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

The official music video for The Chemical Brothers' Star Guitar, directed by Michel Gondry. Visuals of a passing landscape are synced to elements of the music.

David Deutsch's TED talk arguing that humanity's survival depends on solving problems through knowledge growth. He frames people as improbable "chemical scum" capable of understanding distant quasars.

A 2007 Computer History Museum conversation in which Nvidia CEO Jen-Hsun Huang interviews TSMC founder Morris Chang. Chang recounts his career and the creation of the dedicated silicon foundry model.

A US Chemical Safety Board video explaining how sugar dust explosions at the Imperial Sugar plant in Georgia killed fourteen workers in 2008.

Doug Zongker's deadpan conference presentation of his famously chicken-filled paper, given at the 2007 AAAS humor session. It satirizes academic talks while showing the pitfalls of bad presentation.

A George Carlin stand-up bit from Doin' It Again about soft language and euphemism, showing how softened words hide uncomfortable facts. It touches on topics like shell shock and aging.

A clip from George Carlin's 1990 special 'Doin' It Again' in which he describes how American English has been sterilized with euphemisms, using examples such as shell shock becoming PTSD.

Neuroscientist Jill Bolte Taylor describes watching her own brain functions shut down during a massive stroke. She gives a first-person account of losing speech, motion and self-awareness.

A short clip from a Richard Feynman interview in which he explains fire, describing how burning wood releases sunlight stored by the tree, which built itself mostly from air. It showcases his curiosity and plain-spoken explanations.

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.

A three-minute clip from BBC's Planet Earth narrated by David Attenborough about Cordyceps, the fungus that infects insects and takes over their behavior. It shows an infected ant and its demise.

Larry Lessig's TED talk argues that copyright law chokes creativity, drawing on John Philip Sousa, celestial copyrights and the ASCAP cartel to make the case for reviving remix culture.

A clip of the Yes Men posing as a Dow Chemical spokesman on the BBC and announcing compensation for victims of the Bhopal disaster, a hoax on live television.

A 1971 DEC LAB-8/e (PDP-8/e) minicomputer plays music by inducing noise into a nearby AM radio. The software is Richard Wilson's 1975 Music Compiler running under OS/8.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff lectures on how political debates are framed through language and metaphors tied to values, and on the moral worldviews behind progressive and conservative politics. It was given in 2005 at UC San Diego.

Douglas Hofstadter's Stanford Presidential Lecture argues that analogy is the core of cognition, illustrating how concepts, categorization and thought arise from analogy-making.

Mycologist Paul Stamets presents six ways mycelium and fungi could help save the world, in an 18-minute TED talk. Topics include environmental cleanup and other applications of fungi.

A short video of stretching and hand exercises for preventing and easing tendinitis and carpal tunnel syndrome, from a percussion teacher. The exercises were shown to him by a doctor.

An excerpt from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman describes how he and a mathematician friend counted in their heads in different ways, one verbally and one visually. It shows that people can reach the same goal through quite different mental methods.

A short edited excerpt of Terence McKenna arguing that culture acts as an operating system for the mind, set to imagery and music. It touches on psychedelics and how they change thinking.

A concept video from Nokia Research Center and Cambridge Nanoscience Center showing Morph, a flexible, self-cleaning, shape-changing phone imagined through nanotechnology.

Philosopher Dan Dennett argues in a TED talk that we do not understand our own consciousness and that our brains often fool us. He uses perceptual examples, including a painting that invites the viewer to fill in detail.

A very short microscope clip of a neutrophil chasing a Staphylococcus aureus bacterium, originally from David Rogers at Vanderbilt University. It is a widely reposted piece of immune-system footage.

A short clip, titled Orwell Comes to America, on reasoning and perception. One HN user links it repeatedly as the science showing human minds are bad at reasoning and do not see reality as it is.

Neuroscientist Beau Lotto runs the audience through color and pattern illusions to show that perception is shaped by context and evolutionary history rather than being a direct readout of the world. The talk is playful and hands-on, and it argues that the brain interprets ambiguous signals.

The Geopolymer Institute presents Joseph Davidovits's theory that the Egyptian pyramids were built from cast artificial limestone, a geopolymer concrete, rather than carved blocks. It demonstrates how few people could make blocks.

An 8-minute clip of George Carlin's 1992 stand-up bit on the environment, arguing the planet will be fine and it is people who are in trouble. It leans on the contrast between Earth's 4.5 billion years and humanity's 200,000.

A one-minute clip of the New Caledonian crow Betty bending a straight wire into a hook to retrieve food from a tube. It comes from a 2002 Science study on tool-making in crows.

A one-minute 1949 television commercial for Camel cigarettes claiming that more doctors smoke Camels than any other cigarette.

A one-minute animated commercial for the antidepressant Zoloft, described as the original that inspired later sequels and parodies.

A short animation illustrating the proposed nanofactory concept, where nanomachines assemble atomically precise parts into larger products. It depicts how such a system might build macroscopic goods from raw materials and energy.

A 2006 promotional video for sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, a music software project that analyzes and reassembles sampled audio and video in real time, tied to themes of sampling and copyright.

A scene from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in which Kirk and crew rescue the injured Chekov from a 20th-century hospital.

Steve Blank's Computer History Museum lecture argues that Silicon Valley's roots lie in WWII radar and electronic warfare work, Stanford's Fred Terman and Cold War military funding rather than the semiconductor alone.

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.

Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and founder of FriendFeed, speaks at Startup School 08 about listening to users. He covers feedback, features, aiming for 100 happy users, and treating "that's impossible" as a statement of limited experience.

Stargate Studios' 2009 virtual backlot reel shows before-and-after shots in which green screen and compositing replace locations in ordinary TV dramas and comedies. It shows how much of a seemingly real show is computer generated.

The introductory lecture of Stephen Boyd's Stanford Convex Optimization I course (EE 364A). It outlines convex sets, functions and problems, and the course's coverage of least-squares, linear and semidefinite programming, duality and interior-point methods.

A clip of Louis C.K.'s bit "Everything's Amazing and Nobody's Happy," about how quickly people take modern technology for granted and complain about it. It is a comedic riff on impatience with air travel and gadgets.