machine design

Joshua Bloch's Google Tech Talk on how to design good APIs and why it matters, with concrete principles and examples. It treats every programmer as an occasional API designer.

The first lecture of Andrew Ng's Stanford CS229 Machine Learning course, giving an overview of the course. It introduces supervised and unsupervised learning, learning theory and reinforcement learning.

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.

Dan Bornstein's Google I/O 2008 talk on the internals of Dalvik, the virtual machine that runs Android code. It covers the motivation for its design, the dex format and its register-based interpreter, plus tips for writing code that suits the platform.

Cliff Click of Azul Systems gives a Google Tech Talk on running Java business applications on a machine with about a thousand cores. He covers hardware and software codesign, including garbage collection hardware and the JIT.

Matthias Wandel shows his wooden machine that adds binary numbers using marbles. It demonstrates computation with purely mechanical logic.

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.

James Howard Kunstler's TED talk argues that American public spaces and architecture have become unworthy of care, damaging civic life. He presents suburban sprawl and car-first design as failures of the common good.

A 1993 interview in which Steve Jobs talks about designer Paul Rand, who created the NeXT logo. He recounts Rand's insistence on presenting a single design and his uncompromising professionalism.

Jensen Harris of the Office 2007 design team tells the behind-the-scenes story of the Ribbon at MIX08. He covers early prototypes, mistakes, and the UX principles used to design and validate it.

Arthur Ganson's kinetic sculpture chains twelve 1:50 worm gear reductions so the final gear, embedded in concrete, would take over two trillion years to turn once.

A Google Tech Talk arguing that the best interface requires the fewest clicks and choices, with Google search, Facebook, the iPod and Firefox as examples. It shows how minimizing interaction makes interfaces easier to learn.

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.

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.

'Pipe Dream' is the best-known piece from the first Animusic DVD, a computer-animated music video in which fantastical machines play music. The animation is driven by MIDI data.

A short promotional video of a 5-axis CNC machine milling an elaborate helmet, made by DAISHIN SEIKI with a DMG machine and hyperMILL CAM software. It shows what 5-axis machining can produce.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk introducing Polyworld, an artificial life simulator used to evolve artificial intelligence by designing worlds rather than minds. It presents results from ongoing attempts to evolve intelligent behavior.

A spoof industrial promo for the Rockwell Retro Encabulator, a deadpan stream of technobabble about an imaginary machine. It is a classic engineering in-joke.

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.

A short comedy video of the Turbo Encabulator, a piece of technobabble nonsense describing an imaginary machine in deadpan engineering language.

The first lecture of Gilbert Strang's MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra course, covering the geometry of linear equations. It opens a full 35-lecture university course.

Ian Piumarta's 2007 Stanford EE380 lecture on building a dynamic programming environment from the ground up, from the Viewpoints Research Institute's work. It covers the design of a language and system with a recursive design, parsing through code generation, and the COLA architecture.

A concept video from Nokia Research Center and Cambridge Nanoscience Center showing Morph, a flexible, self-cleaning, shape-changing phone imagined through nanotechnology.

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.

A short concept video of Microsoft's unreleased Courier, a dual-screen tablet designed as a digital notebook with clippings and annotation. It was first leaked by Gizmodo in 2009.

Linus Torvalds tells the story of Linux in a 2001 talk at the Computer History Museum, from writing code as a graduate student in Helsinki in the early 1990s to becoming an icon of open source. It covers the project's origins, its growth, and his views on licensing and kernel design.

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.

Rob Pike's October 2009 Google Tech Talk introducing Go, a new experimental systems language designed for fast builds, concurrency and garbage collection. It covers the goals, syntax and type system.

A short, absurd happy-hardcore song and animation celebrating the Bagger 288, the enormous bucket-wheel excavator, in dramatic over-the-top terms.

A one-minute clip filmed from the Arc de Triomphe showing chaotic multi-lane traffic in the surrounding roundabout, including a bus trying to cross about six lanes.

A short animation illustrating the proposed nanofactory concept, where nanomachines assemble atomically precise parts into larger products. It depicts how such a system might build macroscopic goods from raw materials and energy.

A 1937 GM-produced film explaining how the automobile differential lets wheels turn at different speeds around a corner. It uses clear animations and cutaway demonstrations to build the idea from first principles.

A 1930s Chevrolet training film explaining the principles and development of the differential gear. It builds the idea step by step from first principles to the finished mechanism.

The first installment of a hobbyist's video diary documenting his build of a giant walking spider-like vehicle. The footage is casual and self-shot, following the early stages of the project.

A short clip of Richard Feynman explaining how a train stays on its tracks, through the conical shape of wheels and how it handles curves without differentials.

A Consumer Reports and IIHS crash test pitting a 2009 Chevy Malibu against a 1959 Bel Air. It shows how much better modern cars protect occupants.

An IIHS crash test pitting a 1959 Chevrolet Bel Air against a 2009 Malibu in a frontal offset collision for the institute's 50th anniversary. The old car's occupant space collapses while the modern car's protects its driver.

A brief demonstration of a railroad tank car imploding after a vacuum is pulled with its safety valves disabled.

Douglas Crockford's 2009 Google tech talk on the good and bad parts of JavaScript, based on his book. He argues for using a reliable subset of the language and avoiding its flawed features.

Ward Cunningham explains the history and intent of the debt metaphor, which he coined while refactoring the WyCash product. He says debt means code reflecting an incomplete understanding of the problem, not sloppy programming.