house building

Tom Scott visits a rotating house near San Diego and explains how electricity, gas and water keep working on the rotating part. It includes a 3D render of the utility connection system.

A Berkeley Lab Distinguished Lecturer talk on building science, with an expert covering control layers, insulation and vapour barrier placement, and how buildings fail. The delivery is humorous.

An overview of the Quiet Logistics warehouse using Kiva Systems robots, narrated by company executives. The robots bring storage racks to human pickers at stations.

A short clip from Anthony Bourdain's Parts Unknown in which he and chef Sean Brock end a long night of drinking at a Charleston Waffle House. It celebrates the unpretentious, welcoming late-night diner. Bourdain's remark comparing the meal favorably to the French Laundry is what people remember.

A four-minute demo of the greenhouse effect showing how increased carbon dioxide raises temperature. It uses a simple setup that is dramatic and easy to understand.

Sabine Hossenfelder explains how the greenhouse effect actually works, given that infrared is mostly absorbed low in the atmosphere already. She walks through why more CO2 still warms the surface.

Matt Risinger covers installing a Zehnder ERV fresh-air system in a tight passive house, explaining balanced ventilation, the benefits of heat recovery and the costs involved.

Alamo Drafthouse posted an angry voicemail from a customer who was kicked out for texting in the theater. The theater turned it into a humorous in-house preview.

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.

The first episode of Stewart Brand's 1997 BBC series based on his book How Buildings Learn, covering how buildings change after they are built. Brand presents and the series has music by Brian Eno.

Essential Craftsman announces the start of a spec house build on a scenic lot, kicking off a long series. The channel covers every step of building a house from the viewpoint of a general contractor.

A short Insider Tech look at Ocado's grocery warehouse where thousands of robots on a grid pack orders, communicating over 4G to avoid collisions. It handles around 65,000 orders a week.

A short unscientific fire test comparing a massive timber house with an ordinary house. It shows the wood chars and burns slowly while still holding together.

Rational Reminder podcast episode with Morgan Housel, author of The Psychology of Money. They discuss how investing success depends more on behavior than knowledge, the role of luck and the dangers of emulating top investors.

A HOPE X talk giving an in-depth explanation of how elevators work, from their history in hacker culture to using their control systems to bypass building security. It covers features and abilities of elevators that most people never see.

Ian Hubert's Blender Conference talk on world building in Blender, covering photogrammetry, camera projection and assembling complex environments from simple shapes at great speed.

A long video essay on MyHouse.wad, a Doom II mod uploaded by an anonymous user that hides unsettling secrets in its walls. It tells the story of the map, its mystery and its liminal horror.

Kirsten Dirksen visits retired mailman Russ Finch in Alliance, Nebraska, who grows oranges, figs and pomegranates in a backyard greenhouse without paying for heat. The greenhouse uses the stable temperature of the earth, with underground earth tubes, to heat and cool itself.

Y Combinator CEO Michael Seibel lectures at Startup School on building a product people want: identifying the problem, the customer, an MVP and which customers to pursue first.

Kirsten Dirksen tours the underground ferro-cement dome home of Paula and Bill Lishman, the family behind the geese-led flight story. The skylit earth-sheltered house stays warm below the frost line.

Tom Scott tours Ocado's automated grocery warehouse, where thousands of robots move boxes on a grid called the Hive, and asks whether they are individual robots or a hive mind.

The Schoolhouse Rock! cartoon song 'I'm Just a Bill', in which a bill explains how it travels through Congress to become law.

CNN's clip of Stephen Colbert's 2006 White House Correspondents' Dinner routine, in which he mocks President Bush and the press in character. It was republished on the tenth anniversary.

A short 2009 WIRED clip showing Kiva Systems robots moving inventory shelves in a warehouse serving online retailer Zappos. It shows how mobile robots bring goods to pickers instead of people walking the aisles.

A one-minute clip of Stephen Colbert at the White House Correspondents' Dinner delivering the line that reality has a well-known liberal bias.

A South Park clip in which Butters' dad takes a job at an Amazon fulfillment center to make ends meet. It satirizes warehouse work conditions.

This Old House's Ross Trethewey explains MERV filter ratings and how air filtration works, then shows how to build a localized DIY air filter, including a box fan with multiple filters.

A This Old House segment where Richard Trethewey installs a heat exchanger that uses waste heat from a central air conditioner to heat a swimming pool.

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.

Numberphile visits Cliff Stoll, the man behind ACME Klein Bottles, and sees how he stores a thousand glass Klein bottles in a crawlspace under his house. A remote-controlled forklift fetches them.

Deviant Ollam and Howard Payne give an in-depth DEF CON 22 explanation of how elevators work, from the pit to the penthouse. It covers their control modes and how pen testers use elevators to bypass building security.

Not Just Bikes explains missing middle housing, such as duplexes, townhouses and small apartment buildings. The video argues that zoning in the US and Canada has made these options almost illegal.

Gary Vaynerchuk's Web 2.0 Expo keynote on building a personal brand in social media. He urges keeping a day job while building something on the side, with passion and persistence, in a loud and profane style.

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.

Researcher Kamal Meattle describes how an arrangement of three common houseplants placed in specific spots can measurably clean the air in a home or office. It is a short TED talk based on his work in a plant-filled building.

Time-lapse of Broad Group erecting a 30-story prefabricated hotel (J57) in Changsha, China in about 15 days. The description touts modular construction's precision, speed and low waste.

Reason TV profiles Elvis Summers, a Los Angeles musician who crowdfunded dozens of tiny homes for homeless people. City officials moved to remove them while pushing a multibillion-dollar housing plan.

Valve's short video on building the Steam Controller on a heavily automated assembly line, which the company designed itself. It shows the robotic manufacturing process and US final assembly.

World Builder is a short film by Bruce Branit in which a man uses holographic tools to build a world for the woman he loves.

Ed Catmull of Pixar speaks at Stanford's 2007 Entrepreneurship Conference on running a creative company. He argues for surfacing small problems early and building good teams, with stories like the Toy Story 2 crunch.