lectures

Tom Scott-style absurdist research by tom7 for SIGBOVIK 2021, using machine learning to discover letterforms that are 'uppercaser' than uppercase A and lowercaser than lowercase. It is a comedic, technically inventive deep dive with fonts and a paper.

Part one of Sergey Kuryokhin's 1991 live Soviet TV hoax in which he claimed that Lenin was a mushroom. With subtitles, it shows how a surreal absurd theory can be made to seem proven on live television.

A short romantic comedy by Ted Nelson about the 'microcircuitry of love', with Doug Engelbart as his father and Stewart Brand as the villainous CEO.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment arguing that US cannabis prohibition grew out of racially and politically motivated agendas under Nixon and earlier, rather than scientific evidence.

Tim Minchin performs his comedic beat poem 'Storm', a roughly nine-minute rant against homeopathy, alternative medicine and woolly thinking. It is delivered as a fast, rhyming monologue built around an encounter at a dinner party.

Bill Wurtz's fast, comedic and musical run through the whole history of Japan in nine minutes.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment arguing that political motives, including Nixon's, lay behind making marijuana illegal. It mixes comedy with history.

An episode of REACT in which children try to figure out 1970s-1980s computers, including an Apple II and floppy disks. It was made to promote the AMC show Halt and Catch Fire.

A viral amateur video in which a woman struggles to explain what miles per hour means. It is a comedic clip of someone failing to reason about speed.

Penn and Teller help Rob Pike and Dennis Ritchie of Bell Labs play a prank on Nobel-winning physicist Arno Penzias. The clip shows the gag and its setup.

A one-minute 1986 promo of Microsoft Windows 1.0 presented by Steve Ballmer, with a hyperbolic price pitch ending in the tag line about Nebraska.