physics engine

A short clip of a Renault F1 engine playing God Save the Queen by precisely controlling its RPM, recorded at Goodwood. It demonstrates how finely the drivetrain can be controlled.

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.

Footage of an Airbus A380 engine blade-off test, in which a fan blade is deliberately released at full thrust to show the engine contains the failure.

A short clip of Richard Feynman explaining how a train stays on its tracks, through the conical shape of wheels and how it handles curves without differentials.

A short clip from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman explains how a train stays on the track. He covers the geometry of tapered wheels that steer the train back toward the center of the rails.

Amateur footage of a Thomsonfly 757 ingesting a bird on takeoff from Manchester, with a flaming engine and a safe return, with 233 people aboard.

A clip from the 1983 BBC series Fun to Imagine in which Richard Feynman explains heat as the jiggling of atoms and how we perceive it as hot and cold.

Tom Lehrer's satirical song about Wernher von Braun, the German rocket scientist who went from the Nazi missile program to the US space program. It includes the famous line about not caring where the rockets come down.

Part one of a four-part upload of a BBC Horizon documentary featuring Richard Feynman, in which he talks about physics and looking at the world from another point of view.

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.

Tom Lehrer performs his satirical song about rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, with an introduction. It is a two-minute musical clip.

A spoof industrial promo for the Rockwell Retro Encabulator, a deadpan stream of technobabble about an imaginary machine. It is a classic engineering in-joke.

Historian Doron Swade tells the story of Charles Babbage's quest to build the Difference Engine and the construction of Difference Engine No. 2 at the Science Museum. The talk covers Babbage's motivation, his machines and Ada Lovelace's insight into the Analytical Engine.

A Consumer Reports and IIHS crash test pitting a 2009 Chevy Malibu against a 1959 Bel Air. It shows how much better modern cars protect occupants.

A 2006 Google TechTalk in which SQLite's author Richard Hipp introduces the embeddable, zero-configuration C database library. He covers its history, strengths and weaknesses, and where it beats client/server databases.

A comedy video in which a salesperson demands that a web developer fix a down website, with the two talking past each other. It won a Webby award.

A one-minute clip of Scotty from Star Trek giving advice to engineers about managing expectations in estimates. It is a comedic bit of workplace wisdom.

A short comedy video of the Turbo Encabulator, a piece of technobabble nonsense describing an imaginary machine in deadpan engineering language.

Full gameplay of .kkrieger, a first-person shooter by Farbrausch that fits into a 96KB executable by generating its textures, models and sounds procedurally.

An early 2009 tech test by Notch of an Infiniminer-style cave game running about 700 fps on a 256x256x64 tile map. It is the prototype that grew into Minecraft.

Joshua Bloch's Google Tech Talk on how to design good APIs and why it matters, with concrete principles and examples. It treats every programmer as an occasional API designer.

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.

A short clip from a Richard Feynman interview in which he explains fire, describing how burning wood releases sunlight stored by the tree, which built itself mostly from air. It showcases his curiosity and plain-spoken explanations.

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 1930s Chevrolet training film explaining the principles and development of the differential gear. It builds the idea step by step from first principles to the finished mechanism.

Code Rush is a 2000 PBS documentary following Netscape engineers during the year they open-sourced the browser as Mozilla. It shows the pressure and long hours of work in Silicon Valley at the height of the dot-com era.

A short video from the trafficwaves.org site showing how traffic jams and standing waves form, including the fight between cheaters and blockers at an exit-lane backup. It also touches on how individual driving behavior affects the flow.

A PBS clip in which Richard Feynman explains the strange nature of light and electromagnetic radiation. He conveys how little of it we actually see and how radio waves are present everywhere.

Tourist footage of the 660-ton tuned mass damper in Taipei 101 swaying during tremors from the 2008 Sichuan earthquake. The damper hangs from the 92nd floor.

The first installment of a hobbyist's video diary documenting his build of a giant walking spider-like vehicle. The footage is casual and self-shot, following the early stages of the project.

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.

Richard Feynman, in a clip from the BBC series Fun to Imagine, takes on the puzzle of why mirrors seem to swap left and right but not top and bottom.

A clip from the BBC Fun to Imagine series in which Richard Feynman is asked how magnets work and explains why 'why' questions depend on a shared framework of understanding and cannot always be answered in layman's terms.

John Allspaw and Paul Hammond's Velocity 09 talk on how Flickr achieved ten or more deploys per day through close cooperation between development and operations.

A short clip of a frog levitating inside a roughly 10 tesla magnetic coil, demonstrating diamagnetism.

A short clip of the Mythbusters demonstrating superheated water in a microwave, which can erupt violently when disturbed.

David Deutsch's TED talk arguing that humanity's survival depends on solving problems through knowledge growth. He frames people as improbable "chemical scum" capable of understanding distant quasars.

A 2008 Google Tech Talk in which Slava Pestov introduces Factor, a concatenative language influenced by Forth, Lisp and Smalltalk. It covers the interactive environment, metaprogramming, and the language's modern high-level features and libraries.

Alan Kay's TED talk on teaching ideas, in which he argues the world is not what it seems and shows children learning through programming and building their own lessons with Etoys/Squeak.

David Heinemeier Hansson builds a blog engine with Ruby on Rails in 15 minutes, the demo that launched Rails' momentum.