engineering failures

A spoof industrial promo for the Rockwell Retro Encabulator, a deadpan stream of technobabble about an imaginary machine. It is a classic engineering in-joke.

A Consumer Reports and IIHS crash test pitting a 2009 Chevy Malibu against a 1959 Bel Air. It shows how much better modern cars protect occupants.

A short comedy video of the Turbo Encabulator, a piece of technobabble nonsense describing an imaginary machine in deadpan engineering language.

A 1930s Chevrolet training film explaining the principles and development of the differential gear. It builds the idea step by step from first principles to the finished mechanism.

Tourist footage of the 660-ton tuned mass damper in Taipei 101 swaying during tremors from the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The damper hangs from the 92nd floor.

The first installment of a hobbyist's video diary documenting his build of a giant walking spider-like vehicle. The footage is casual and self-shot, following the early stages of the project.

First lecture of Stanford's CS106A Programming Methodology by Mehran Sahami, giving a course overview and starting on programming. The course teaches software engineering principles using Java.

A comedy video in which a salesperson demands that a web developer fix a down website, with the two talking past each other. It won a Webby award.

A 1937 GM-produced film explaining how the automobile differential lets wheels turn at different speeds around a corner. It uses clear animations and cutaway demonstrations to build the idea from first principles.

Footage of British steeplejack Fred Dibnah climbing a chimney overhang at over fifty years old, without a harness. It is a short clip from his steeplejack work.

Arthur Ganson's kinetic sculpture chains twelve 1:50 worm gear reductions so the final gear, embedded in concrete, would take over two trillion years to turn once.

A short clip of Richard Feynman explaining how a train stays on its tracks, through the conical shape of wheels and how it handles curves without differentials.

Footage of an Airbus A380 engine blade-off test, in which a fan blade is deliberately released at full thrust to show the engine contains the failure.

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.

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.

Matthias Wandel shows his wooden machine that adds binary numbers using marbles. It demonstrates computation with purely mechanical logic.

A brief demonstration of a railroad tank car imploding after a vacuum is pulled with its safety valves disabled.

An Onion News Network satirical segment about a memorial dedicated to the future victims of a dam that officials know will fail. It is a dark joke about known infrastructure risk and inaction.

Joshua Bloch's Google Tech Talk on how to design good APIs and why it matters, with concrete principles and examples. It treats every programmer as an occasional API designer.

Tom Lehrer's satirical song about Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who went from the Nazi missile program to the US space program. It includes the famous line about not caring where the rockets come down.

John Allspaw and Paul Hammond's Velocity 09 talk on how Flickr achieved ten or more deploys per day through close cooperation between development and operations.

Tom Lehrer performs his satirical song about rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, with an introduction. It is a two-minute musical clip.

A one-minute clip of Scotty from Star Trek giving advice to engineers about managing expectations in estimates. It is a comedic bit of workplace wisdom.

Short clip of Honda's ASIMO humanoid robot falling down stairs during a live demonstration.

A short clip of CNBC's Jim Cramer insisting Bear Stearns is fine in March 2008, days before the firm was sold to JP Morgan for $2 a share.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk in which Slava Pestov introduces Factor, a concatenative language influenced by Forth, Lisp and Smalltalk. It covers the interactive environment, metaprogramming, and the language's modern high-level features and libraries.

James Howard Kunstler's TED talk argues that American public spaces and architecture have become unworthy of care, damaging civic life. He presents suburban sprawl and car-first design as failures of the common good.

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.

An excerpt from Hal Abelson's opening SICP lecture introducing computer science and contrasting declarative and imperative knowledge. He argues that computer science is not really a science and is more like magic or engineering of ideas.

A sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Sound in which a caller learns that identity theft is, in effect, a bank robbery in which the bank blames the customer. It runs about two minutes.

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