human era

Kurzgesagt explains the Holocene or Human Era calendar, which adds 10,000 years to the current year to anchor dates to the start of human civilization. It argues this gives a more sensible frame for human history.

Disney Research presents Touche, a swept frequency capacitive sensing technique that recognizes complex hand and body configurations, and adds touch sensitivity to humans, liquids and everyday objects.

A short clip of Robert Sapolsky on how social hierarchy generates chronic stress, drawing on baboon research. It links rank-related stress to heart health and life expectancy.

Bret Victor's closing keynote at UIST and SPLASH 2014 argues that our tools for thinking ignore most of human sensory and motor capability. He sketches representations that engage more modalities beyond screens and keyboards.

A 1997 Computer History Museum lecture in which Larry Tesler and Chris Espinosa recount how the Apple human interface was born, from the Lisa through the Macintosh. It covers design decisions such as discoverability and the standard editing keys.

The official trailer for the documentary General Magic, about the secretive Apple spinoff that tried to build a handheld communicator in 1990 and whose ideas shaped the smartphone era.

Howard Abrams demonstrates, in an EmacsConf 2015 talk, how he uses org-mode's Babel and Tramp to configure and operate remote servers from a single document. Code blocks, their results and the explanatory text all live together.

The Thought Emporium's host describes making and taking a DIY gene therapy to treat his own lactose intolerance. It uses an AAV virus to deliver DNA coding for the lactose-digesting enzyme, made with biohacker Gabriel Licina's help.

ScienceClic explains why the rubber sheet analogy for general relativity is misleading and offers a new visualization that includes the curvature of time and shows gravity as motion through curved spacetime.

Herbert Wolverson's Roguelike Celebration 2020 talk surveying procedural map generation techniques, including integration of hand-crafted prefabs and vaults.

Timothy Daly, an original author of the Axiom computer algebra system, talks about turning a large Common Lisp codebase into a literate program. He argues code should be written as readable manuals, and the talk was given at Write the Docs 2013.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day explains Multi-Domain Operations through footage from his last mission at RIMPAC 2018. He covers missile and torpedo testing and interviews military leaders about the cyber and information domains.

The Thought Emporium's update on the home-brewed gene therapy he took to cure his lactose intolerance. It reports how the effect held up over two years and what future versions might look like.

Freya Holmer delivers a long critique of generative AI, arguing it degrades the internet by flooding it with machine-generated junk. The video grew out of her frustration finding reliable information about a technical file format.

A philosophy video critiquing the concept of human rights from a Marxist perspective, drawing on Locke, Marx, Nietzsche, Hegel and Rawls. It examines what human rights actually mean and presuppose.

A 1957 Walt Disney film in which he explains and demonstrates the multiplane camera, the animation tool that gave 2D films depth. It is a short behind-the-scenes piece from Disney's archives.

Kurzgesagt's animated overview of human origins and the vast prehistory before recorded history. It covers how modern humans emerged and spread.

Benn Jordan concludes his Flock trilogy, filmed on a publicly deployed Flock Safety camera, covering a leak of camera feeds reported by 404 Media. He shows the cameras' capabilities, including panning to track people.

A short clip of the Snowbird, a human-powered ornithopter built by University of Toronto students. On August 2, 2010 it sustained altitude and airspeed for 19.3 seconds, the first such flight.

Craig Heffner's Black Hat 2013 talk on exploiting network surveillance cameras, covering how insecure their firmware is. It shows how easily such devices can be compromised.

A hobbyist builds a prototype full-frame CCD camera from scratch, with open-source design files and a custom PCB. The video shows the first, still rough prototype.

Tom Gally, a former professional translator and University of Tokyo professor, discusses in March 2023 whether GPT-4 and similar models could translate literary and popular fiction. He gives his assessment of Japanese-to-English quality.

Ilya Sutskever gives a Simons Institute talk on why neural networks generalize, framing learning as finding short descriptions, like compression. It was part of the Large Language Models and Transformers program.

A short Unitree promo for its G1 humanoid robot, priced from $16K, showing agile motion, dexterous hands and imitation and reinforcement learning.

Dr Brad Stanfield recounts the research history and scandal around resveratrol, the supposed anti-aging supplement, including problems with the original studies.

A Computer History Museum interview in which John Markoff of the New York Times talks with Douglas Engelbart about his life and research. It covers the influences and struggles behind his work on the mouse, hypertext and collaborative computing, and his aim of helping humanity tackle complex problems.

Associate Professor Simon Michaux presents estimates of the metals needed to build one generation of renewable technology to replace fossil fuels. He argues current production and reserves fall far short, with copper a key shortfall.

The first part of an Al Jazeera undercover investigation into the Israel lobby in Britain, covering efforts to influence youth groups and the National Union of Students, including a smear campaign against its president.

Timothy Roscoe of ETH Zurich delivers the joint USENIX ATC/OSDI 2021 keynote arguing that operating systems must reckon with modern hardware, which is a heterogeneous collection of processors, firmware and coprocessors rather than a simple machine. It shows how much runs below and beside Linux.

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.

Andrew Tanenbaum's FOSDEM 2010 talk on MINIX 3, a microkernel OS built for high reliability and security. It shows how the system detects and recovers from device driver crashes, and addresses microkernel performance concerns.

Ubisoft procedural technical artist Etienne Carrier explains the Houdini-based tools used to build Far Cry 5's roughly 100 square km open world. It covers generating biomes, texturing terrain, freshwater networks, cliff rocks and vegetation placement.

A Reason TV segment, drawing on Alex Gladstein of the Human Rights Foundation, argues that Bitcoin works as an escape hatch for people living under authoritarian governments and inflating currencies.

Developmental and synthetic biologist Michael Levin speaks at a Harvard Extension student event on bioelectricity, body intelligence and regenerative medicine. He discusses how cell electrical networks guide growth and form.

A feature-length documentary on General Magic, the 1989 startup that envisioned the smartphone and handheld connected devices, featuring Tony Fadell, Andy Hertzfeld and Marc Porat. It covers the company's vision and eventual failure.

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.

Al Baydha project co-founder Neal Spackman gives a final update nine years in, explaining how desertification followed the loss of indigenous land management and how the land has changed since inputs stopped in 2016. It lists which species worked best.

A 2015 CNBC Mad Money interview in which Jim Cramer gives Theranos CEO Elizabeth Holmes a platform to answer accusations about her company after critical press coverage. It captures her public persona at the height of the company's hype.

Political economist Mark Blyth gives a lecture tracing two versions of capitalist 'software': the postwar Great Compression era and the neoliberal era from 1980 to 2008. He explains the bug that crashed the first and the design of the second.

Al Jazeera's full unedited version of the WikiLeaks 'Collateral Murder' footage from a US military helicopter cockpit, showing a 2007 Baghdad attack that killed about a dozen people, including two Reuters journalists.