liquid sand

Mark Rober builds a hot tub filled with sand fluidized by air blown from below, so that the sand behaves like a liquid. He explains how fluidized beds work and shows people swimming in them.

Brandon Sanderson's keynote on AI-generated art, arguing that the artistic process and the journey matter more than the finished product. He explains why he rebels against generative AI in creative work.

A five-minute animated explainer of liquid democracy, in which voters can delegate their vote to trusted people. It starts from the origins of democracy and contrasts direct and representative models.

A short clip of Bernie Sanders in conversation with Ezra Klein of Vox, where he rejects open borders as a proposal that serves the Koch brothers. It is an excerpt from a longer interview on global poverty.

Sandi Metz takes an ugly section of conditional code and refactors it into a few simple objects, bridging object-oriented theory and practice. The talk includes her take on the Gilded Rose refactoring kata and the idea that duplication is cheaper than the wrong abstraction.

Sandi Metz's RailsConf 2013 talk offers practical guidelines for deciding what to test and how, so tests stay cheap and stable. She argues for testing the public interface rather than implementation and using mocks appropriately.

MIT's Donald Sadoway presents the liquid metal battery as a design for grid-scale stationary electricity storage, at an Imperial College London event in 2018. He covers the grid benefits of massive-scale storage.

Sandy Munro interviews Elon Musk at Boca Chica about Tesla production, mega-castings, seats, structural battery packs and the difficulty of mass production.

Lex Fridman interviews Jeff Hawkins, founder of Numenta and author of On Intelligence, about the Thousand Brains Theory and reverse-engineering the neocortex. They also cover Hierarchical Temporal Memory and brain-inspired AI architectures.

Tech Ingredients explains the principles of magnetohydrodynamics and builds several demonstrations, including propelling liquid metal and electrolytes with magnets and a railgun-style setup.

Sandy Munro and Cory discuss how Tesla Model 3 and Model Y bodies in white have evolved over five years, including giga castings and lean design.

Drummer Larnell Lewis hears Metallica's Enter Sandman for the first time on Drumeo and learns to play it by ear, using his musical vocabulary.

A man spends six months and $1500 making a chicken sandwich entirely from scratch: growing vegetables, making salt from seawater, milking a cow for cheese, grinding wheat, collecting honey and killing a chicken.

Engineer Sandy Munro joins an Autoline panel for a 100-minute deep dive on Tesla's design and manufacturing, including the Model 3 and its motors.

A Google I/O 2019 talk explaining the architecture of Linux on Chromebooks (Crostini), a sandboxed Linux development environment built on containers inside a VM, with demos and design rationale.

Robert Watson presents the Capsicum paper at USENIX Security 2010, describing practical capability-based sandboxing for UNIX. The paper won Best Student Paper.

Part one of Sandia National Labs' first-person documentary on the use control, detonation safety and survivability of US nuclear weapons. It covers nuclear sharing in NATO and how control of use was separated from possession, leading to the always/never problem.

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.

In this 2019 GDC session, Petri Purho of Nolla Games explains the technical side of Noita's physics engine, including scaling a falling-sand simulation to large continuous worlds and adding destructible rigid bodies. It also shows how the emergent physics drives the gameplay.

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.

Sandy Pentland of MIT presents his book on social physics, which uses big-data studies of how people interact to explain how ideas spread. He describes findings on collective intelligence and social influence.

MrBtongue argues that modern theme-park MMOs lost what made earlier sandbox online games compelling, and that MMOs could be saved by returning to sandbox design.

David Sanders gives the first part of a two-part introduction to the Julia programming language at SciPy 2014. It walks through the language's basics and its appeal for scientific computing.

Karen Sandler's keynote at Linux.conf.au 2012 on the software running inside medical devices such as her own pacemaker-defibrillator. She discusses the difficulty of learning what code runs in life-sustaining devices and why open source matters there.

Ned Batchelder's PyCon 2012 talk gives a quick overview of what Unicode is, then focuses on what a Python programmer needs to handle text correctly. It presents the 'Unicode sandwich' strategy: decode bytes at input, work with Unicode internally, encode at output.

Practical Engineering explains Mechanically Stabilized Earth, where layers of reinforcement make soil strong enough to hold heavy loads, shown with a sand structure supporting a car. It notes that MSE walls are everywhere in infrastructure.

A short Boston Dynamics clip of the Sand Flea, an 11-pound RC-car-style robot that can jump about 30 feet into the air. An onboard stabilization system keeps it oriented in flight and for landings.

Disney Research presents Touche, a swept frequency capacitive sensing technique that recognizes complex hand and body configurations, and adds touch sensitivity to humans, liquids and everyday objects.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk making the case for the liquid fluoride thorium reactor as an abundant, safe source of electrical power. It covers the technical motivations and design of thorium molten-salt reactors.

Steven Johnson's TED talk argues that good ideas come from connected, slow-building hunches and liquid networks, from London coffee houses to Darwin to the modern web, rather than lone Eureka moments.

A short Insider Tech look at Ocado's grocery warehouse where thousands of robots on a grid pack orders, communicating over 4G to avoid collisions. It handles around 65,000 orders a week.

LockPickingLawyer shows what happens when liquid gallium is applied to an aluminum Abus padlock, which weakens and breaks the metal. It is a short demonstration of gallium's effect on aluminum.

The shareholder speech by Larry the Liquidator, played by Danny DeVito, from the film Other People's Money. He argues that a dying company should be liquidated rather than kept alive.

Karen Sandler, then Executive Director of the GNOME Foundation, talks at OSCON 2011 about the risks of proprietary, closed-source software in implanted medical devices like her own pacemaker-defibrillator.

Markus Kayser's Solar Sinter project video shows a machine in the desert using sunlight and sand to 3D print glass objects. It is a short demonstration of desert manufacturing from renewable energy and local material.

Christopher Domas presents at Black Hat 2017 how page fault analysis and processor fuzzing can exhaustively search the x86 instruction set. The talk uncovers undocumented instructions and hardware bugs and shows limits of disassemblers.

Jason Scott's DerbyCon 2012 talk on rescuing the Prince of Persia source code from old floppy disks, working with the game's author Jordan Mechner. It is a story of digital archaeology and recovering data from ancient media.

An Autoline After Hours episode where Sandy Munro discusses his complete teardown of the BMW i3, along with automotive journalists. It covers the car's carbon fiber construction and manufacturing technology.

Sandi Metz argues that hidden assumptions in code are missing concepts, and shows how to name and expose them so code is easier to understand and change. It covers null objects and messages in Ruby.

An Autoline After Hours episode with teardown expert Sandy Munro and a panel of auto journalists. It covers his Tesla Model 3 teardown, including the battery, drive modules, build quality and manufacturing automation.