introduction

An edited excerpt of Steve Jobs introducing Mac OS X at Macworld San Francisco in 2000. It covers the Aqua interface, Quartz graphics built on PDF, and the Classic, Carbon and Cocoa application environments.

First lecture of MIT 6.00, an introductory computer science course taught in Python by Eric Grimson and John Guttag. It covers the goals of the course, what computation is, and data types, operators and variables.

Steve Jobs introduces the first iPod at a small Apple event in 2001. He positions it as a music player and ties it to the Apple brand.

A 2006 Google TechTalk in which SQLite's author Richard Hipp introduces the embeddable, zero-configuration C database library. He covers its history, strengths and weaknesses, and where it beats client/server databases.

Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky lectures on depression as a real biological disease. He covers its biological and psychological causes, how it differs from ordinary sadness, and ideas such as learned helplessness. He ties these together into one account.

Jon Kabat-Zinn leads an hour-long Google tech talk on mindfulness, introducing the basic ideas and including a guided meditation. It is aimed at newcomers.

Steve Blank's Computer History Museum lecture argues that Silicon Valley's roots lie in WWII radar and electronic warfare work, Stanford's Fred Terman and Cold War military funding rather than the semiconductor alone.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk in which Slava Pestov introduces Factor, a concatenative language influenced by Forth, Lisp and Smalltalk. It covers the interactive environment, metaprogramming, and the language's modern high-level features and libraries.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk by the creator of Org-mode, introducing the Emacs subsystem for plain-text note-taking and project planning. It covers outlines, TODO states, tags, dates and priorities, and later shows using Org-mode as a spreadsheet.

Kirk Sorensen's Google Tech Talk on liquid-fluoride thorium reactors, a design that could burn nuclear waste and use thorium as fuel. It draws on Oak Ridge National Laboratory work from the 1950s and 60s.

A short edited excerpt of Terence McKenna arguing that culture acts as an operating system for the mind, set to imagery and music. It touches on psychedelics and how they change thinking.

A segment from Carl Sagan's original Cosmos explaining the fourth spatial dimension through analogy with a two-dimensional world and shadow projection.

The first part of a four-part Channel 4 (UK) documentary series presented by Howard Goodall, this episode covers melody and why tunes affect us so deeply. It explains how melody works in Western music with historical background and music theory.

James Howard Kunstler's TED talk argues that American public spaces and architecture have become unworthy of care, damaging civic life. He presents suburban sprawl and car-first design as failures of the common good.

A three-minute clip from BBC's Planet Earth narrated by David Attenborough about Cordyceps, the fungus that infects insects and takes over their behavior. It shows an infected ant and its demise.

Slavoj Zizek discusses his book Violence in an Authors@Google talk in New York. He covers ideology, including his idea of the unknown knowns.

David Spiegelhalter, Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk, uses statistics to weigh everyday risks such as bacon sandwiches and cycling. The six-minute piece introduces micromorts as a way to compare the risk of dying.

Physicist David Deutsch's TED talk on why science took off, arguing that good explanations are those that are hard to vary. It contrasts scientific explanation with myth.

Tom Lehrer performs his satirical song about rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, with an introduction. It is a two-minute musical clip.

A restored recording of Steve Jobs unveiling the original Macintosh in 1984, including the moment it is taken out of its bag and speaks. The upload comes from the team that rediscovered and restored the lost footage.

Tom Lehrer performs his satirical song about rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, with an introduction, in a short clip posted for the Apollo 11 anniversary. It lampoons von Braun's moral flexibility.

Lecture 1B of MIT's 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1986) with Gerald Sussman, covering procedures, processes and the substitution model. It includes the line about the power of naming things.

Extracts from the documentary The Art of Piano showing Glenn Gould playing Bach's Partita No. 2.

Tom Lehrer performs his satirical song Who's Next, about the spread of nuclear weapons, with a spoken introduction. It is a short musical comedy piece from the Cold War era.

Noam Chomsky gives a Talks at Google lecture covering his work on politics and language. It touches on his linguistic theory, including universal grammar, alongside his political criticism.