instrument failure

A two-minute clip from a 1994 interview with Steve Jobs by the Santa Clara Valley Historical Association. Jobs talks about failure and about how most people never ask for help, recalling that he simply called people to ask.

A Nike commercial in which Michael Jordan lists the shots he missed and games he lost, saying that repeated failure is the reason he succeeds.

Wintergatan's video of the Marble Machine, a hand-built music instrument that plays a song using about 2000 marbles on a mechanical clockwork-style mechanism.

An American Airlines training video by Captain Warren VanderBurgh on control malfunctions and flight instrument anomalies. It discusses real incidents such as runaway trim and instrument failures and how crews should respond.

Robert Miles explains instrumental convergence: why an AGI with almost any goal would tend to pursue sub-goals like self-preservation and resource acquisition. It builds on Omohundro's basic AI drives and his orthogonality thesis video.

Tom Scott performs a fictional story at GeekyConf about the day Google accidentally stops checking passwords, letting anyone into any account. It works as a parable about how a single point of failure in login can unravel everything built on it.

Footage of the failed Mercury-Redstone 1 launch, where the engine cut off almost immediately after liftoff. The escape tower and parachutes then deployed because the rocket thought the flight was over.

Rob Scallon explores a five-story pipe organ, the largest in the Midwest, with organist John Sherer. The half-hour tour covers most of the instrument and how it works.

Louis Rossmann, a Macbook repair shop owner, goes through a long list of Apple hardware engineering failures, from GPU defects to keyboards and repair practices.

Clay Shirky argues at Web 2.0 Expo NY that the problem online is not information overload but filter failure. He says the real challenge is building better ways to filter and organize what we see.

Practical Engineering summarizes the 2017 Oroville Dam spillway failure, explaining the engineering details behind the incident. It also discusses how operators and regulators failed to keep downstream residents safe.

Travis Kalanick's talk at FailCon 2011 about his earlier failed startups, given as a case study before Uber's rise. It describes lessons from those ventures.

Cockpit footage of a Swiss Airbus A340 crew dealing with rising oil temperature in one engine on a Zurich to Shanghai flight, ending with a safety landing. It shows the pilots' procedures through the emergency.

SpaceX's own compilation of failed orbital booster landing attempts, set to sound, showing the crashes before landings succeeded.

A complete remastered soundtrack for the Transport Tycoon 2014 mobile game, re-recorded with real instruments rather than the original MIDI. The music was composed by John Broomhall for the classic Transport Tycoon.

A short TED-Ed animated lesson by Anita Collins on what happens in the brain when people play a musical instrument. It argues that playing engages many brain areas at once, like a full-body workout, with long-term benefits.

A Tom Scott guest video by Grady Hillhouse of Practical Engineering on the 1981 Hyatt Regency walkway collapse. A seemingly minor change to the support design led to catastrophic failure, which is why the case is taught as a lesson to check and double-check everything.

Short British Pathe newsreel footage of the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge as it twisted and swayed in the wind. The only casualty was a dog left in a stalled car.

A one-minute clip of an Atlas Agena rocket losing pressure on the pad and collapsing. The Atlas relied on tank pressurization for structural integrity, so a simple failure tore it apart.

Richard Cook's short Velocity 2013 talk on resilience in complex adaptive systems, arguing systems operate near the edge of failure and that the surprise is how rarely they fail. He presents a model of how pressures push systems toward failure boundaries.

Peter Thiel is the first guest on Eric Weinstein's The Portal, in a nearly three-hour conversation about technological stagnation, institutional failure and the link between growth and violence. They discuss universities, the economy and the search for a more ambitious future.

Media Molecule's Alex Evans recounts the journey, including the failures, of finding the Dreams engine, based on his Siggraph 2015 talk. It covers the signed-distance-field and splat-based rendering approach and the artistic goals behind it.

A short music video by the Japanese group Electronicos Fantasticos, led by Ei Wada, playing festival-style music on repurposed old electronics. Instruments include CRT TVs, a barcode reader, an electric fan harp and TV taiko drums.

Journalist Matthew Cole's Black Hat 2013 talk on the CIA's operational security failures in the 2003 Milan kidnapping. Phone and location metadata exposed the team and led to arrest warrants.

A Foresight Institute workshop video with two talks: Shawn Douglas on nanoscale instruments for visualizing small proteins, and Bret Victor on Dynamicland. Victor's part shows biomolecular design built in his Realtalk system with physical objects.

Matthew Cole's Black Hat 2013 talk on operational security failures by CIA operatives. It covers the Abu Omar case and how sloppy tradecraft with cell phones exposed officers through call records and metadata.

A long video essay by Kraut arguing that Trump's biggest failure was his handling of China. It spends much of its length on Chinese history, culture, the trade war, and the rise of a communist superpower.

An AWS re:Invent 2018 talk on how AWS limits the blast radius of failures. It covers design techniques such as cell-based architecture and shuffle sharding.

A New Yorker short documentary about the 2014 sinking of the Sewol ferry in South Korea, based on the film In the Absence. It examines the failures in the rescue and the political aftermath.

Chamath Palihapitiya's Stanford GSB View From The Top talk on money as an instrument of change. HN mostly knows it for his remarks on social media's dopamine-driven feedback loops and regrets about Facebook.

Linus Tech Tips documents a major RAID failure on its Whonnock server and the attempt to recover the lost data with a data recovery firm.

Ian Miers' Devcon4 talk on failures in on-chain privacy for Bitcoin and Ethereum. It covers attacks on transparent and decoy-based schemes, including how Monero-style privacy can be eroded over repeated transactions.

A two-minute classroom scene from the film Starship Troopers in which a teacher lectures on why only veterans earn the right to vote, titled Failure of Democracy.

Perun's hour-long analysis of how institutional lying, cover-ups and corruption ("vranyo") undermined the Russian military in Ukraine. It examines how false reporting up the chain degrades readiness and decision-making.

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 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.

Jenny Nicholson's roughly four-hour review of her two-night stay on Disney's Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser immersive hotel. She goes through the experience, its story and production, and why it failed.

Nickolas Means recounts the 1979 Three Mile Island accident minute by minute, from the control rod insertion to the operator's decision to switch off emergency cooling. He argues that finding systemic causes is more useful than blaming individuals.

Dr. Richard Cook, a physician and patient safety researcher, presents his ideas on how complex systems fail, at Velocity 2012. He argues for designing for resiliency rather than trying to exhaustively handle every failure mode.

The first episode of James Burke's Connections series, 'The Trigger Effect', explores how modern society depends on interlinked technological systems and how quickly it breaks down when they fail, starting with a power blackout.