learning

A short video accompanying the CVPR 2018 paper Learning to See in the Dark. It shows a neural network producing sharp images from very low-light raw sensor data, compared against denoising approaches.

OpenAI's short demo of agents playing hide-and-seek in a simulated environment. Through self-play, the agents develop six progressively more complex strategies and counter-strategies, including tool use.

A two-minute Insider Tech clip on DeepMind's simulated agents that learned to walk, run, jump and climb without guidance, with the goofy resulting gaits.

Toyota Research Institute presents an approach for teaching robots new dexterous behaviors from human demonstration. It explains why this capability matters and what advances made it possible.

A one-minute clip from a 2016 Toronto conference in which Geoff Hinton comments on deep learning and radiology. He suggests radiologists should stop being trained because machines would soon read scans better.

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

A short clip from Star Trek (2009) showing young Spock learning at a Vulcan school with an immersive, machine-driven teaching system.

The first of a short series by Welch Labs on building a complete neural network in Python. It introduces the data and the architecture of a simple network before later parts cover forward propagation, gradient descent, and backpropagation.

A two-minute clip of Richard Feynman on the difference between knowing the name of something and actually knowing it. He uses the example of knowing a bird's name in every language and still knowing nothing about the bird.

A short clip from a 1973 NOVA episode in which Richard Feynman recalls his father teaching him that knowing the name of a bird in many languages tells you nothing about the bird.

A short excerpt from a 1973 Yorkshire TV film in which Richard Feynman explains that knowing the name of something is not the same as knowing it.

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.

A bot built by Robin Baumgarten plays Infinite Mario using A* path-finding, shown as a red planned path that updates as new obstacles appear. It won the Mario AI competitions and uses only on-screen information.

A short demo of the Deep Visualization Toolbox, which shows the activations inside a convolutional neural network as it processes live camera input. Viewers see individual units responding to edges, faces and text.

A two-minute comedy sketch in which a foreigner speaking fluent Japanese is repeatedly not understood by Japanese people who refuse to process it.

Terry Moore's three-minute TED talk showing a better way to tie shoes, replacing the common granny knot with a square knot so laces stay tied.

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

A one-minute Sesame Street animation of a counting pinball game focused on the number 12, set to Pointer Sisters music.

Veritasium answers criticism that his videos make people look stupid, explaining that teaching must address learners' misconceptions and that holding common beliefs inconsistent with science is not stupidity.

A two-minute video of Ira Glass on the creative process, describing the gap between taste and skill when starting out and urging you to keep producing until your work matches your taste.

A two-minute promotional video introducing the team at Memrise, a language-learning company, as part of their recruiting page.

A two-minute animation of an Alan Watts talk arguing that life is like music: it is meant to be danced to in the moment, not rushed toward a final goal. It is a short, accessible take on living in the present.

A short excerpt from a 1994 interview of Steve Jobs in which he says everything around us was made up by people no smarter than you, and that you can change and shape the world.

Finnish YouTuber Saara improvises gibberish that mimics how various languages sound to people who do not speak them. The sentences are mostly made up, and the clip went viral.

A 1972 song by Adriano Celentano whose lyrics are nonsense syllables designed to sound like American English to non-English speakers. It is a rock and rap-flavored novelty track with a video.

A one-minute clip of Bryan Cranston at an Academy new-member reception, advising actors to approach auditions without desperation and focus on solving the problem rather than landing the job.

A three-minute clip of Jeff Bezos describing his Regret Minimization Framework: imagining yourself at 80 to decide whether to leave a Wall Street job to start Amazon.

A short satirical 'motivational' talk by the character Self-help Singh, a sham life coach who urges viewers to do nothing. It parodies self-help gurus and hustle culture.

A four-minute TED talk in which Derek Sivers argues that announcing your goals can make you less likely to achieve them. He cites psychology research going back to the 1920s.

A short clip of Stephen Fry defending swearing as a rich and essential part of the English language and rejecting the idea that it is unnecessary.

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 three-minute video from Derek Sivers, based on his book Anything You Want, about remembering that the people you deal with online are real people. It contrasts how we treat people face to face with how we treat them online.

Tom Scott argues that grammatical gender is a silly concept and that the singular 'they' is an established gender-neutral pronoun. The description carries later corrections and reflections he added in 2019.

Tom Scott explains phatic expressions such as hello, thank you and how are you, which carry social meaning rather than information, and why replies like no problem can seem rude to some people.

A short Ze Frank piece from his 2006 show about "brain crack", the rush of exciting new ideas that feel great but tend to fall apart once you start executing them.

A BBC Horizon clip demonstrating the McGurk effect, where the same audio sounds like different syllables depending on the mouth movements you see. It shows that people integrate visual speech information into what they hear.

A short English-subtitled clip of Shuzo Matsuoka, a retired Japanese tennis player turned motivational speaker, delivering a never-give-up pep talk. It is a well-known Japanese internet meme.

Peter Pringle sings the opening of the Epic of Gilgamesh in Sumerian, accompanied by a reconstructed ancient instrument. The description gives background on Sumer, cuneiform and how little is known about the language's pronunciation.

A short clip from the Season 2 finale of BoJack Horseman in which a character says that doing the hard thing every day gets easier. It is set to a Courtney Barnett song.

Weird Al Yankovic's 2014 parody of 'Blurred Lines' that scolds common grammar and usage errors, with a kinetic typography video. It is a catchy music video about language mistakes.