executive function

Part 1 of a lecture by physicist Albert Bartlett on the exponential function and its consequences for population growth, resource use and energy. It argues that steady growth rates quickly lead to enormous quantities.

A short Frank Zappa interview clip on the decline of the music business, contrasting old cigar-chomping executives with younger industry people.

Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky lectures on depression as a real biological disease. He covers its biological and psychological causes, how it differs from ordinary sadness, and ideas such as learned helplessness. He ties these together into one account.

Jon Kabat-Zinn leads an hour-long Google tech talk on mindfulness, introducing the basic ideas and including a guided meditation. It is aimed at newcomers.

The classic 1980s anti-drug PSA in which a father confronts his son about drugs and is told 'I learned it by watching you'.

Jon Bentley walks through three implementations of Hoare's Quicksort, from a dozen-line C function to a series of systematic code transformations that make the program ever simpler and more powerful. It is a Google Tech Talk on code elegance and program derivation.

Peter Seibel's 2006 Google TechTalk on Practical Common Lisp, framed by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Paul Graham's Blub paradox. It shows Lisp features such as condition restarts and its generic-function object system.

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.

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 short Supernova 2007 provocation in which Clay Shirky uses a 1300-year-old Japanese shrine, rebuilt periodically, as a metaphor for how networks change business and collective creativity.

A short clip from the film Office Space in which Peter explains his typical workday to the Bobs, the consultants.

A two-minute clip of Steve Ballmer laughing at the $500 price of the newly announced iPhone and dismissing its lack of a keyboard. It captures a famously wrong early reaction from an industry executive.

The business card scene from the film American Psycho, in which executives compare increasingly refined business cards with escalating envy. It is a two-minute clip of a classic dark comedy moment.