range voting

A six-minute explainer from Undefined Behavior on range (score) voting. It follows an earlier video on Arrow's Theorem and shows how range voting seems to satisfy the criteria Arrow's Theorem says no ranked system can.

Tom Scott explains why electronic voting is a bad idea. Elections must be trusted by everyone and attacks on software scale in ways attacks on paper do not, so open source or blockchain fixes do not solve it.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why electronic voting is a bad idea, arguing that paper ballots are transparent, auditable and hard to tamper with at scale. He covers why moving voting to phones, tablets or computers undermines trust and verifiability.

An animated simulation comparing single-winner voting methods such as plurality, instant runoff and STAR. Colored regions show which candidate wins as a randomized electorate shifts across a two-dimensional political space, building on Ka-Ping Yee's earlier diagrams.

The Center for Election Science explains favorite betrayal in instant-runoff voting: in some elections, ranking your favorite first can cause your least favorite to win. It contrasts this with plurality voting's spoiler problem.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on US voting machines, covering how they work, their security weaknesses, and how elections could be made more secure.

A John Oliver Last Week Tonight segment on voting access in the US, covering how some states are making voting less equal. It is a comedic news commentary piece.

Chris Granger presents Eve, a programming environment designed to be approachable for humans, at Strange Loop 2015. The talk covers the project's approach and design ideas.

A short CGP Grey explainer on the alternative vote (instant runoff voting) versus first past the post, made around the 2011 UK referendum. It shows how ranked ballots are tallied and why they avoid spoiler effects.

CGP Grey explains the Single Transferable Vote, a proportional ranked-ballot system, and why politicians have little incentive to adopt it. It is a short animated explainer of how multi-winner ranked voting works.

CGP Grey explains Mixed-Member Proportional representation, the system used in New Zealand where voters get two votes. It covers how it differs from first-past-the-post.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science shows that a plain laser diode can measure sub-micron vibrations from centimeters away using self-mixing interferometry, and can also be used for range-finding.

The Doomsday Machine scene from Stanley Kubrick's 1964 film Dr. Strangelove, in which the Soviet doomsday device is explained.

A four-minute clip from Dr. Strangelove in which the President and General Turgidson argue over the 'mineshaft gap' after a nuclear war. Peter Sellers and George C. Scott play it as Cold War satire.

Numberphile interviews cryptographer Ron Rivest about end-to-end verifiable voting. He explains how homomorphic encryption and receipts let a voter confirm their ballot was counted without being able to prove how they voted to anyone else.

Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang, gives a funny and opinionated Strange Loop talk on the tangled state of software: build tools, package managers, entropy and the physical limits of computation. He argues for ideas like naming things by content hash and throwing away your first version.

Michael Hendricks of PriceCharting shares tricks and pain points from running Prolog in production for 18 months at Strange Loop. It argues Prolog is a productive modern language beyond logic puzzles, and includes a demo of changing code mid-execution.

Evan Czaplicki's Strange Loop 2014 talk surveys the many formulations of functional reactive programming and how they relate historically and theoretically. It then shows how Elm's variant enables hot-swapping and its time-traveling debugger.

Jon Moore's Strange Loop 2017 talk argues that rate limiting is the wrong tool for protecting services from noisy clients. He proposes concurrency-based capacity management and quotas instead.

Aditya Siram introduces ATS, a statically typed ML-like language that compiles to C and offers type-safe pointer arithmetic and a full proof language. The Strange Loop talk shows off C interop, concurrency and verification features with non-trivial examples.

Michael Arntzenius's Strange Loop talk on Datafun, a functional query language that brings database-style querying into a general-purpose language. It discusses bridging database theory and programming languages.

InRangeTV's controlled mud test of an AKM, covering it in mud and testing whether it still fires, in a series that also tested the M1, M14 and AR-15.

Strange Parts spends four months, seven custom circuit boards and several disassembled iPhones adding a working headphone jack to an iPhone 7 in China. The build is documented in detail.

CGP Grey explains first-past-the-post voting and why it pushes elections toward two dominant parties. It is the first in his series on electoral systems.

Kirsten Dirksen visits retired mailman Russ Finch in Alliance, Nebraska, who grows oranges, figs and pomegranates in a backyard greenhouse without paying for heat. The greenhouse uses the stable temperature of the earth, with underground earth tubes, to heat and cool itself.

The climactic orange juice futures trading scene from the film Trading Places, in which the heroes corner the market on the trading floor.

Matt Parker on Numberphile explains the strange properties of spheres in higher dimensions, such as how they poke out of their bounding boxes. It uses Pythagoras to build intuition for 4D and beyond.

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.

Evan Czaplicki, creator of Elm, discusses the hard parts of running an open source project: online community conflict, why its patterns arise, and a cultural history of open source. He offers ideas for more civil, productive communication.

Aditya Siram introduces Shen, a small hosted Lisp with macros, a built-in Prolog and an optional type system. The talk demos a full web app moving between functional, logic and imperative styles, including turning JSON into a type with macros.

Richard Feldman describes introducing Elm into a mixed React and jQuery front-end in production, and why the result was reliable, clean and fast enough to make the back-end team jealous.

CGP Grey explains split-brain patients, where severing the corpus callosum lets the two hemispheres act independently. He uses this to explore the idea of two minds in one head.

Dirk Hohndel explains why the Subsurface dive log project migrated from Gtk to Qt, the obstacles encountered, and advice for other applications frustrated with Gtk. It is a linux.conf.au 2014 talk.

Chris Granger, creator of Light Table and the Eve language, gives a Berkeley data science lecture on what computation and programming might look like in ten years. He covers the path that led to Eve and ends with demos.

Nicholas Ormrod's CppCon 2016 talk on how Facebook optimizes std::string with its open-source replacement fbstring. It covers storage layout tradeoffs, small string optimization and memory allocation behavior.

CGP Grey explains how the 2015 UK general election showed the flaws of first-past-the-post voting, with parties like UKIP winning many votes but few seats.

Jon Ronson, author of The Psychopath Test, gives a TED talk on the blurry line between sane and crazy and on psychopathy as a spectrum, with stories of how the label gets applied.

A Last Week Tonight segment on how century-old Supreme Court decisions left U.S. territories such as Puerto Rico, Guam and American Samoa without meaningful representation. It mixes comedy with a history of their legal status.

Nerdwriter1 shows how rearranging the scenes of the film Passengers, so the audience shares the female lead's confusion, would change the movie. It draws on discussion of the original script.

Engineering Explained uses physics to show why today's electric cars, including Teslas, are poor at towing, pointing to battery energy density and weight. It examines Cybertruck and F-150 towing claims.