event loop

Steve Jobs introduces the first iPod at a small Apple event in 2001. He positions it as a music player and ties it to the Apple brand.

Nate Harrison's 2004 video history of the Amen Break, a six-second drum sample from a 1969 b-side that became the basis of hip-hop sampling, jungle and drum and bass. It is also a meditation on cultural ownership and creativity.

A roughly one-minute TV clip in which a guest accidentally breaks a rare, one-of-a-kind wax cylinder recording on camera.

A short Dyalog demonstration building Conway's Game of Life in a single line of APL, step by step. It shows how array operations replace loops.

A two-minute animation of an Alan Watts talk arguing that life is like music: it is meant to be danced to in the moment, not rushed toward a final goal. It is a short, accessible take on living in the present.

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.

A short animation reconstructing a planet's looping orbit using Ptolemy's epicycles and deferents, with the epicycles tracing out the face of Homer Simpson. It shows how enough circles can reproduce nearly any shape.

Bobby McFerrin uses audience participation at a World Science Festival event to demonstrate how instinctively people follow the pentatonic scale.

Seventeen-year-old Ray Kurzweil appears on the TV show I've Got a Secret in 1965, playing a piece of music composed by a computer program he built.

A short demo from the Ishikawa Komuro Lab of a high-speed robot hand paired with a 1000fps vision system performing dexterous manipulation. It shows what very low-latency vision and actuation can do.

A short Adam Curtis clip on what he calls oh dearism, the habit of news reporting that presents events as a stream of sad, inexplicable happenings. He argues this leaves viewers passive and unable to imagine action.

The classic MrWeebl animated music video Badgers, a short looping song of badgers, a mushroom and a snake. It is a staple of early internet absurdist humor.

A short clip from Microsoft's 1995 Judgement Day event in which Bill Gates is inserted into Doom as a promo for Windows 95 and DirectX gaming. It was never publicly released at the time.

Google's 2008 press announcement of its open source browser, Chrome, featuring Sundar Pichai among the presenters.

A short clip of Steve Ballmer at a Microsoft event chanting "developers" over and over. It became a lasting internet meme.

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

The official music video for Billy Joel's 1989 song We Didn't Start the Fire, a rapid-fire list of historical events.

A one-minute clip of John McCain singing 'Bomb bomb Iran' to the tune of a Beach Boys song at a 2007 campaign event.