peak demand

A clip from the BBC series Britain from Above showing UK peak power demand. It shows a grid engineer preparing for the surge as millions put the kettle on when a popular show ends.

Tech Ingredients shows how to build flat panel speakers from exciters and foam board, with construction guidelines, measured SPL comparisons and a complete system playing music.

CityNerd Ray Delahanty explains induced demand and what happens when freeways are widened. He walks through the economics of supply and demand applied to traffic and asks how much new traffic appears and whether congestion returns.

Tech Ingredients shows how to build cheap, high-performance flat-panel speakers using audio exciters on sheet materials such as foam-core board. It explains how distributed-mode speakers work and walks through experiments to find good designs.

Dave2D looks at why MacBook speakers sound so much better than those on other laptops, with input from an audio researcher. He compares them against the best Windows laptop speakers.

The Secret of Monkey Island intro theme played through the internal PC speaker. It is a tribute to LucasArts.

Tech Ingredients builds a pair of large Voigt speakers and explains ported, transmission line and horn designs. It tests them in an anechoic chamber and uses constrained layer damping for the enclosure.

A 52-minute short version of the documentary The End of Suburbia, about peak oil and the end of cheap energy. It argues that American suburbs depend on cheap oil and may become the slums of the future.

Explains induced demand beyond roads, showing that it applies to transit, walking and cycling infrastructure too but with different consequences. It corrects common misunderstandings of the concept.

A two-minute comedy sketch in which a foreigner speaking fluent Japanese is repeatedly not understood by Japanese people who refuse to process it.

Patrick Winston's long-running MIT lecture on public speaking teaches heuristic rules for talks. It covers how to start, use time and place, boards, props and slides, and how to inform, persuade and finish.

Floyd Toole's CIRMMT distinguished lecture on the science of sound reproduction, drawing on decades of blind listening research. It covers what listeners prefer in loudspeakers and why measured accuracy and anechoic response matter.

An animated short on limits to growth, covering oil formation, peak oil, energy, economic growth and resource depletion. Its central section deals with exponential growth, and the author notes some statistics are dated.

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 short clip of Romain Dumas and the all-electric VW I.D. R breaking the overall Pikes Peak hillclimb record with a 7:57 run, over 16 seconds faster than the previous best, with footage of the crowd's reaction.

A scene from My Fair Lady in which Professor Higgins meets Colonel Pickering and Doolittle, singing about how the English fail to speak their own language properly. It has English subtitles.

Tracy Young, a former construction engineer and cofounder of PlanGrid, speaks at the 2015 Y Combinator Female Founders Conference. She talks about building software for construction superintendents and about customer success.

Tom Scott, with linguists Gretchen McCulloch and Molly Ruhl, examines whether the language you speak changes how you think. The short answer is mostly no, with caveats about the weak version of the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis.

Larry Wall speaks at Google's Chicago office in 2008 about the Perl community, the language, and Perl 6. The talk touches on grammars, macros and error messages.

Ashley Feniello demonstrates VimSpeak, a voice-controlled interface for Vim inspired by Tavis Rudd's voice programming talk. The demo includes working through a VimGolf challenge by speech.

'Skwerl' is a short film by Brian and Karl made entirely in fake English, imitating how English sounds to people who don't speak it. It was made for Kino Sydney and shown on QI.

A very short clip from Star Trek: The Next Generation's 'Peak Performance' in which Picard says it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. It is a single quotable moment about how outcomes are not fully in your control.

A short scene from Star Trek TNG season 2, episode 'Peak Performance', in which Picard tells Data that it is possible to commit no mistakes and still lose. He says that is not a weakness but life.

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.

Seven-minute footage of Fred Rogers testifying before a US Senate subcommittee in 1969 to defend federal funding for the new Corporation for Public Broadcasting. A skeptical Senator Pastore starts out abrasive and is won over during Rogers' brief, calm testimony.

Physicist Al Bartlett's well-known lecture on the arithmetic of exponential growth, applied to population, energy consumption and resource depletion. He argues that steady percentage growth cannot be sustained on a finite planet and that most public discussion ignores this.

A short satirical 'motivational' talk by the character Self-help Singh, a sham life coach who urges viewers to do nothing. It parodies self-help gurus and hustle culture.

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.

Historian Timothy Snyder explains the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity, two ways of thinking about time that frame his books On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom.

An 86-minute Milton Friedman talk arguing that inflation is a monetary phenomenon caused by money supply growing faster than goods, and that the cure is less government spending and money printing.

8088 MPH is a demoscene production for the original 1981 IBM PC with CGA graphics and a 4.77MHz 8088, shown with real composite output. It competed at Revision 2015 and pushes the hardware well past what it was thought capable of, breaking emulators.

A clip of Craig Ferguson's late-night monologue in which he talks about his past as an alcoholic. He explains why he will not mock Britney Spears over her breakdown.

A player piano is made to reproduce human speech, here reciting a European Environmental Criminal Court proclamation in German at the 2009 World Venice Forum. This upload adds subtitles so the words become understandable.

Jayson E. Street's DEF CON 19 talk shows photos from real security engagements where he was already inside client facilities, illustrating how social engineering and physical intrusion can cause huge losses. For each attack he also explains what defenses would have stopped him.

Physicist Albert Bartlett's full-length lecture on how steady exponential growth in population and energy use collides with finite resources. It uses examples like bacteria in a bottle and covers peak oil.

Adobe's VoCo demo from the MAX 2016 Sneak Peeks, co-hosted by Jordan Peele, showing software that changes words in a voiceover by typing new ones.

Artem Dinaburg's DEF CON 19 talk on bit-squatting, where flipped bits in DRAM cause devices to contact domains that differ by one bit from legitimate ones. He shows how registering such domains can hijack traffic without exploiting any software bug.

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.

Justine Tunney presents Redbean, a web server distributed as a single actually portable executable that runs on multiple operating systems. It embeds Lua, SQLite and MbedTLS in a fork-based server.

A 1992 MIT Sloan talk and Q&A by Steve Jobs, then CEO of NeXT, covering NeXT's strategy, co-creating Apple, his ouster, and the value of direct experience. It ranges across technology, business and career advice.