grain bins

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day explores how grain bins work and the engineering and know-how involved in farming. His point is that farmers are exceptionally capable.

Sir Ken Robinson argues, with humor and stories such as that of choreographer Gillian Lynne, that education systems undermine creativity and should be changed. It is one of the most viewed TED talks.

Dan Robinson, then CTO of Heap, explains how Heap runs its product analytics backend on PostgreSQL and CitusDB. It covers conversion funnels, retention and cohort queries across tens of billions of events and 50 TB of data, plus Postgres and Kafka together and the indexing strategy.

Peter Robinson interviews Peter Thiel at the Hoover Institution about Thiel's essay The Straussian Moment. Thiel discusses how people trust the will more than the intellect and reason, and how the question of human nature has been abandoned.

Mel Robbins gives a TEDxSF talk on why people sabotage themselves and how to push past hesitation. It is the source of her 'count backward from five' technique.

A short clip of the robot's famous warning line 'Danger, Will Robinson!' from the 1960s TV series Lost in Space.

An RSA Animate drawn from a Sir Ken Robinson talk arguing that current education systems are modeled on the industrial age. It discusses divergent thinking, standardization, and how schools disengage kids.

A DEF CON 23 talk on researching whether a commercial quadcopter could be forced to land by interfering with its GPS signal, inspired by a neighbor's kid's drone. It covers the research and the legal and technical issues encountered.

A look at Le Plessis-Robinson, a French suburb transformed from modernist urbanism into traditional mixed-use fabric with local-style architecture, green space and a more balanced housing supply.

Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and virtual reality pioneer who was dying of cancer, gives his 'Last Lecture' about achieving childhood dreams and living well. The recording is a full-length talk of about 104 minutes.

The video accompanying the SIGGRAPH 2012 paper on Eulerian Video Magnification. It amplifies subtle changes in ordinary video, such as skin color shifts from a heartbeat, to reveal pulse and tiny motions.

A condensed film of Dick Proenneke's footage of building a cabin and living alone in the Alaskan wilderness, using hand tools and local materials. It draws on the 8mm films he shot himself.

Zack Freedman introduces Gridfinity, his free, open-source modular workshop storage system of 3D-printable bins and baseplates. The video walks through the design, the parametric templates and the many module types that fit parts, tools and accessories.

Adam Robinson-Yu's GDC 2020 talk on how he shelved a big project to prototype what became A Short Hike. He covers the solo development process and technical choices like a pixel shader over low-poly models.

A one-minute clip from Cambridge's Prof. Holger Babinsky that debunks the equal transit time explanation of lift. It shows how air actually flows over a wing.

Tom Scott visits ThyssenKrupp's test tower in Rottweil to see the Multi, a rope-free elevator that uses linear motors to move cabins sideways as well as vertically.