human power

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.

Olympic track cyclist Robert Forstemann tries to pedal hard enough to power a 700 W toaster and toast a slice of bread. The film frames it as a comparison of how much energy people consume versus how much they can generate.

Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, presents GreenArrays' 144-core asynchronous chip at Strange Loop 2013. He explains how idle cores draw almost no power and how tight code minimizes energy use.

The full 1971 Dutch television debate between Noam Chomsky and Michel Foucault on human nature, with subtitles. They discuss creativity, knowledge, power and politics.

Isaac Arthur explores space-based solar power, in which satellites beam energy down via microwaves to rectennas on Earth. He discusses feasibility, profitability and its role in spurring space colonization.

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.

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

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

Disney Research's demo of quasistatic cavity resonance, which uses a purpose-built room or cabinet to generate magnetic fields that deliver kilowatts of power wirelessly to mobile receivers inside.

Practical Engineering explains what a black start is: restarting a power grid after total collapse. It shows why most plants need outside power to start and why rebuilding a synchronized grid is delicate and high-stakes.

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.

Kenneth Finnegan shows how USB-C Power Delivery trigger boards like the ZY12PDN negotiate 5V to 20V so you can power projects from a USB-C charger, including the color coding for each voltage.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on the state of the US power grid, why it needs fixing, and the risks of aging infrastructure.

In this TEDxBerlin talk, environmental activist Michael Shellenberger explains why he changed from opposing nuclear power to advocating it, after looking at the evidence on Chernobyl, Fukushima and air pollution.

A 73-minute Stanford talk by Robert Sapolsky drawn from his book Behave. It surveys the biological factors behind human behavior at its best and worst.

The closing speech from Charlie Chaplin's 1940 film The Great Dictator, in which the barber appeals for humanity, kindness and liberty over machinery and cleverness.

Technology Connections explains the difference between power (watts) and energy (watt-hours) and why confusing them leads to errors. It runs about 52 minutes and uses everyday examples.

A 2006 Google TechTalk in which Luis von Ahn introduces human computation, using people's effort to solve problems like image recognition that computers cannot yet handle. It covers games with a purpose and related ideas such as CAPTCHAs.

A short clip from The Matrix in which Agent Smith tells Morpheus that humans behave like a virus. It is shared as a standalone monologue.

A short IEEE Spectrum clip of Stanford's autonomous car Junior learning to powerslide into a parking spot. It shows several approaches to the maneuver.

Footage of Richard Box's art installation in which fluorescent tubes light up in the ground under high voltage power lines, showing the electric fields they produce.

A short 2000s Apple commercial for the PowerMac G4 that plays on the computer being classed as a weapon under US export restrictions, with tanks as imagery.

The Eames Office's 1977 film Powers of Ten starts at a picnic in Chicago and zooms out by a factor of ten every ten seconds to the edge of the universe. It then zooms inward to a proton in a carbon atom.

Practical Engineering's explanation of the February 2021 Texas winter storm and the resulting power grid outage. It lays out the facts about ERCOT, the grid's isolation, and how generation across fuel types failed in the cold.

A short SIGBOVIK 2017 presentation by Tom Wildenhain showing that PowerPoint animations are Turing complete, with a working Turing machine built in slides. The talk is delivered deadpan as a serious research result.

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 feature-length film by the Makani team chronicling their thirteen-year effort to build energy kites that harvest wind power, with footage from test sites in Hawaii, California and Norway. It shows the engineering, the team and the eventual shutdown.

Shriram Krishnamurthi's PWLConf 2019 talk on the formal notion of expressive power of programming languages, based on Felleisen's paper. It explains how to tell when a feature adds power by whether emulating it requires global rewriting.

Tom Wildenhain's guest lecture for CMU's Esoteric Programming Languages course shows that PowerPoint transitions and slides are Turing complete without macros, building up to a mind-bending fractal ending.

A clip from the BBC series Britain from Above showing UK peak power demand. It shows a grid engineer preparing for the surge as millions put the kettle on when a popular show ends.

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.

The Thought Emporium builds a homemade multi-electrode array, grows human neurons on it and attempts to take readings. It is the first part of a series aimed at connecting living neurons to a computer.

A former fusion scientist argues why fusion power by 2040 is unrealistic, covering the physics challenges, neutron issues and optimistic company claims, with a brief note of good news.

Boston Dynamics shows its Atlas humanoid robots running a parkour course with jumps, balance beams and vaults, demonstrating whole-body athletic control.

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 recording of Charlie Munger's 1995 Harvard speech on the psychology of human misjudgment. He walks through a list of cognitive biases such as incentives, social proof, and overoptimism.

Gamers Nexus benchmarks the Ryzen 9 7950X in its BIOS Eco Mode presets (65W, 105W and stock 170W). It measures the performance cost against the power and heat savings.

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, presents Duolingo at TEDxCMU 2011. The idea is to have millions of people translate the web for free while learning a language, an example of human computation.

BobbyBroccoli's first of two long documentaries about Hwang Woo-suk, the South Korean scientist who faked human cloning results. It tells the story of the scandal that shook a country.

Big Clive takes apart an IKEA Koppla USB power supply to assess its safety, looking at isolation and transformer construction.