moment when a large white earpiece is put in his ear.

A 1993 episode of The Computer Chronicles on the early Internet, with guests including Howard Rheingold discussing online community. It is a window into how the internet was seen and what hardware was in use at the time.

Map Men's Jay Foreman tells the story of how the London Tube map nearly looked very different, including Harry Beck's design and TfL's initial rejection of it. A short, witty history of a design icon.

CGP Grey argues for picking a theme for the year or season instead of setting goals or new year's resolutions. He explains how a theme gives direction without a pass/fail target.

CGP Grey explains how traffic jams come from human driving behavior such as tailgating and reaction delays, and how leaving gaps and smoothing speed would reduce congestion. It also touches on self-driving cars.

A 73-minute Stanford talk by Robert Sapolsky drawn from his book Behave. It surveys the biological factors behind human behavior at its best and worst.

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.

Testimony by Peter McCullough, MD, to the Texas Senate Health and Human Services Committee on March 10, 2021, about COVID-19 outpatient treatment. It was posted by the AAPS.

The official trailer for the documentary General Magic, about the secretive Apple spinoff that tried to build a handheld communicator in 1990 and whose ideas shaped the smartphone era.

Prof. Eran Segal's TEDx talk on research showing that people's blood sugar responses to identical foods vary widely. It describes an algorithm that predicts individual responses and why one best diet for everyone does not exist.

Tom Scott visits the Swiss Military Museum to see the last surviving 1970s tank-driving simulator. It uses a real camera moving over a miniature model landscape rather than any computer graphics.

Gameplay footage of Zarch, the 1987 3D Defender-like game by David Braben for the Acorn Archimedes. It shows the 256-colour 3D landscape where you stop landers spreading a virus.

Giant Bomb interviews John Carmack at E3 2012 about his virtual reality head-mounted display prototype. He demos it and talks about latency, depth and focus problems in VR.

PBS Space Time explains the Standard Model Lagrangian, the single equation encapsulating the particle physics theory, and visualizes what its terms mean.

A 1997 interview with Jeff Bezos taped at a Special Libraries conference, where he explains why Amazon started with books and why the web made it possible. He calls it the Kitty Hawk stage of electronic commerce.

Archival footage of Larry Tesler demonstrating Gypsy, the modeless text editor he and Tim Mott built at Xerox PARC, running on the Computer History Museum's restored Alto. It is a long hands-on walkthrough of one of the earliest graphical document editors.

A 38-minute highlights video from a January 2022 Senate roundtable hosted by Ron Johnson, where doctors and experts offered dissenting views on pandemic response, early treatment and vaccine safety. It condenses a five-hour event.

Kurzgesagt explores the idea that life might have arisen shortly after the Big Bang, when the whole universe was warm enough to be habitable. It discusses what that would mean for the origin and spread of life.

Jay Leno takes a host for a spin in his restored 1909 Baker Electric car on My Classic Car. It shows an early electric vehicle and what driving one is like.

A 1994 Today Show clip in which hosts puzzle over what the Internet is and how to say the at-sign in email addresses. It is a short archival piece from the early days of the web.

A one-minute clip about Paul Otlet, the Belgian bibliographer who in 1934 imagined users accessing a remote database through an electric telescope over a phone line. It presents his vision as a precursor of the web.

Jason Perkins's talk at Vintage Computer Festival East 2020 compares the user interface of the Xerox Star with that of the Apple Lisa. It covers editing documents, the Star's mouse and a Q&A.

Ben Felix examines whether the well-known 4% retirement withdrawal rule holds up, drawing on academic papers. He argues that a safe rate may be closer to 2.7%, especially for early retirees.

Elon Musk's 2016 IAC presentation on the technical challenges and architectures for building a self-sustaining human presence on Mars.

A three-minute Computer History Museum clip showing Ernst Dickmanns' VaMoRs Mercedes van and later VaMP sedan, early self-driving vehicles tested from 1986 to 2003.