power law

Veritasium explains why many real-world systems follow power laws rather than normal distributions. It covers self-organized criticality, with simulations of sandpiles, magnetism and forest fires.

Casey Muratori's lecture, originally given at the Technical University of Madrid, arguing that Conway's Law is the only viable candidate for a true law of software architecture. He explains how software mimics the organization over time, using examples like Windows' multiple volume controls.

Chuck Moore, inventor of Forth, presents GreenArrays' 144-core asynchronous chip at Strange Loop 2013. He explains how idle cores draw almost no power and how tight code minimizes energy use.

Vsauce's explainer on Zipf's law, the pattern in which the frequency of a word is inversely related to its rank. It shows the pattern across many domains and discusses why it remains unexplained.

Part one of Errol Morris's First Person interview with Murray Richman, a New York lawyer who defends mob figures. He talks about how he sees the law and his clients.

Isaac Arthur explores space-based solar power, in which satellites beam energy down via microwaves to rectennas on Earth. He discusses feasibility, profitability and its role in spurring space colonization.

Olympic track cyclist Robert Forstemann tries to pedal hard enough to power a 700 W toaster and toast a slice of bread. The film frames it as a comparison of how much energy people consume versus how much they can generate.

Matt Parker examines claims that Biden's 2020 vote counts violate Benford's Law, explaining the law and why it often does not apply to precinct-level election data.

A short clip of the Snowbird, a human-powered ornithopter built by University of Toronto students. On August 2, 2010 it sustained altitude and airspeed for 19.3 seconds, the first such flight.

A brief toast by lithography expert Chris Mack at SPIE Advanced Lithography 2014, humorously declaring the end of Moore's Law. His argument centers on the cost per transistor no longer falling.

Disney Research's demo of quasistatic cavity resonance, which uses a purpose-built room or cabinet to generate magnetic fields that deliver kilowatts of power wirelessly to mobile receivers inside.

Practical Engineering explains what a black start is: restarting a power grid after total collapse. It shows why most plants need outside power to start and why rebuilding a synchronized grid is delicate and high-stakes.

Bryan Cantrill's Scale By The Bay 2019 talk on software after Moore's Law. He covers the end of easy scaling and the move toward specialized, emerging architectures.

Kenneth Finnegan shows how USB-C Power Delivery trigger boards like the ZY12PDN negotiate 5V to 20V so you can power projects from a USB-C charger, including the color coding for each voltage.

A one-minute clip from the 1966 film A Man for All Seasons. Thomas More refuses to arrest the Devil, saying he would give even the Devil the benefit of law for his own safety's sake.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on the state of the US power grid, why it needs fixing, and the risks of aging infrastructure.

Lex Fridman interviews legendary chip architect Jim Keller about Moore's Law, microprocessor design, and first-principles thinking. Keller draws on his work at AMD, Apple, Tesla and Intel, discussing instruction sets, transistor budgets, and self-driving.

Jim Keller gives a UC Berkeley EECS colloquium arguing that Moore's Law is not dead. He surveys upcoming technologies and the multiple innovation curves that can keep transistor density and performance scaling.

In this TEDxBerlin talk, environmental activist Michael Shellenberger explains why he changed from opposing nuclear power to advocating it, after looking at the evidence on Chernobyl, Fukushima and air pollution.

Engineer Stuff Made Here builds two new supposedly unpickable locks with different designs and sends them to the Lock Picking Lawyer to see whether they can be defeated. The video covers the novel anti-picking mechanisms.

An Adam Ruins Everything segment on the real facts of the McDonald's hot coffee lawsuit, covering the severity of the burns and the corporate PR campaign that painted it as frivolous.

A satirical 'honest' government ad from The Juice Media about Australia's 2018 Assistance and Access anti-encryption bill. It lays out in blunt terms what the law would let authorities do.

Technology Connections explains the difference between power (watts) and energy (watt-hours) and why confusing them leads to errors. It runs about 52 minutes and uses everyday examples.

Flanders and Swann perform 'First and Second Law', a comic song about the laws of thermodynamics, from their 1964 stage show At the Drop of Another Hat. It sets the first and second laws to a deadpan call-and-response routine.

Footage of Richard Box's art installation in which fluorescent tubes light up in the ground under high voltage power lines, showing the electric fields they produce.

A short clip of a jet-powered flying lawnmower, the Sky Cutter, and related RC flying lawnmowers.

A short 2000s Apple commercial for the PowerMac G4 that plays on the computer being classed as a weapon under US export restrictions, with tanks as imagery.

A LockPickingLawyer video showing that a padlock sold as an Amazon's Choice high-security product can be opened trivially, with no picking needed.

Lawrence Lessig's Talks at Google presentation based on his book Republic, Lost, arguing that money in politics corrupts Congress and eroded public trust, and outlining what could be done about it. It supports the argument with data on political donations.

In this TED talk, Lawrence Lessig argues that American politics is corrupted by Congress's dependence on funding from a tiny fraction of citizens. He uses rapid-fire visuals and calls for a bipartisan push to reclaim the Republic.

The Eames Office's 1977 film Powers of Ten starts at a picnic in Chicago and zooms out by a factor of ten every ten seconds to the edge of the universe. It then zooms inward to a proton in a carbon atom.

Practical Engineering's explanation of the February 2021 Texas winter storm and the resulting power grid outage. It lays out the facts about ERCOT, the grid's isolation, and how generation across fuel types failed in the cold.

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.

An illustrated 23-minute summary of David Friedman's talk based on The Machinery of Freedom. It describes how law, police and courts could work as market services in a stateless society, covering private law, polycentric law and objections.

The first of Richard Feynman's 1964 Cornell Messenger Lectures, The Character of Physical Law, focusing on the law of gravitation. Feynman builds up from planetary motion to the nature of physical laws.

A short SIGBOVIK 2017 presentation by Tom Wildenhain showing that PowerPoint animations are Turing complete, with a working Turing machine built in slides. The talk is delivered deadpan as a serious research result.

A feature-length film by the Makani team chronicling their thirteen-year effort to build energy kites that harvest wind power, with footage from test sites in Hawaii, California and Norway. It shows the engineering, the team and the eventual shutdown.

Shriram Krishnamurthi's PWLConf 2019 talk on the formal notion of expressive power of programming languages, based on Felleisen's paper. It explains how to tell when a feature adds power by whether emulating it requires global rewriting.

Tom Wildenhain's guest lecture for CMU's Esoteric Programming Languages course shows that PowerPoint transitions and slides are Turing complete without macros, building up to a mind-bending fractal ending.

Seeker's Focal Point short documentary on ASML's extreme ultraviolet lithography machines, which make the most advanced chips. It shows how plasma-generated 13.5 nm light is used to push Moore's Law forward.