mit opencourseware

First lecture of MIT 6.00, an introductory computer science course taught in Python by Eric Grimson and John Guttag. It covers the goals of the course, what computation is, and data types, operators and variables.

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.

The first lecture of MIT's 1986 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs, given by Harold Abelson, introducing Lisp and the idea of computer science as the study of process.

Lecture 1B of MIT's 6.001 Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs (1986) with Gerald Sussman, covering procedures, processes and the substitution model. It includes the line about the power of naming things.

Lecture 7A of the 1986 MIT 6.001 SICP course, with Gerald Sussman presenting the metacircular evaluator, part 1. It shows how a Lisp evaluator can be written in Lisp itself.

David Mitchell's Soapbox rant on employers who demand passion and enthusiasm from workers, using satire to skewer fake workplace passion.

In Top Gear's second part, racing driver Sabine Schmitz tries to lap the Nurburgring in a Ford Transit van in under ten minutes. She finishes just over the mark.

A three-minute student film from Campus MovieFest showing drivers in every lane holding exactly the speed limit on an Atlanta-area interstate and the traffic jam that results.

A promotional commercial for Microsoft Songsmith, software that generates backing music from a vocal recording. The ad became widely known for its awkwardness.

A sketch from That Mitchell and Webb Sound in which a caller learns that identity theft is, in effect, a bank robbery in which the bank blames the customer. It runs about two minutes.

A segment from the animated film The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, in which Asterix must get Permit A 38 from a maze-like building run by unhelpful bureaucrats. He wins by asking for a nonexistent permit.

A That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch in which a hospital A&E is staffed by homeopaths who dilute everything, leaving patients with nothing.

A short That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch in which a rocket scientist and a brain surgeon trade jibes over whose job is harder. It is a BBC comedy clip from 2009.

A one-minute clip of Slavoj Zizek showing what he calls the official geographical limit between the Balkans and Central Europe, standing at a river in Ljubljana. It is a short, absurd and funny piece of cultural geography.

Psychologist Philip Zimbardo explains how ordinary people can be pushed into doing evil by situations and systems. He draws on the Stanford prison experiment and unseen Abu Ghraib photos, then turns to the opposite case: how ordinary people can become heroes.

A four-minute extract from the documentary The Fog of War in which Robert McNamara discusses the Gulf of Tonkin incident. He acknowledges that the second reported attack did not happen.

A short clip from Macworld 1999 in which actor Noah Wyle, who played Steve Jobs in Pirates of Silicon Valley, appears on stage as Jobs at the start of the keynote. Jobs then joins in.

Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky lectures on depression as a real biological disease. He covers its biological and psychological causes, how it differs from ordinary sadness, and ideas such as learned helplessness. He ties these together into one account.

The first episode of Michael Sandel's Harvard course on moral reasoning, opening with the trolley problem and the choice between killing one to save five. Sandel draws out student arguments and introduces utilitarian and other approaches to justice.

Randy Pausch's 2007 last lecture at Carnegie Mellon, given as he was dying of pancreatic cancer. He reflects on achieving childhood dreams, overcoming obstacles and helping others reach theirs.

Part 1 of a lecture by physicist Albert Bartlett on the exponential function and its consequences for population growth, resource use and energy. It argues that steady growth rates quickly lead to enormous quantities.

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.

Harvard physicist Eric Mazur explains how he realized his students were memorizing rather than understanding, and how he changed his teaching. He presents peer instruction and data showing improved student performance.

Elizabeth Warren's 2007 Berkeley lecture, when she was a Harvard law professor, on why middle-class families are under growing financial strain. She draws on bankruptcy research to examine rising costs of housing, health care and education.

Douglas Hofstadter's Stanford Presidential Lecture argues that analogy is the core of cognition, illustrating how concepts, categorization and thought arise from analogy-making.

Carnegie Mellon professor Randy Pausch gives a lecture on time management at the University of Virginia in 2007. He covers practical habits such as tackling important tasks first and distinguishing important from urgent work.

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.

The first lecture of Stanford's CS107 Programming Paradigms, taught by Jerry Cain, giving an overview of the course. The course goes from C and assembly through C++, concurrency, Scheme and Python.

The first lecture of Leonard Susskind's Stanford Continuing Studies course on modern physics, beginning with classical mechanics. It is the start of a six-quarter sequence on the theoretical foundations of physics.

The introductory lecture of Stephen Boyd's Stanford Convex Optimization I course (EE 364A). It outlines convex sets, functions and problems, and the course's coverage of least-squares, linear and semidefinite programming, duality and interior-point methods.

First lecture of Stanford's CS106A Programming Methodology by Mehran Sahami, giving a course overview and starting on programming. The course teaches software engineering principles using Java.

An excerpt from Hal Abelson's opening SICP lecture introducing computer science and contrasting declarative and imperative knowledge. He argues that computer science is not really a science and is more like magic or engineering of ideas.

Climber Chris Warner talks at Google about his book on high altitude leadership and the 2007 K2 expedition, where eighteen climbers summited and two died.

Paul Buchheit, creator of Gmail and founder of FriendFeed, speaks at Startup School 08 about listening to users. He covers feedback, features, aiming for 100 happy users, and treating "that's impossible" as a statement of limited experience.

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.

An SNL skit featuring Tom Brady in a mock workplace training video on sexual harassment, where the difference between welcome and unwelcome advances depends on who makes them. It is a satirical sketch.

Debris by Farbrausch, the winner of the Breakpoint 2007 demo competition. All of its 3D visuals, textures and music come from a single 177 KB executable.

Earliest known footage of Ivan Sutherland's MIT PhD work, Sketchpad, the first computer graphics system, with commentary by Alan Kay. It shows light-pen drawing with constraints in a short clip.

A short clip of Richard Feynman answering an interviewer's question about how magnets work, in which he explains why a why-question has no simple answer without a shared frame of reference.

A short BBC clip in which David Attenborough shows a lyrebird imitating sounds, including camera shutters, car alarms and chainsaws. It comes from the BBC natural history series Life on Earth.