medium is the message

Jonathan Blow's CreativeMornings talk arguing that business models shape game design, drawing an analogy between 1970s TV and HBO and between free-to-play and premium games. He calls for games that inspire awe rather than chase constraints.

The 2016 Isaac Asimov Memorial Debate, moderated by Neil deGrasse Tyson, in which a panel of physicists and philosophers debates whether the universe is a simulation. Participants include David Chalmers, Zohreh Davoudi and James Gates.

Dean Friedman's near-hour-long introduction to synthesis, covering the building blocks of sound and the controls on a synthesizer. He slowly adjusts knobs so viewers hear what each parameter does.

The first episode of Clickspring's series on reproducing the Antikythera Mechanism by hand, laying out the plan and the history. The series follows a machinist building the ancient Greek device with traditional tools and methods.

Nadia Polikarpova's Strange Loop talk on program synthesis driven by refinement types, as in Synquid. It shows how rich type specifications can be turned into verified, executable code.

The first lecture of N J Wildberger's History of Mathematics course, starting with Pythagoras' theorem and following Stillwell's text. It emphasizes the flow of ideas over proofs.

The American Museum of Natural History's film flies from the Himalayas out through the atmosphere and solar system to the afterglow of the Big Bang, using its Digital Universe Atlas four-dimensional map.

PBS Space Time examines the Silurian hypothesis, the idea that an industrial civilization could have existed on Earth before humans. It looks at what traces such a civilization might leave in the geological record.

The opening credit sequence of the 1960s British spy series The Prisoner, with Patrick McGoohan. It is a short intro to a cult TV show.

Clickspring makes the pin-and-slot epicyclic gearing of the Antikythera Mechanism, the module modelling the Moon's variable motion in the Greek theory, by hand.

A video essay from Pop Culture Detective arguing that The Big Bang Theory normalizes sexism and toxic masculinity through its portrayal of nerd men. It analyzes recurring tropes in how the male leads treat women.

A very long livestream in which Ron Gilbert and Frank Cifaldi look at the making of The Secret of Monkey Island, including its SCUMM source code, which they edit and recompile live.

R. Stanley Williams of HP Labs gives a keynote on the memristor, covering the physics, crossbar computation, and potential for memory and new computer architectures.

A playful music video promoting the book Land of Lisp, with a song about Lisp programming.

ScienceClic gives a 15-minute animated introduction to quantum field theory, covering fields, spin, conserved quantities, the standard model and interactions.

The Verge's documentary on Handspring and its Treo, a smartphone that came a decade before the iPhone. It tells how a small team tried to build the modern smartphone and was held back by carriers and timing.

In an IT Crowd episode clip, Moss and Roy convince Jen that the internet is a small black box. She believes it and carries it around.

An episode of Patriot Act with Hasan Minhaj on the cruise industry. It looks at worker exploitation, safety shortcuts, and how cruise lines sweep crime at sea under the rug.

A New Yorker short documentary about the 2014 sinking of the Sewol ferry in South Korea, based on the film In the Absence. It examines the failures in the rescue and the political aftermath.

Bill Atkinson shows and explains his binder of Polaroids taken during Lisa development, documenting how its graphical interface evolved. Recorded at the Computer History Museum.

The Thought Emporium synthesizes chicken noodle soup from pure chemicals, following an original patent for artificial chicken flavor. The video explores how many chemicals it takes to make a convincing soup.

Sam Harris interviews linguist John McWhorter about race, racism and what McWhorter calls the new religion of anti-racism. Topics include identity politics, police violence and affirmative action.

Physicist Angela Collier's roughly hour-long video on how string theory was hyped to the public and what that did to science communication. She traces the history of the theory as a narrative and argues it is interesting but was oversold.

Veritasium asks people where a tree's mass comes from, then explains that most of a dry tree's mass originates from carbon dioxide in the air. It combines street interviews with a short explanation of photosynthesis.

Marcus du Sautoy of the BBC demonstrates the wisdom of the crowd, showing that averaging many guesses of jelly beans in a jar lands near the true count.

A comedy-music medley from the Australian band The Axis of Awesome showing that dozens of famous pop songs use the same four-chord progression. The performers cycle through a long list of hits over the same chords.

Sam Harris's talk at the 2012 Global Atheist Convention on the secular attitude toward death and living in the present moment, with a guided meditation element.

A three-minute side-by-side comparison of scenes from Star Wars (1977) and the WWII film The Dam Busters (1955). It shows how closely the Death Star trench run mirrors the earlier film.

Julia co-creator Stefan Karpinski explains why multiple dispatch makes Julia code and types reusable across packages with so little friction. He covers sharing basic types and sharing generic algorithms.

Will Wilson explains autonomous testing: using deterministic simulation and fuzzing, building on FoundationDB's approach, to test software continuously. It sets out the ideas behind his later company Antithesis.

Jon Bois tells the story of the 1904 St. Louis Olympic marathon, a chaotic race involving fraud, rat poison, brandy, feral dogs and near-deaths. It is an episode of his show Pretty Good.

Captain Disillusion's VFXcool episode, led by Alan Melikdjanian, takes a 41-minute nostalgic look at how the visual effects of Flight of the Navigator were made. It covers early computers, motion control, in-camera effects and practical crafts.

Gaming Historian recounts how Alexey Pajitnov created Tetris in the Soviet Union and how a fight over publishing rights spanned the West, Mirrorsoft, Nintendo and the Cold War. It runs about an hour with chaptered parts.

Historia Civilis explains the origins and governing system of the Iroquois (Haudenosaunee) Confederacy. It covers the Great Law and the league's surprisingly intricate legal and political structure.

A ten-minute clip of Richard Feynman describing how mathematicians and physicists differ in their interests and customs. He argues physics rests on visualizing and applying math rather than pure abstraction.

A song by Pig With The Face Of A Boy that narrates the history of the Soviet Union from a worker's view, set to the Tetris melody.

Nick Lane's Royal Institution lecture on the origin of life and why it is the way it is. It draws on his book The Vital Question and the alkaline hydrothermal vent theory of abiogenesis.

Bryan Cantrill's LISA11 talk on how illumos arose after Oracle closed OpenSolaris. It covers the history of Sun, ZFS, DTrace and Zones, and the diaspora of kernel engineers, with a famous rant about Oracle and Larry Ellison.

The first episode of John Vervaeke's lecture series on the modern meaning crisis, tracing its history through philosophy, cognitive science, religion and psychology. It introduces the series and its themes.

Christopher Domas presents his Cantor Dust tool at Derbycon 2012, a 3D visual approach to reverse engineering binaries by visualizing their structure dynamically.