experiment

Washington Post video of the experiment in which violinist Joshua Bell played incognito at a D.C. metro station. It asks whether commuters would notice a world-class musician in an ordinary setting.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo explains how ordinary people can be pushed into doing evil by situations and systems. He draws on the Stanford prison experiment and unseen Abu Ghraib photos, then turns to the opposite case: how ordinary people can become heroes.

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.

A 2006 video showing a man openly cutting the lock and stealing a bike in New York City while passersby, including police, ignore him.

The first episode of Michael Sandel's Harvard course on moral reasoning, opening with the trolley problem and the choice between killing one to save five. Sandel draws out student arguments and introduces utilitarian and other approaches to justice.

Randy Pausch's 2007 last lecture at Carnegie Mellon, given as he was dying of pancreatic cancer. He reflects on achieving childhood dreams, overcoming obstacles and helping others reach theirs.

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 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.

Carl Sagan's narration of the Pale Blue Dot passage, reflecting on the Voyager photograph of Earth as a tiny speck in space. It is a short meditation on humanity's smallness and shared home.

A short video from the trafficwaves.org site showing how traffic jams and standing waves form, including the fight between cheaters and blockers at an exit-lane backup. It also touches on how individual driving behavior affects the flow.

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 PBS clip in which Richard Feynman explains the strange nature of light and electromagnetic radiation. He conveys how little of it we actually see and how radio waves are present everywhere.

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

Psychologist Barry Schwartz argues in this TED talk that abundant choice makes people more paralyzed and dissatisfied rather than freer and happier.

A short anarchist-leaning video by Larken Rose arguing that the Constitution and similar documents cannot legitimately grant anyone the right to take other people's property. It uses a rhetorical 'paper that lets me rob you' setup to challenge belief in political authority.

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 short clip of Richard Feynman answering an interviewer's question about how magnets work, in which he explains why a why-question has no simple answer without a shared frame of reference.

Richard Feynman, in a clip from the BBC series Fun to Imagine, takes on the puzzle of why mirrors seem to swap left and right but not top and bottom.

Dan Pink's TED talk argues that traditional carrot-and-stick rewards often fail for creative work, drawing on the candle problem and social science research. He points to autonomy, mastery and purpose as better motivators.

Slavoj Zizek discusses his book Violence in an Authors@Google talk in New York. He covers ideology, including his idea of the unknown knowns.

Psychologist Jonathan Haidt presents his moral foundations research in a TED talk. He argues that liberals and conservatives weigh a different set of moral values, which helps explain political divides.

A two-minute Rouxbe cooking-school demo of how to heat a pan properly before cooking. It uses the Leidenfrost effect, where water beads and skates across a hot pan, to show when a stainless steel pan is ready.

A one-minute clip of Slavoj Zizek showing what he calls the official geographical limit between the Balkans and Central Europe, standing at a river in Ljubljana. It is a short, absurd and funny piece of cultural geography.

Physicist David Deutsch's TED talk on why science took off, arguing that good explanations are those that are hard to vary. It contrasts scientific explanation with myth.

A 1947 US military film that deconstructs how the Nazi regime used divisive propaganda and prejudice to split and control a population. It teaches viewers to recognise demagoguery tactics.

In a TED talk, behavioral economist Dan Ariely uses visual illusions and his research to show that people are less rational in their decisions than they think. He covers defaults, such as organ donation rates, and how choice framing steers decisions.

A one-minute clip from Richard Feynman's 1979 Auckland lecture in which he answers whether you see an object or only its light. It is a short, playful take on perception and on the use of philosophy.

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.

Steven Pinker presents his book The Stuff of Thought at Google in 2007. He covers language as a window into human nature, including taboo words, swearing and the psychology and game theory of indirect speech like bribery.

Elizabeth Gilbert, author of Eat, Pray, Love, reflects on the pressure placed on artists to be geniuses. She proposes the older idea that creative people have a genius that visits them rather than being one.

A short clip of a frog levitating inside a roughly 10 tesla magnetic coil, demonstrating diamagnetism.

Amateur footage from the 2009 Sasquatch music festival in which one person starts dancing alone and a crowd gradually joins in, turning it into a dance party.

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

Alain de Botton gives a TED talk questioning how we define success and failure. He argues that snobbery and the assumption that outcomes are fully earned make career anxiety worse.

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.

Ten minutes of ultra-slow-motion footage of bullet impacts filmed at about one million frames per second by Werner Mehl of Kurzzeit. It includes hollow points in ballistics gel and impacts on glass.

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.

A short clip from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman explains how a train stays on the track. He covers the geometry of tapered wheels that steer the train back toward the center of the rails.

A short clip of the Mythbusters demonstrating superheated water in a microwave, which can erupt violently when disturbed.

A five-minute clip in which Erich Fromm asks whether the purpose of work is just making money. He argues that white-collar workers end up selling their personality, relating to others the way goods relate to each other on a market, and he points to creative pleasure, participation and usefulness to society as what work could offer instead.