nist competition

An Empire Files documentary by Abby Martin presenting a critical account of the Afghanistan War, from the CIA's role in the 1980s to the stalemate of the 2010s and 2020. It argues the war was driven by imperial interests.

A Burnistoun sketch in which a voice-recognition elevator cannot understand two Scottish men saying the number eleven. It satirizes voice interfaces that fail on accents.

Daniel J. Bernstein and Tanja Lange survey recent highlights in post-quantum cryptography at 35C3, covering the NIST competition, network protocol experiments, and broken candidates.

A short Yes Minister clip in which Sir Humphrey explains why a hospital with no patients still needs a large administrative staff. It is a satirical look at bureaucratic bloat in the public sector.

A classic Yes, Minister sketch in which the Minister visits a brand-new, fully staffed hospital with no patients and demands that some be found.

Will Wilson of FoundationDB explains how the team tested their distributed database using deterministic simulation. By running the whole system in a simulator with injected faults and reproducible seeds, they could find rare concurrency and network bugs.

Peter Thiel's lecture from the How to Start a Startup course on business strategy and monopoly theory, arguing that competition destroys profits and that startups should aim to build monopolies. It covers the ideas of Zero to One.

A clip from Yes Prime Minister in which Sir Humphrey shows how leading questions can make a survey support or oppose national service. It is a short satirical scene.

Veritasium visits the Micromouse competition, where small autonomous robots race to solve mazes at extreme speed. It covers the competition's technical history, including fans and ground effect enabling very high-g turns.

Veritasium visits NIST to explain Standard Reference Materials, the carefully characterized items such as peanut butter used to calibrate instruments and keep measurements consistent. It covers why they exist and why they are expensive.

A short Yes Minister clip in which the civil servant explains why Britain joined the European Union, delivered as satire of British foreign policy.

A Burnistoun sketch from BBC Scotland in which two men try to use a voice-recognition elevator that cannot understand their Scottish accents.

A short clip from the BBC sitcom Yes, Prime Minister in which Jim Hacker explains which kind of person reads which British newspaper. It is a satirical take on press readership and bias.

A two-minute Yes Prime Minister scene in which Sir Humphrey persuades Jim Hacker to buy Trident, using tortured logic about nuclear deterrence.

A short scene from the British sitcom Yes Prime Minister in which officials describe 'salami tactics' for invading a country slice by slice. Each small step is too minor to justify a major response.

A Yes Minister sketch in which Jim Hacker and Sir Humphrey meet the BBC and discuss its independence from government pressure. It is a satirical look at the relationship between the state and the broadcaster.

A sketch from the British sitcom Yes, Prime Minister in which Jim Hacker and the chief scientific advisor discuss the logic of the nuclear deterrent.

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

A short clip from the British sitcom Yes Minister in which Sir Humphrey cynically explains to Jim Hacker why European nations joined the common market.

Ben Anderson's VICE documentary shows embedded reporting on Afghan security forces and US Marines in Helmand during the troop drawdown, exposing incompetence, drug abuse and corruption.

Documentary filmmaker Cassie Jaye explains how making The Red Pill led her, a feminist, to reevaluate her assumptions about the Men's Rights movement. She argues for listening to people you think of as the enemy.

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.

Thomas Ricks's Nimitz Memorial Lecture at UC Berkeley asks why US generals did better in World War II than in Korea, Vietnam or Iraq and Afghanistan. A central point is the WWII practice of quickly reassigning or relieving underperforming generals.

Tom Scott visits Penistone to explain the Scunthorpe problem, showing why naive web and profanity filters block innocent words.

A score-following video of Iannis Xenakis's 1950s orchestral piece Metastasis, showing his graphic, mathematically derived notation as the music plays. It is a landmark of post-war modernist composition.

The classic Monty Python sketch 'The Ministry of Silly Walks', in which a civil servant applies for a grant to develop his silly walk. It is a short, absurdist British comedy clip.

Martin Gorner's Devoxx talk introduces deep learning with TensorFlow, walking through neural networks for MNIST, how to choose an architecture and how to diagnose networks that fail to train.

Joran Dirk Greef's Systems Distributed '23 talk on TigerStyle, the engineering methodology behind TigerBeetle. It covers designing safer systems in less time through up-front design, assertions, and deterministic simulation.

Veritasium explains why the kilogram is being redefined in terms of Planck's constant rather than a physical metal artifact. It visits NIST to show the Kibble balance and why measuring mass precisely is hard.

A bot built by Robin Baumgarten plays Infinite Mario using A* path-finding, shown as a red planned path that updates as new obstacles appear. It won the Mario AI competitions and uses only on-screen information.

A short NIST-based demonstration places a room furnished with old natural-material furniture beside one with modern synthetic furnishings and burns both. The modern room reaches full flashover in a few minutes while the legacy room is only starting to spread.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment arguing that US cannabis prohibition grew out of racially and politically motivated agendas under Nixon and earlier, rather than scientific evidence.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment arguing that political motives, including Nixon's, lay behind making marijuana illegal. It mixes comedy with history.

A short news segment from Arutz Sheva about a course on pro-Israel editing of Wikipedia.

A one-minute clip of Peter Norvig saying that Google found programming contest success correlates negatively or poorly with job performance. The description links to a blog post discussing it.

A sketch from the Scottish comedy show Burnistoun in which two men cannot get a voice-recognition elevator to understand the word eleven in their accents.

A short clip from the 1980 British sitcom Yes Minister about why Britain is in the European Community, showing bureaucratic and diplomatic maneuvering.

A very short clip from Yes, Prime Minister in which Sir Arnold and Sir Humphrey run through a piece of circular political reasoning. It is the origin of the so-called politician's logic.

A one-minute clip from Yes Minister in which Sir Humphrey explains the role of a civil servant, listing the contradictory policies he has loyally served across eleven governments.

John Oliver's 13-minute Last Week Tonight segment explains the 2014 net neutrality fight over cable companies creating unequal internet speeds. It uses comedy to make a dull regulatory topic engaging and tells viewers how to comment to the FCC.