grasp lab

Bret Weinstein and Yuri Deigin discuss the evidence for the hypothesis that SARS-CoV-2 leaked from a lab, including the furin cleavage site and gain-of-function research. The conversation draws on Deigin's Medium article.

Jon Stewart appears on The Late Show with Stephen Colbert and discusses the pandemic, vaccine science and the Wuhan lab origin theory. He jokes that the disease shares its name with the lab.

Casey Neistat's short New York Times op-doc investigating how accurate restaurant and packaged-food calorie labels really are. He gets items from chains like Chipotle, Starbucks and Subway measured by nutrition researchers and compares them to the printed numbers.

A Seeker short documentary on a lab where robots run experiments with almost no human intervention, covering automation and active machine learning in drug discovery and synthetic biology.

Cuong Do of YouTube describes how a handful of engineers scaled the site, covering hardware, software and database scalability challenges during its rapid growth. The talk was given at the 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability.

A JRE clip in which Bret Weinstein explains his concern that most American lab mice descend from a single lab lineage. He argues this undermines how well mouse research translates to humans.

Science journalist potholer54 examines the claim that SARS-CoV-2 came from a Wuhan lab, tracing the sources behind it and the weaknesses in the evidence.

A long Portal podcast episode in which Bret Weinstein tells Eric Weinstein the story of his lab mice telomere work, the prediction behind it, and what it means for science and aging.

A 1982 AT&T Bell Labs film for students about the Unix system and how it can be used practically. It includes Lorinda Cherry building a talking calculator by piping together Unix commands, and a spell checker made from Unix utilities.

A 1973 AT&T training film made for new employees at Bell Labs' Holmdel Computing Center, when Unix was in its third version and running at 16 computer centers in the Bell System. It shows how users submitted jobs and used the center's machines.

Dave Chinner's linux.conf.au 2012 talk on XFS scalability, covering pain points with large numbers of files and complex metadata, and the work to fix XFS metadata performance.

Dr. Layne Norton critiques claims made by Dr. Robert Lustig on the Huberman Lab podcast, going through them against the nutrition research with cited sources. It covers topics like sugar, calories and fruit juice.

A podcast episode in which GPT-4 red teamer Nathan Labenz describes using the model before release, finding it human-level but not human-like, and discussing its weaknesses and worrying capabilities. It closes with speculation about GPT-5.

A demonstration from UPenn's GRASP Lab of an autonomous quadrotor performing flips, flying through windows and perching on surfaces. It shows precise aggressive maneuvering control of a small UAV.

Destin of Smarter Every Day goes behind the scenes at the 23andMe lab to show how genotyping works. He also discusses DNA testing and privacy.

A short Google video introducing the Quantum AI Lab, a partnership between Google, NASA, USRA and a 512-qubit D-Wave Two quantum computer. It covers the lab's early goals and some potential applications of quantum computing.

A short GRASP Lab (University of Pennsylvania) demo in which teams of quadrotors autonomously assemble tower-like cubic structures from modular parts. The drones are given the target structure and work out the assembly plan themselves.

A short demo from the GRASP Lab at the University of Pennsylvania showing a swarm of nano quadrotors flying in coordinated formations. The vehicles were developed by KMel Robotics.

A one-minute motivational clip from the art piece #INTRODUCTIONS in which Shia LaBeouf shouts "Just Do It" in front of a green screen. It spawned many remixes.

Anthony Marcar describes lessons from three years of using Clojure at WalmartLabs, including scaling a team and a large multi-project codebase in an enterprise setting.

Penn and Teller help Rob Pike and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs play a prank on Nobel-winning physicist Arno Penzias. The clip shows the gag and its setup.

A short CMU Robotics Institute clip on NavLab 1 from 1986, the first self-driving car to carry people on board. It was very slow but revolutionary for its era's computing power.

Jonathan Blow talks at Gamelab 2018 about the design decisions behind Jai, the programming language he is building for game programmers. He covers low-friction development, quality of life and the effects of compile times.

A 100-minute tutorial from Phil's Lab on designing an STM32-based 'black pill' PCB in KiCad 6. It covers schematic capture, two-layer layout and routing, USB, and sending the board for manufacture and assembly.

An 11-minute clip of Milton Friedman explaining the incentives of unions and how they affect employment. He argues unions restrict labor supply, raising pay for some workers while hurting low-skill workers.

Computerphile with Professor Brailsford on how a 1979 Bell Labs team reverse engineered a Linotron 202 phototypesetter over a summer to get high-quality print output. It covers typesetting history and the later 2013 rebuild of the famous vacation memo.

Nicholas Zakas of Yahoo discusses architecture for large, modular JavaScript web applications. He lays out the theory behind building front ends that scale in complexity.

A PyCon 2012 talk by early YouTube engineer Mike Solomon on how YouTube scaled its architecture, which is mostly Python.

The first part of Welch Labs' series on imaginary numbers, presenting them as the natural extension of the number line into two dimensions. It covers the history and the math with strong visuals.

The first of a short series by Welch Labs on building a complete neural network in Python. It introduces the data and the architecture of a simple network before later parts cover forward propagation, gradient descent, and backpropagation.

A roughly three-hour screen recording of designing a barebones STM32F4 board in KiCad, covering schematic, four-layer layout and routing, USB and a buck converter. It ends with ordering manufacture and assembly through JLCPCB.

Martin Kleppmann's GOTO Berlin 2016 talk on how collaborative editors, offline apps, and multi-datacenter databases handle concurrent updates. It covers conflict resolution approaches including operational transformation and CRDTs, with a worked look at text CRDTs.

Brian Fitzpatrick and Ben Collins-Sussman argue that the 'genius programmer' ideal harms collaboration. They advocate trading ego for growth, sharing work early, and understanding how tools shape social behavior.

A two-minute time-lapse from the Kishony Lab showing bacteria spreading across a giant petri dish with increasing antibiotic doses, evolving resistance as they go.

Redis Labs and Tim Davis present RedisGraph, which uses GraphBLAS to treat graph queries in Cypher as sparse linear algebra for lower latency.

Jean-Marc Jancovici gives an MIT Media Lab talk on whether technology can save us from climate change. He argues from a physical view of energy that economic growth, energy use and climate impact are tightly linked.

minutephysics, in collaboration with the US Census Bureau, explains differential privacy and why the 2020 census adds noise to protect individuals' data. It walks through how statistics can leak private information.

A short Tesla promotional video touring the company's Crash Lab. It describes using data from the fleet and replicated real-world crash scenarios to engineer vehicle safety.

A 1971 DEC LAB-8/e (PDP-8/e) minicomputer plays music by inducing noise into a nearby AM radio. The software is Richard Wilson's 1975 Music Compiler running under OS/8.

Tom Scott tours the rotating room artificial gravity facility at Brandeis University's Graybiel lab. It shows how humans cope with rotation-based gravity and the odd effects such as Coriolis forces.