maze solving

A half-hour television special on the 2007 fiery collapse of a connector in the Bay Area's MacArthur Maze and its rebuilding in 26 days. It was produced for the Professional Engineers in California Government.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2019 talk on the mental strategies he uses when programming in Python, such as chunking, solving a simpler related problem, and repeating tasks manually until patterns emerge. This version is re-synced with the slides.

3Blue1Brown walks through a very hard Putnam competition problem and its elegant solution, emphasizing the visual intuition and the thought process behind solving it.

Rafal Dittwald's Clojure/north talk shows how to move from writing Java-style code in Clojure to thinking in data-driven, functional terms. He walks through a JavaScript example, refactoring imperative code step by step into a functional core.

Dr. Jason Fung, a nephrologist, explains therapeutic fasting as a treatment for obesity and type 2 diabetes. He frames it around the two-compartment problem of fat storage and insulin resistance.

A two-minute comedy sketch in which a woman describes her problems while a visible nail sticks out of her head, and her partner keeps trying to fix it instead of listening. It dramatizes the gap between wanting empathy and being offered solutions.

Matt Might's Curry On talk on ending errors in code, both software and the human genome. He covers conservative approximation of the halting problem via static analysis and a computational approach to precision medicine.

A BBC Earth clip from Inside the Animal Mind in which a crow named 007 solves an eight-step puzzle to get a reward. It showcases crow problem-solving.

Mathologer shows a simple idea, the commutator, that lets anyone who can solve the first layer design their own full Rubik's cube solution. The same idea carries over to other symmetric twisty puzzles such as the Megaminx.

Rick Hudson's GopherCon 2015 talk on Go 1.5's new low-latency concurrent garbage collector. It covers the motivation, performance numbers, technical challenges and why the approach fits Go.

Rich Hickey's philosophical talk from the first Clojure Conj in 2010. He argues that good design comes from deliberate, away-from-keyboard thinking, and describes how to feed the background mind so it solves problems.

Raymond Hettinger's PyBay 2019 talk on the mental habits behind effective programming, drawn from coaching, teaching and StackOverflow. He covers problem decomposition, chunking, managing working memory and getting unstuck.

Ben Katz's custom robot solves a Rubik's Cube in 0.38 seconds. The description links to the hardware and software write-ups.

A one-minute clip of Bryan Cranston at an Academy new-member reception, advising actors to approach auditions without desperation and focus on solving the problem rather than landing the job.

Bryan Cantrill's 2007 Google Tech Talk on DTrace, showing how dynamic tracing improves debugging of both development and live production systems. It includes a vivid war story about tracking down a problem on a Sun Ray server.

NASA JPL engineers explain the final minutes of the Curiosity rover's entry, descent and landing on Mars, which combined aerobraking, a parachute and a skycrane. It lays out the tight sequence of events that all had to work automatically.

Two Google engineers perform a mock coding interview and then discuss best practices for candidates, including asking clarifying questions and communicating while solving.

A silent PLOS ONE video of New Caledonian crows solving Aesop's Fable puzzles by dropping objects to raise water and reach food. It shows example trials from experiments testing causal understanding of water displacement.

Bobby Powers presents Mesh, a drop-in malloc replacement that eliminates memory fragmentation in unmodified C/C++ programs by compacting memory. The talk covers how it works despite C's fixed object addresses, and its benefits for programs like Redis.

Gary Bernhardt's Cascadia Ruby Conference 2011 talk on using the Unix shell for practical problem solving. He builds pipelines interactively by iterative refinement, using small tools as levers.

Numberphile with Daniel Erman on the Josephus problem, where people in a circle are eliminated in turn. It shows how the survivor's position follows a neat pattern tied to powers of two and binary.

Steven Pinker's TED talk presents data on homicide, war, poverty and pollution to argue that the world has improved over the past decades. He frames progress as problem-solving, not inevitability.

Numberphile talks with Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown about a darts puzzle with a shrinking bullseye. Solving it takes the volumes of high-dimensional spheres, and the answer turns up Euler's number.

A short experiment dissolving the aluminum of a Coca-Cola can with drain cleaner to reveal the clear plastic film lining inside.

A short clip of a young Steve Jobs preparing for an early TV appearance, amazed to see himself on a nearby monitor. It includes the moment when a large white earpiece is put in his ear.