nation state

Andrew "bunnie" Huang examines how realistic hardware supply chain attacks are, from rogue insiders to nation states, in the wake of the Bloomberg Businessweek report. He explains how undocumented components could be hidden on boards and how hard they are to spot.

Peter Thiel is the first guest on Eric Weinstein's The Portal, in a nearly three-hour conversation about technological stagnation, institutional failure and the link between growth and violence. They discuss universities, the economy and the search for a more ambitious future.

Physicist David Deutsch's TED talk on why science took off, arguing that good explanations are those that are hard to vary. It contrasts scientific explanation with myth.

Nathan Kutz presents the spatio-temporal dynamics of rotating detonation rocket engines, including combustion fronts that behave like solitons. He shows a bifurcation analysis of a multiscale model that captures the main features.

Scott Manley explains rotating detonation engines, how they differ from pulsed detonation engines, and why thermodynamics predicts they beat traditional jet and rocket engines.

A hobbyist build-and-experiment video on rotating detonation engines (RDEs), where a continuous detonation wave spins around an annular chamber. The creator 3D prints parts and tests a small engine, while being candid about uncertainty over whether a true rotating wave was achieved.

Tyler Cowen interviews Peter Thiel about technological stagnation, innovation, and lessons from Zero to One. The conversation ranges over business, startups and how Thiel thinks about progress.

A Last Week Tonight segment on organ and body donation, covering where donations actually go, how donated bodies are used and sold, and problems in organ transplant programs.

Lieutenant General Mark Hertling gives a TEDx talk arguing that obesity and poor youth fitness are a national security problem because too few young Americans can meet military physical requirements.

A short clip of Penn and Teller arguing, in blunt and profane language, for vaccination and against anti-vaccine claims. It covers risk versus benefit and herd immunity.

Sasha Rush surveys linear RNNs and state space models as replacements for attention in transformer-style models, in a talk for MLSys. It covers the foundational preliminaries and predates Mamba.

Veritasium explains how investigators caught the Golden State Killer using forensic genealogy, matching crime scene DNA to distant relatives in public genealogy databases. It also covers the privacy implications of DNA databases.

Jon Gjengset's 2020 PhD dissertation presentation at MIT on partial state in dataflow-based materialized views, the idea behind the Noria database. The Q&A is cut out.

A 1956 episode clip of the game show I've Got a Secret in which 95-year-old Samuel J. Seymour appears as the mystery guest. He was the last living eyewitness to Lincoln's assassination at Ford's Theater, and the panel tries to guess his secret.

Richard Feldman's elm-conf talk on designing models so that bugs from impossible application states cannot occur, using Elm's compiler and types. It demonstrates techniques for making invalid states unrepresentable.

A 98-minute LEMMiNO video reconstructing what happened inside the Texas School Book Depository before, during, and after the Kennedy assassination. It draws on testimony to map people's movements and discrepancies.

The first part of a long two-part video series by historian Sean Munger arguing, with citations, that Lee Harvey Oswald assassinated President Kennedy and acted alone. It goes through the provable historical facts and addresses conspiracy theories.

Noam Chomsky talks with the University of Washington's Upon Reflection about how languages change over time, why a national language is a modern idea, and how language is a system of communication rooted in human nature.

A 2012 Harvard Institute of Politics conversation between Peter Thiel and historian Niall Ferguson. Thiel discusses technology, politics and his stagnation hypothesis.

A short demonstration comparing just intonation with equal temperament, played so you can hear how the tuning compromise changes intervals and chords. It includes a Bach prelude played in both tunings.

Ben Felix rebuts common arguments for holding only US stocks, such as past outperformance and international revenue exposure. He supports the case for international diversification with cited academic research.

Gamers Nexus builds a fully ray-traced demo in Unreal Engine to compare faked global illumination with RTX ray-traced GI. It covers the gains in dynamic scenes and accuracy against the performance cost and noise.

A VICE News report on the 2017 protests at Evergreen State College, including the confrontation involving professor Bret Weinstein.

A one-minute scene from the film Enemy of the State showing absurdly implausible image enhancement, with freezing, rotating, zooming and focusing on a video.

Mark Fisher's 2014 talk in Zagreb on the slow cancellation of the future, about cultural stagnation and the sense that popular culture has stopped producing the new.

A Yes, Prime Minister scene in which Sir Humphrey shows how leading questions can make a poll produce either answer on national service.

Tom Scott visits the US National Helium Reserve in Amarillo, Texas, and explains why headlines that the world is running out of helium are misleading. He covers the Federal Helium Program and its planned privatization.

A short National Geographic piece showing a laser system that tracks and kills mosquitoes, filmed in slow motion, as part of anti-malaria efforts. It comes from Intellectual Ventures' 2010 work.

A one-minute National Geographic clip of researchers Terry Hunt and Carl Lipo testing a theory that Easter Islanders used ropes to rock the moai statues upright to walk them to their platforms.

National Geographic footage showing the cordyceps fungus infecting ants and other insects and steering their behavior so it can reproduce.

Rich Hickey's talk on time, state, identity and values, arguing that mutable object-oriented modeling fits the world poorly. It lays out the thinking behind Clojure's approach to data and change.

A short clip of Richard Feynman answering an interviewer's question about why magnets repel, explaining that a 'why' question depends on a shared framework of understanding. It illustrates how hard it is to explain fundamentals to a layperson.

CGP Grey explains what it means that a third of the United States is federally owned land. It describes the agencies that manage it and why so much of it is in the western states.

2swap explains how he solved the Klotski sliding-block puzzle by mapping its full state space as a graph and visualizing it. The video includes footage of the Guinness world-record solve and links to an interactive graph.

Economist Martin Jacques offers three building blocks for understanding China's rise, including seeing China as a civilization-state rather than a nation-state. He also covers how Chinese people view the state.

Weird Al's whiteboard-animated music video parodying corporate buzzword culture, from the album Mandatory Fun. The lyrics are packed with business jargon.

A 30-minute condensed version of the documentary I.O.U.S.A., which examines the growing US national debt and its consequences.

An animated National Film Board of Canada short about a young woman who picks a log driver as her partner because his work makes him a great dancer. It is set to Wade Hemsworth's folk song sung by Kate and Anna McGarrigle.

A clip from a BBC interview in which Richard Feynman is asked why magnets repel and attract. He explains that "why" questions depend on what a person already accepts as fundamental.

Mel Robbins gives a TEDxSF talk on why people sabotage themselves and how to push past hesitation. It is the source of her 'count backward from five' technique.