led longevity

Apple's 1987 Knowledge Navigator concept video imagines a conversational voice assistant, multi-touch tablet and video calling used by a professor. It was made years before the graphical web existed.

A 2006 promotional video for sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, a music software project that analyzes and reassembles sampled audio and video in real time, tied to themes of sampling and copyright.

David Deutsch's TED talk arguing that humanity's survival depends on solving problems through knowledge growth. He frames people as improbable "chemical scum" capable of understanding distant quasars.

A subtitled edit of the 1987 Max Headroom broadcast signal intrusion, in which hijackers interrupted Chicago stations WGN and WTTW.

A four-minute extract from the documentary The Fog of War in which Robert McNamara discusses the Gulf of Tonkin incident. He acknowledges that the second reported attack did not happen.

Robert Martin's RailsConf 2009 talk looks at why Smalltalk lost out despite its technical strengths. He draws lessons about language communities and arrogance that he argues could hurt Ruby too.

David Rock gives a Google Tech Talk based on his book Your Brain at Work, using neuroscience to explain why focus and productivity are hard at the office. He gives strategies for managing mental energy and distraction.

A one-minute clip of the New Caledonian crow Betty bending a straight wire into a hook to retrieve food from a tube. It comes from a 2002 Science study on tool-making in crows.

Steve Jobs's WWDC 2005 keynote segment announcing Apple's move from PowerPC to Intel processors, and revealing that Mac OS X had been secretly built for Intel all along.

Eben Moglen of the Software Freedom Conservancy speaks at the 2009 Law of the Commons Conference about free and open software as a model for a new intellectual commons. The talk covers the legal and social case for sharing knowledge.

Peter Norvig's 2007 Google talk on theorizing from data, covering what huge datasets can do for language understanding, translation, information extraction and inference. It argues that more data often beats cleverer models.

Alex Martelli's Google Developers Day talk on classic design patterns (creational, structural and behavioral) and how they appear in Python. He stresses that patterns must be studied in the context of the implementing language.

A very short clip of Bill Gates hitting a Blue Screen of Death while demonstrating plug and play on Windows 98 on stage.

The first episode of Michael Sandel's Harvard course on moral reasoning, opening with the trolley problem and the choice between killing one to save five. Sandel draws out student arguments and introduces utilitarian and other approaches to justice.

Ed Catmull of Pixar speaks at Stanford's 2007 Entrepreneurship Conference on running a creative company. He argues for surfacing small problems early and building good teams, with stories like the Toy Story 2 crunch.

A short clip from a Richard Feynman interview in which he explains fire, describing how burning wood releases sunlight stored by the tree, which built itself mostly from air. It showcases his curiosity and plain-spoken explanations.

Doug Zongker's deadpan conference presentation of his famously chicken-filled paper, given at the 2007 AAAS humor session. It satirizes academic talks while showing the pitfalls of bad presentation.

Jim Pavloff rebuilds the Prodigy track Smack My Bitch Up in Ableton, identifying the samples used and recreating the track by hand.

A 2006 parody made by a Microsoft team that shows how the company would redesign iPod packaging, with a box piled with feature claims, logos and clutter in contrast to Apple's clean design.

Johnny Lee demonstrates head tracking with a Wii remote and a head-mounted pair of IR LEDs, so a screen acts like a window into a 3D scene as your head moves.

Kirk McKusick gives a narrative history of BSD from its start at UC Berkeley in the late 1970s through the 1980s releases and the lawsuit that led to 4.4BSD-Lite in 1992. It is full of anecdotes from a key developer.

A two-minute demonstration of the loudness war, showing how heavy dynamic range compression in CD mastering makes music louder while degrading sound quality. It uses audio examples so you can hear the distortion.

Short footage of the 1983 Soyuz T-10-1 pad fire, in which the launch escape tower pulled the crew away seconds before the rocket exploded.

The main theme from Eduard Artemyev's score to the 1979 Soviet film Siberiade, an electronic piece that features the ANS synthesizer.

Robotic Liberation by PWP is a music video demo performed entirely by an unexpanded Commodore VIC-20 and a 1541 disk drive, using only a few kilobytes of RAM and a 16 KB disk. It uses demoscene effects to tell a story.

The full webcast of SpaceX's Falcon 1 Flight 4, the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit, on 28 September 2008. It includes the crew's cheering and Elon Musk's statement afterward.

The official video for Boards of Canada's Dayvan Cowboy, built from reassembled documentary footage. It forms a dreamlike journey from space to the sea and shore, including Kittinger's 1960 high-altitude jump and surfing footage.

Footage of Stefani Germanotta, later Lady Gaga, performing 'Captivated' and 'Electric Kiss' at NYU's Ultraviolet Live talent show in 2005-era college days. It shows her singing and playing before she became famous.

A short clip of a Renault F1 engine playing God Save the Queen by precisely controlling its RPM, recorded at Goodwood. It demonstrates how finely the drivetrain can be controlled.

Cuong Do of YouTube describes how a handful of engineers scaled the site, covering hardware, software and database scalability challenges during its rapid growth. The talk was given at the 2007 Seattle Conference on Scalability.

Researcher Kamal Meattle describes how an arrangement of three common houseplants placed in specific spots can measurably clean the air in a home or office. It is a short TED talk based on his work in a plant-filled building.

A short Princeton CITP video describing cold boot attacks, where encryption keys remain in DRAM after power loss and can be recovered. It covers the attack against disk encryption such as BitLocker, FileVault and TrueCrypt.

A US Chemical Safety Board video explaining how sugar dust explosions at the Imperial Sugar plant in Georgia killed fourteen workers in 2008.

A clip of the Yes Men posing as a Dow Chemical spokesman on the BBC and announcing compensation for victims of the Bhopal disaster, a hoax on live television.

Joel Spolsky's 2009 Google Tech Talk on why StackOverflow was built, how it addresses the mess of searching for programming help, and the community design behind it. He also takes jabs at paywalled answer sites.

A short clip, titled Orwell Comes to America, on reasoning and perception. One HN user links it repeatedly as the science showing human minds are bad at reasoning and do not see reality as it is.

Lin-Manuel Miranda performs an early version of the Hamilton idea, then called "The Hamilton Mixtape", at the White House poetry and spoken word evening in May 2009. He is accompanied by Alex Lacamoire and the audience laughs along at the premise of a hip-hop song about Alexander Hamilton.

Footage of an Airbus A380 engine blade-off test, in which a fan blade is deliberately released at full thrust to show the engine contains the failure.

An excerpt from Hal Abelson's opening SICP lecture introducing computer science and contrasting declarative and imperative knowledge. He argues that computer science is not really a science and is more like magic or engineering of ideas.

Short clip of Honda's ASIMO humanoid robot falling down stairs during a live demonstration.