food system

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on food waste covers how producers, sellers and consumers throw away huge amounts of food, including sell-by dates and donation myths.

A short film about the Dervaes family, who grow over 6,000 pounds of food a year on a tenth of an acre near downtown Los Angeles. They grow more than 400 plant species, keep chickens and ducks, and get most of their food from the plot.

A Kurzgesagt explainer asking whether organic food is really healthier or better for the environment. It defines what organic means and looks at pesticide use, nutrition and environmental impact, with sources.

A Radio Free Asia report from its China food safety series on how "gutter oil" is recovered from sewers and waste and sold on to cheap restaurants and street vendors.

FreeBSD developer Benno Rice traces the history of init and bootstrap systems at linux.conf.au 2019 to explain why systemd was seen as necessary and why it provokes such strong reactions. He also discusses why change is scary.

Rich Hickey's 2013 talk applies language-design thinking to whole systems, covering names, queues, data, failure, and the interfaces between programs. It ends with a call to action for building systems holistically.

Vegan advocate Erin Janus explains the dairy industry in about five minutes, covering how milk is produced and the treatment of cows and calves. It is an advocacy piece and includes graphic material.

Jeff Dean of Google describes his experiences building Google's systems and how its infrastructure evolved over time. The Stanford talk covers search, scaling tipping points and lessons from building large-scale software.

Stanford Health Care hosts Christopher Gardner and Robert Lustig on whether all calories are equal, with a focus on processed food and sugar. The talk questions the idea that calories in versus calories out fully explains weight and health.

Benno Rice's BSDCan 2018 talk on why systemd exists and what it got right and wrong. It traces the history of Unix init and why Linux distributions adopted it, while asking what the BSDs should learn.

José Valim's ElixirConf US 2023 closing keynote on the foundations of the Elixir type system, covering set-theoretic types and gradual typing with strong arrows.

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison travels with the UN World Food Programme to Niger to see land recovery within the Great Green Wall, where rainwater harvesting is boosting food security and restoring the ecosystem.

A Kurzgesagt animation of how the immune system responds to a bacterial infection, depicting immune cells as an army defending the body.

A 1990 lecture by James Gosling on NeWS, Sun's networked window system in which clients send PostScript programs to the server for execution. It covers the high-level imaging model and compares NeWS with similar systems.

A FoundMyFitness episode on how microplastics and associated chemicals such as BPA and PFAS accumulate in the body, including the brain and reproductive systems. It also discusses ways to reduce exposure.

Bryan Cantrill's QCon SF 2019 talk asking whether operating systems should be rewritten in Rust. He draws on his systems experience to discuss C, memory safety and Rust's fit for system software.

An AWS re:Invent 2014 talk on the core distributed systems primitives behind AWS and Amazon.com, such as consensus, key-value stores and transactional logging. It describes how AWS builds large services from a few common building blocks.

A Last Week Tonight segment on food safety in the US. It looks at the FDA, the USDA and industry groups such as the Association for Dressings and Sauces, and how little enforcement there is.

A short film in which friends build the first true-to-scale model of the solar system, with full planetary orbits, on a Nevada dry lakebed. It conveys the real distances and sizes involved.

Chris Houser's Clojure/conj talk on why Clojure's exceptions destroy information as the stack unwinds, unlike Common Lisp's condition system, which can resume from the error site. He surveys the existing libraries that approximate conditions, explains why they don't compose with each other, and considers what a better design would look like.

A panel from the Lang NEXT 2014 conference on systems programming in 2014 and beyond. Language designers including Bjarne Stroustrup and Rob Pike discuss the topic, including C++ header compile times.

A long talk by rancher Gabe Brown on turning his North Dakota farm into a regenerative ecosystem using no-till, cover crops and integrated livestock. It covers the five principles of soil health and how they pay off financially.

Timothy Roscoe of ETH Zurich delivers the joint USENIX ATC/OSDI 2021 keynote arguing that operating systems must reckon with modern hardware, which is a heterogeneous collection of processors, firmware and coprocessors rather than a simple machine. It shows how much runs below and beside Linux.

A four-minute Not Just Bikes comparison of grocery shopping in Amsterdam versus car-centric North America, arguing that frequent small fresh-food trips beat bulk shopping. It ties this to land use and reduced food waste.

The first lecture in Martin Kleppmann's 8-lecture distributed systems series from the University of Cambridge undergraduate course. It introduces the subject, and accompanying lecture notes are available.

Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, the creators of ZFS, present 'ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems' at the 2008 SNIA Software Developers' Conference. They explain the design, including copy-on-write, checksumming and avoiding the write hole.

Aditya Siram introduces ATS, a statically typed ML-like language that compiles to C and offers type-safe pointer arithmetic and a full proof language. The Strange Loop talk shows off C interop, concurrency and verification features with non-trivial examples.

Aaron Hsu's FnConf18 talk asks whether APL needs a static type system. He argues that APL's expressiveness and rapid iteration already deliver the benefits usually credited to types.

A Kurzgesagt animation giving a big-picture tour of the human immune system, its organs, transport network, and the cells it produces every day. It accompanies their IMMUNE book.

A Kurzgesagt video on the conditions in which most farm animals are raised. It argues that cruelty is for cheaper rather than better meat, and that a small price increase per meal could avoid most of the suffering.

Joe Duffy's RustConf 2017 closing keynote on his experience at Microsoft building Midori, an operating system written in a Rust-like safe systems language. He covers the technical and cultural challenges of applying those lessons to Windows.

Veritasium examines whether food has become less nutritious, weighing soil depletion, selective breeding and rising atmospheric CO2. It evidences nutrient decline even in weeds over a century and ties it to faster plant growth.

A Microsoft Research talk on BetrFS, a file system built on B-epsilon trees, a write-optimized data structure. It covers WODS such as LSM-trees, how to design a file system around them, and benchmark wins over ext4 and xfs.

Marshall Kirk McKusick gives a talk at EuroBSDCon tracing filesystem and storage development from 1979 to today, using the BSD Fast Filesystem as the focus. It covers early disk-geometry optimization through later contiguous layout and small-file performance work.

An animation presenting a non-standard helical or vortex model of the solar system, in which the planets trail the Sun through space instead of orbiting in flat circles. The model is a non-conventional view that the author says differs from standard diagrams.

Richard Cook's short Velocity 2013 talk on resilience in complex adaptive systems, arguing systems operate near the edge of failure and that the surprise is how rarely they fail. He presents a model of how pressures push systems toward failure boundaries.

Psychologist Melanie Joy's TEDxMunchen talk introduces carnism, the invisible belief system that conditions people to eat some animals but not others, and how it shapes reactions to food choices.

Soil microbiologist Elaine Ingham speaks at the Oxford Real Farming Conference on how soil organisms cycle nutrients, unlock minerals from rock and air, and why pesticides and fertilizers harm soil life. Slides are linked in the description.

CGP Grey explains Mixed-Member Proportional representation, the system used in New Zealand where voters get two votes. It covers how it differs from first-past-the-post.

Dr. Richard Cook, a physician and patient safety researcher, presents his ideas on how complex systems fail, at Velocity 2012. He argues for designing for resiliency rather than trying to exhaustively handle every failure mode.