no-code

A professor from Illinois compares the cost of building, fueling and operating a nuclear plant against a natural gas plant, using visual charts. It shows how construction time and interest rates dominate, when the investment pays off and when costs cross over.

The first lesson of Uncle Bob (Robert C. Martin)'s "Coding Better World Together" series. It makes the case for clean code and for treating software craftsmanship as an ethical and professional responsibility. It runs about 109 minutes.

Neil Postman's 1997 lecture at College of DuPage, based on his book, argues that Americans treat technology as a national religion and depend on it to solve larger human problems. It includes audience questions.

MIT 22.01 lecture by Michael Short explaining the Chernobyl accident technically, including RBMK reactor positive feedback, xenon poisoning and the cascade of human errors during the test.

A Berkeley lecture by psychologist Christina Maslach, a leading burnout researcher, on what burnout is and what causes it. It covers common misunderstandings and the job and workplace factors involved.

A recording of Richard Feynman's talk on the possibilities of manipulating matter at very small scales, widely seen as an early vision of nanotechnology. This is a later version of his 1959 "There's Plenty of Room at the Bottom" lecture.

A short clip of Milton Friedman explaining his free-market view of monopoly, namely that monopolies persist mainly through government help. It is excerpted from the Milton Friedman Speaks series.

Clayton Christensen explains disruptive innovation using the steel industry, showing how mini-mills beat incumbents from the low end. He argues disruption is not about stupid or bad management.

Casey Muratori's invited lecture on where bad code comes from, rebroadcast from a Twitch stream. He critiques conventional wisdom such as SOLID and Clean Code and argues about how those habits lead to slow, poorly structured software.

Thomas Sowell speaks at the Hoover Institution about economic and racial inequality and what he considers myths about poverty. He also recounts his early life and brief flirtation with Marxism.

Clayton Christensen explains his theory of disruptive innovation at Oxford's Said Business School, using examples from steel, Toyota, Sony, Walmart and Godrej. He applies the theory to why some economies stagnate and others grow.

Lawrence Krauss's 2009 talk on the current picture of the universe, how it will end and how it could have come from nothing. It covers the expanding universe, cosmic background radiation and the cosmological constant.

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.

Noam Chomsky's 2011 University of Oslo lecture on Newton's contributions to the study of mind. He argues Newton abandoned mechanical explanation and lowered the bar for scientific intelligibility, with consequences for the limits of human understanding. Q&A starts at 45:33.

A 2013 lecture in which Vitalik Buterin explains what quantum computers are and what they can and cannot do. He then discusses what they could mean for Bitcoin's cryptography.

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.

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.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum tells how a 4,000-year-old cuneiform tablet came to him for examination. It revealed the oldest known account of Noah's Ark and led to a book and a documentary.

Admiral Grace Hopper holds up a length of wire to show how far light travels in a nanosecond, about 11.8 inches. She explains how she made the idea concrete to people who could not picture a billionth of a second.

Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard, starting with Musical Phonology. He draws analogies between music and linguistics, including references to Chomsky.

Mark Blyth's 2016 Brown University lecture on global Trumpism, explaining the rise of populism through economics, the decline of Western middle classes and revolt against technocracy.

Milton Friedman explains why the US tax code is enormously complex and why meaningful reform is unlikely. He argues that politicians profit from the complexity, since tax breaks are products they sell and the code works as a tool of reward and punishment. The clip is about 14 minutes from his lecture series.

Peter Norvig's UBC distinguished lecture on how massive amounts of simple data, such as for language modeling, can yield understanding that hand-built models could not.

Sacha Arnoud, Waymo's Director of Engineering, gives a lecture in MIT's 2018 deep learning for self-driving cars course on the rise of machine learning in autonomous vehicles. It covers how Waymo uses deep learning and how it handles tricky driving situations.

Milton Friedman lectures to physicians on the economics of medical care, arguing that government involvement raises costs and leads toward socialized medicine. He also discusses licensing and protecting patients from quacks.

A lecture by Noam Chomsky on thought control in democratic societies, covering propaganda and manufacturing consent. The upload has no description.

A talk by Eric Weinstein on gauge theory and its possible application to economics and inflation. It proposes extending the Wu-Yang dictionary into a geometric tool beyond physics.

An 11-minute clip of Milton Friedman explaining the incentives of unions and how they affect employment. He argues unions restrict labor supply, raising pay for some workers while hurting low-skill workers.

Russell Barkley gives the keynote at UNC's 2012 Burnett Seminar on ADHD. He presents it as an executive function disorder and discusses its effects and how to help.

An American Airlines training video by Captain Warren VanderBurgh on control malfunctions and flight instrument anomalies. It discusses real incidents such as runaway trim and instrument failures and how crews should respond.

Microsoft's Brian Beckman gives an hour-long, whiteboard-style walk through monads, building from function composition and monoids using school-level math. It is aimed at practicing programmers rather than category theorists.

Hillsdale historian Burt Folsom lectures at a 2011 seminar on the 'robber barons' of the Gilded Age. He argues that figures like Vanderbilt and Rockefeller were market entrepreneurs rather than monopolists.

Casey Muratori's first refterm lecture lays out philosophies of optimization, distinguishing optimization from non-pessimization, which means avoiding needless work. It uses his fast terminal renderer project to show how fast computers really are.

Casey Muratori's University of Twente guest lecture is a case study in how straightforward code can cut thousands of lines and tens of seconds of runtime down to a few dozen lines running in under a second. It uses concrete examples to show why software is often an order of magnitude slower than it should be.

Jean-Marc Jancovici lectures at ENS Paris on whether energy use, jobs and growth can all be preserved. He argues for a physical approach to economics, since resource depletion and climate limits make perpetual GDP growth unrealistic.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum lectures at the Royal Institution on the invention and decipherment of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, and why it is so hard to translate.

An RSA Animate in which Steven Pinker explains how the mind builds infinite meanings from finite language, and why people often speak indirectly. It covers ambiguity, politeness and mutual knowledge, including the emperor's new clothes example.

The six Norton Lectures Jorge Luis Borges gave in 1967-68, titled This Craft of Verse, on topics including the riddle of poetry, metaphor, storytelling, translation and a poet's creed. The recording runs over four hours.

A lecture by Prof. Thomas Seyfried arguing that cancer is primarily a metabolic disease rather than a genetic one. It covers the Warburg effect, mitochondrial damage and implications for therapies.

The first lesson from Timothy Snyder's short video series accompanying On Tyranny, arguing that most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given when people comply in advance. It runs about eight minutes.