logic

Ben Eater shows how to build logic gates out of transistors, including NOR gates. It is part of his clear hardware-from-scratch teaching style.

A 1985 interview by G. Edward Griffin with former KGB operative Yuri Bezmenov. He describes long-running Soviet efforts at ideological subversion and manipulation of US public opinion.

A 1984 interview with former KGB agent Yuri Bezmenov on ideological subversion and psychological warfare, reposted in 2020 with a modern political framing.

Numberphile's James Grime explains Cantor's result that some infinities are bigger than others, including why the reals outnumber the integers. It is a short, accessible introduction to countable and uncountable infinity.

A short clip of former KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov in 1984 describing Soviet ideological subversion of Western societies. It is a political commentary excerpt from his longer lecture.

Veritasium shows how Hilbert's infinite hotel can still run out of room, using infinite buses of guests. It explains the surprising answer in a short animated segment.

Curious Droid asks what traces human civilization would leave in the geological record 65 million years from now. It considers how thin the fossil record of humanity might be.

Tom Murphy (suckerpinch) presents a deliberately trollish computer architecture built on IEEE-754 floating point, using NaN and infinity to define logic gates. He builds working hardware around the idea.

Kyle Hill explains what nuclear waste actually is and how it is stored, arguing that the problem was effectively solved decades ago. It covers solid shielded waste and deep geological storage.

Tom Scott visits Onkalo in Finland, the planned deep geologic repository for high-level nuclear waste intended to be sealed for 100,000 years.

A clip of a 1984 interview with KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov describing Soviet ideological subversion and demoralization of a target society, uploaded with a politically charged framing.

Kurzgesagt asks whether advanced civilizations could have existed on Earth in the deep past and left little evidence. It looks at time as a dimension for searching for alien civilizations and the limits of the geological record.

A short clip from an ACM and Computer History Museum interview in which Leslie Lamport discusses writing his paper on time, clocks and the ordering of events. He explains its link to special relativity.

Louis Rossmann explains why many 16-inch MacBook Pros fail and are difficult to repair, focusing on power design on the logic board. He argues the design leads to failures that are hard to fix.

Louis Rossmann, an independent repair shop owner, explains a recurring MacBook logic board design problem that leads to failures such as a black screen. The video is part of his right-to-repair advocacy.

CGP Grey narrates an animated adaptation of Nick Bostrom's Fable of the Dragon-Tyrant. The story uses a dragon that demands a daily toll of lives as a metaphor for aging and society's acceptance of death.

James Mickens of Harvard gives a funny lecture at HBS's Future Assembly arguing that blockchains are a very bad idea. He covers their trust, legal and practical shortcomings for real-world problems.

Technology Connections explains how LED traffic lights, which do not melt snow, drew complaints and were blamed for accidents. He uses it to illustrate the 'but sometimes' fallacy against new technology.

CGP Grey explains how ideas spread like germs, and why content that triggers outrage spreads fastest, using a study on what makes online content viral. He argues that opposing outrage-driven memes feed each other.

Kurzgesagt makes a selfish case for improving the world, arguing that helping people far away raises prosperity and innovation for everyone, including yourself. The animated video frames this as egoistic altruism and positive-sum cooperation.

Jon Ronson's TED talk on public shaming on Twitter, centered on Justine Sacco and others whose lives were upended by online mobs. He argues we have become a baying crowd and should rethink how we treat each other online.

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, explains how small contributions from many people online can digitize books. He then introduces Duolingo as a way to translate the web while people learn languages.

CGP Grey argues that aging and death are a problem worth defeating, using a short animated essay. It is part of a pair with a follow-up from Kurzgesagt.

Kurzgesagt explains stellar engines such as the Shkadov thruster and Caplan thruster, which could move the Sun and solar system across the galaxy over millions of years to avoid hazards and reach new regions.

Skateboarding pioneer Rodney Mullen talks about how the open skate community and its environments drive the invention of new tricks out of pure passion. He draws parallels to collaboration and open source.

Bret Victor's talk proposing a new kind of maker space built for seeing and understanding a project's behavior: inside it, across time and across possibilities. It argues for scientific understanding over recipes and rules of thumb.

Louis C.K. on Conan explains why he won't give his kids cell phones. He argues that phones keep people from sitting with sadness and being alone with their thoughts, and that kids lose empathy when they cannot see another person's reaction.

A clip of Louis CK on Conan riffing that everything is amazing and nobody is happy, about people complaining over airplane wifi and taking modern technology for granted.

A short, music-driven video built from Neil deGrasse Tyson's remarks on why advancing the space frontier matters, contrasting NASA's small budget with war spending and stressing inspiration.

A Kurzgesagt video arguing that social media's problem is information flooding and tribal polarization. It suggests a return to smaller online communities and more in-person interaction.

CGP Grey argues that a classroom works well only for the one student pitched at the average level, and sketches a future of personalized instruction. It introduces the idea of a Digital Aristotle, a tutor for every learner.

A short Kurzgesagt animation explaining the Great Filter, the idea that finding alien life might be bad news because it implies something usually destroys civilizations. It connects the concept to the Fermi paradox.

A video essay explaining hauntology, Mark Fisher's idea of lost futures, and 80s nostalgia. It uses the Fallout games and other media as examples of a retro-futurism that mourns futures that never arrived.

Michael Wesch's five-minute video about Web 2.0, showing how the read/write web, XML and user-generated content change how people create and share information.

Eli Pariser's TED talk argues that personalized web services trap users in filter bubbles, limiting exposure to challenging information. He says this is bad for individuals and for democracy.

Kurzgesagt examines how AI-generated content is flooding the internet, from video and music to news and books. It looks at how this makes verifying what is real harder.

Epic 2014 is a short science-fiction film that imagines the media landscape merging into a personalized, computer-generated news service. It is a fictional history of 'Googlezon' and the decline of traditional newspapers.

An excerpt from an RSA event in which physicist David Deutsch makes the case for optimism as a driver of progress in the 21st century. It is a short highlight of a longer discussion.

Scott Galloway's TED talk uses data to argue that young Americans are financially worse off than earlier generations, calling it a great intergenerational theft. He covers root causes and what could change it.

Bill Gates's 2015 TED talk, given after the 2014 Ebola outbreak, argues the world is unprepared for the next fast-spreading epidemic. He calls for scenario planning, vaccine research, and trained health workers, in the way countries prepare for war.