hal abelson

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.

In Top Gear's second part, racing driver Sabine Schmitz tries to lap the Nurburgring in a Ford Transit van in under ten minutes. She finishes just over the mark.

A family comedy video in which kids write instructions for making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, and a parent follows them with exact literalness, producing chaos. This is the classroom-friendly version.

Top Gear segment in which Hammond and May try to turn a Reliant Robin into a space shuttle. Launching is easy, but landing it safely is the problem.

A short montage from HBO's Silicon Valley of the TechCrunch Disrupt scene, in which founders repeat the phrase 'making the world a better place'.

A short clip from The West Wing in which staffers meet a group advocating the Peters projection and challenge the Mercator map. It was shown as geography humor at a Salt Lake GIS user group meeting.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on patents and patent trolls, explaining how stockpiled patents and lawsuit threats burden businesses. It features the East Texas venue of Marshall.

A short Cracked video arguing, tongue in cheek, that the world of the film Idiocracy would actually be a utopia. It plays with the movie's premise and today's politics.

A REACT episode where teenagers try Windows 95 for the first time and react to the retro interface and technology.

A clip from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home where Scotty introduces an astonished engineer to future technology to build the whale tanks.

An episode of REACT in which children try to figure out 1970s-1980s computers, including an Apple II and floppy disks. It was made to promote the AMC show Halt and Catch Fire.

The stoning scene from Monty Python's Life of Brian, where a man is condemned for blasphemy after saying 'Jehovah' over a halibut supper.

The opening sequence of the film Idiocracy, which satirically shows less intelligent people out-breeding more intelligent ones. It runs about three minutes.