mick west

Astronomer David Kipping of Cool Worlds talks with Mick West to break down the three declassified Pentagon UFO videos. They explain the footage through camera artifacts, glare, and perspective effects.

Mick West shows new night-vision reference footage indicating the Navy's supposed flying pyramid UFO is just an out-of-focus light, likely a plane near LAX, rendered triangular by bokeh. He identifies other lights as Jupiter and stars.

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.

Geologist Nick Zentner of Central Washington University gives an hour-long public lecture on the great earthquakes of the Pacific Northwest, including the Cascadia subduction zone and the evidence for past megaquakes. It is part of his Downtown Geology Lecture Series, recorded in Ellensburg in 2016.

James Mickens's 2015 Harvard colloquium argues that browsers are bloated and insecure because feature races trump clean interface design. He presents a cleaner, more secure browser architecture (Atlantis) with a much smaller API surface.

Physicist Geoffrey West speaks at an FQXi conference on time about complexity and scaling laws. He covers how metabolism, growth and lifespan scale across organisms and how the same mathematics applies to cities and companies.

Rhonda Patrick interviews USC gerontologist Valter Longo about fasting, the fasting-mimicking diet, and their effects on longevity, cancer, and multiple sclerosis. They discuss mechanisms such as IGF-1 and autophagy and clinical trials.

James Mickens delivers his comedic rant about JavaScript and web programming, in his usual dry, hyperbolic style. It includes his account of learning the language from the O'Reilly Definitive Guide.

A short clip from The West Wing in which staffers meet a group advocating the Peters projection and challenge the Mercator map. It was shown as geography humor at a Salt Lake GIS user group meeting.

A two-minute Westworld scene in which Robert Ford and Bernard Lowe discuss whether consciousness exists. Ford argues that the self is a fiction for hosts and humans alike.

A Hot Fuzz clip in which Nicholas Angel struggles to understand the West Country accent of locals.

A 1999 Qwest commercial in which a weary traveler at a remote motel is told every room offers every movie ever made, on demand. It was shot at Roy's Motel in Amboy, California.

A very short clip from the TV series Westworld about whether it matters if you cannot tell a human from an artificial being.

A one-minute 1999 Qwest commercial where a hotel clerk promises every movie ever made in any language, any time.

Mick West explains the three Navy UFO videos (FLIR, GIMBAL and GOFAST) released in 2020, giving mundane explanations such as a distant plane and camera artifacts. He notes the videos were not new and had been circulating since 2017.

Mick West analyzes the Navy's Gimbal UFO video and gives four checkable observations suggesting it is an infrared glare that appears to rotate because the camera rotates while tracking. He argues the object is likely a hot craft hidden behind the glare.

Mick West analyzes the Navy "Go Fast" UFO footage and shows with simple trigonometry and the data overlay that the object is slow and high up, consistent with a balloon. He explains how parallax makes it look fast and argues the original TV claims were wrong.

Adam Neely examines Phil Ewell's paper arguing Western music theory is framed by a white racial perspective. He covers North Indian theory, alternative frameworks, Schenker and responses to the paper.

Robert C. Martin's Ruby Midwest 2011 keynote argues that software architecture should express the application's intent rather than its framework. He covers separating entities, interactors and boundaries so the web, database and framework are details.

Catherine West's RustConf 2018 closing keynote on building a game in Rust and organizing a large codebase. It builds up an entity component system and generational indices step by step.

University of Chicago lecture in which John Mearsheimer argues the West, through NATO and EU expansion, bears primary responsibility for the Ukraine crisis. He also discusses how to end it and its consequences.

Noel Rappin's MountainWest RubyConf talk introduces Smalltalk to Ruby programmers. He compares the two languages' object models, blocks, 1-based arrays, simple syntax and live programming environment, and walks through sample code.

A Climate Town episode on who uses America's water, particularly Western water. It looks at agriculture such as alfalfa and animal feed, and at water-rights rules that discourage conservation.

A short clip from The West Wing in which characters argue for the Gall-Peters map projection over Mercator. It dramatizes how standard maps distort the relative size of countries.

David Weston's BlueHat IL 2023 talk traces the evolution of Windows security and previews Windows 11 and hardware advances. It ends with upcoming changes such as Rust in the kernel and fonts, signed binaries and adminless Windows.

A design essay on why products designed in Western contexts often fail when deployed in developing countries. It covers expert blindness and cultural assumptions, with examples such as malaria nets and the One Laptop Per Child project.

A long video essay arguing against the claim that Blazing Saddles could not be made today. It looks at the film as satire of the sanitized Western genre and what it did to that genre.

James Mickens's humorous USENIX Security keynote argues that improving security and trusting opaque technology like machine learning is far harder than the industry admits.

Greg Baugues tells his story of living with bipolar II and ADHD as a developer at a Ruby conference. He urges openness about mental illness and explains how to get help and support colleagues.

CGP Grey compares airplane boarding methods, based on an arXiv paper, and shows why the intuitive back-to-front approach is slow while random or outside-in boarding does better.

Mick Gordon's GDC 2017 session on composing the Doom (2016) soundtrack. He details his compositional process, production techniques and the experimental instrument and synth design behind the music.

Tom Scott-style absurdist research by tom7 for SIGBOVIK 2021, using machine learning to discover letterforms that are 'uppercaser' than uppercase A and lowercaser than lowercase. It is a comedic, technically inventive deep dive with fonts and a paper.

A 1983 Los Angeles lecture by KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov on how the Soviets carried out ideological subversion of target societies through propaganda. He walks through demoralization and normalization stages.

The first part of a four-part Channel 4 (UK) documentary series presented by Howard Goodall, this episode covers melody and why tunes affect us so deeply. It explains how melody works in Western music with historical background and music theory.

Gary Bernhardt argues that software history moves in reactions to earlier tools, and that new tools are not simply better in every way. He distinguishes capability (what a tool allows) from suitability (what it fits), and warns against repeating past mistaken reactions.

Westwood Studios co-founder Louis Castle talks about how pathfinding was solved in Command & Conquer: Tiberian Sun, in an Ars Technica War Stories episode. It also touches on other challenges in Westwood's RTS games.

Paul Phillips, a former Scala core contributor, argues after moving a million lines of code that much of what the software industry does is wrong. He critiques Scala and compiler design and calls for better approaches.

RealLifeLore explains France's military posture towards Russia, including French involvement in Africa and Russian influence in the Sahel. It covers the geopolitics behind current tensions.

Footage of a doubleheader of locomotives crawling over badly maintained track on a former Wabash Railroad line, now the ND&W Railway. The uploader explains the track had deferred maintenance for decades.

Walter Bright explains to the Northwest C++ Users Group how the D programming language can interface directly with legacy C++ code. He covers why C++ is hard to interface with and how D approaches the problem.