ghost in the shell

The wordless city montage from Mamoru Oshii's 1995 film Ghost in the Shell, in 1080p, showing the city and its people as Motoko travels by boat.

ADVChina tours Chinese ghost cities and discusses the housing bubble, with speculative buyers purchasing empty apartments as investments.

Joscha Bach's 35C3 talk offers an AI perspective on the soul, covering perception, mental representation, agency, consciousness and selfhood as things that can arise in a computational system like the brain.

Will Wilson explains autonomous testing: using deterministic simulation and fuzzing, building on FoundationDB's approach, to test software continuously. It sets out the ideas behind his later company Antithesis.

Physicist Angela Collier's roughly hour-long video on how string theory was hyped to the public and what that did to science communication. She traces the history of the theory as a narrative and argues it is interesting but was oversold.

Coffeezilla gives a comprehensive history of Tether, the stablecoin issued by a company controlled by the owners of Bitfinex. He lays out accusations that it is not fully backed.

Rune Skovbo Johansen explains Surface-Stable Fractal Dithering, a technique he invented and released as open source. It makes dithering stick to 3D surfaces and covers the experiments and shortcomings along the way, inspired by Return of the Obra Dinn.

The first lecture of David MacKay's Cambridge course on information theory, pattern recognition and neural networks. It introduces the core ideas of his book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms.

Kyle Hill of Because Science explains and demonstrates, using real cards, how Magic: The Gathering can be used to build a Turing machine, a computer inside the card game.

Sixty Symbols interviews Nottingham cosmologist Tony Padilla, who says string theory deserves to be taken seriously. He explains how strings emerged from the equations rather than being invented.

3Blue1Brown uses Wordle as an excuse to teach information theory and entropy, building a solver that picks guesses by expected information and incorporating word frequencies.

A short video of railroad workers in Storfors, Sweden, using thermite to weld rail sections together.

A talk by Eric Weinstein on gauge theory and its possible application to economics and inflation. It proposes extending the Wu-Yang dictionary into a geometric tool beyond physics.

The first episode of Clickspring's series on reproducing the Antikythera Mechanism by hand, laying out the plan and the history. The series follows a machinist building the ancient Greek device with traditional tools and methods.

Part two of Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture on inventing the future. He draws on his time at Xerox PARC and elsewhere to discuss how to think about new technology and what makes ideas useful.

Bill Hammack of engineerguy explains how medieval engineers designed stone cathedrals using rules of thumb, with no science, mathematics or literacy. He uses it to define the engineering method.

Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard, starting with Musical Phonology. He draws analogies between music and linguistics, including references to Chomsky.

Machine Thinking argues the 1751 machine, a metal-cutting lathe associated with Vaucanson, triggered the biggest explosion of wealth in history by enabling precise manufacturing of other machines.

An Economics Explained video arguing that the Netherlands shows taxes alone can't reduce wealth inequality. It distinguishes income inequality from wealth inequality and discusses the Gini index.

Linus Tech Tips opens up an M1 MacBook Air to test whether better thermal pads could improve performance in the fanless design. It looks at what Apple left on the table.

A short scene from Malcolm in the Middle in which Hal tries to fix a light bulb and is pulled into a growing chain of side repairs.

Lin-Manuel Miranda performs an early version of the Hamilton idea, then called "The Hamilton Mixtape", at the White House poetry and spoken word evening in May 2009. He is accompanied by Alex Lacamoire and the audience laughs along at the premise of a hip-hop song about Alexander Hamilton.

James D'Angelo argues that the 1970 Legislative Reorganization Act made congressional votes public, opening the door to lobbyists and special interests. He proposes restoring secret voting as a cheap fix for corruption and many social ills.

Noam Chomsky's 2011 University of Oslo lecture on Newton's contributions to the study of mind. He argues Newton abandoned mechanical explanation and lowered the bar for scientific intelligibility, with consequences for the limits of human understanding. Q&A starts at 45:33.

David Tong, a Cambridge theoretical physicist, explains at the Royal Institution that the fundamental building blocks of nature are quantum fields rather than particles. He covers what we know about these fields and how they fit into the Standard Model.

Kurzgesagt explains stellar engines such as the Shkadov thruster and Caplan thruster, which could move the Sun and solar system across the galaxy over millions of years to avoid hazards and reach new regions.

Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.

Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture covers his career at Xerox PARC and how to think about inventing the future. He goes through what came out of PARC and why companies fail to capitalize on such ideas.

Mathematician Colin Wright demonstrates juggling and explains the mathematics of juggling patterns, including notation that led to new throwing patterns. It is a public presentation at the Museum of Mathematics aimed at a general audience.

Microsoft's short announcement video for the new Windows Terminal, a modern terminal app for Command Prompt, PowerShell and WSL. It is a stylized trailer for the unreleased project.

The ADVChina hosts tour a villa neighborhood in southern China that was built only three years earlier and is already empty and deteriorating. They use it to discuss ghost cities, building quality and the real estate bubble.

The Verge's documentary on Handspring and its Treo, a smartphone that came a decade before the iPhone. It tells how a small team tried to build the modern smartphone and was held back by carriers and timing.

Clickspring makes the pin-and-slot epicyclic gearing of the Antikythera Mechanism, the module modelling the Moon's variable motion in the Greek theory, by hand.

Illumina's 3D animation of its sequencing-by-synthesis workflow, from sample preparation and cluster generation to sequencing on a flow cell and data analysis.

The Browser Company's CTO explains how the team is building the Arc browser for Windows using Swift. It covers the de-risking work and why they believe it is feasible.

Not Just Bikes argues that the Netherlands, famed for cycling, is also the best country for drivers. It explains how prioritizing walking, cycling and transit makes driving faster and more pleasant.

A short CGP Grey explainer on the alternative vote (instant runoff voting) versus first past the post, made around the 2011 UK referendum. It shows how ranked ballots are tallied and why they avoid spoiler effects.

A 30-minute animated film explaining how money, banking and the Federal Reserve work and arguing that the American economy is heading for collapse. It is opinionated and has a strong point of view.

Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind gives a public lecture on the holographic principle, the indestructibility of information and the nature of black holes. It asks whether the world could be a hologram.

Andrew Huang teaches the basics of music theory in about half an hour, covering intervals, chords and patterns. He stresses understanding how music works over memorizing terminology.