reference frames

A how-to video on datamoshing, the glitch-art technique of removing keyframes so that motion data smears across video. It walks through the tools needed, such as ffmpegx and Avidemux, though the author notes parts are outdated.

A one-minute clip from the movie The Big Hit showing a gangster explaining how a trace buster works.

Malcolm Gladwell's TED talk on how Howard Moskowitz found that there is no single perfect spaghetti sauce. He draws a larger point about choice, preference and happiness.

Ted Nelson demonstrates Xanadu Space, his software for representing hypertext in three-dimensional space with linked, referenced content fragments.

Peter Seibel's 2006 Google TechTalk on Practical Common Lisp, framed by the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis and Paul Graham's Blub paradox. It shows Lisp features such as condition restarts and its generic-function object system.

Johnny Lee demonstrates head tracking with a Wii remote and a head-mounted pair of IR LEDs, so a screen acts like a window into a 3D scene as your head moves.

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.

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.

Australian comedy group Axis of Awesome perform a sketch showing that dozens of pop hits share the same four chords. It was recorded at the 2009 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

A 2007 Google Tech Talk in which Bryan Cantrill demonstrates DTrace and explains how it improves debugging of both development and live production systems.

A short product demo of Dabble DB, a web tool for importing, entering and manipulating structured data with little effort. It was built in Smalltalk and later acquired by Twitter.

Karl Sims's 1994 demonstration of evolved virtual creatures: block-bodied creatures whose bodies and controllers are evolved through selection, mutation and recombination to swim, walk and compete.

The climactic lesson scene from the 1983 film WarGames, in which the computer learns that the only winning move in nuclear war is not to play. It includes the character entering zero players and the famous closing line.

A clip in which Eben Moglen tells how he grew up when software was freer and how his path crossed Richard Stallman's. He describes how they came to work together to make software free again.

A short clip of economist Milton Friedman discussing the dynamics of illegal immigration and its relationship with the welfare state. It is part one of two.

A clip of George Carlin riffing on advertising and the nonsense around it, taken from a longer piece tied to the Zeitgeist movie.

A short clip from the BBC sitcom Yes, Prime Minister in which Jim Hacker explains which kind of person reads which British newspaper. It is a satirical take on press readership and bias.

A live 2007 performance of Todd Snider's song 'Statistician's Blues' at the Great American Music Hall. The song satirizes statistics and how readily people believe them.

Ten minutes of ultra-slow-motion footage of bullet impacts filmed at about one million frames per second by Werner Mehl of Kurzzeit. It includes hollow points in ballistics gel and impacts on glass.

A short demo showing slow 2D drawing in the Windows 7 GUI compared with XP. It attributes the slowdown to the display driver model lacking hardware accelerated GDI.

The official music video for Daft Punk's Harder, Better, Faster, Stronger, taken from Discovery. It is a chapter of the anime film Interstella 5000 supervised by Leiji Matsumoto.

A fan-made music video for Jonathan Coulton's song 'Code Monkey', about the life of a programmer, using World of Warcraft footage. It was made by Mike Spiff Booth.

The official music video for The Chemical Brothers' Star Guitar, directed by Michel Gondry. Visuals of a passing landscape are synced to elements of the music.

A Little Britain sketch featuring the 'Computer says no' catchphrase, in which a clerk refuses requests by deferring to her computer.

Julia Ecklar's recording of "The Eternal Flame," a filk song about God writing the universe in Lisp, written by Bob Kanefsky. It is a geek-humor song set to a familiar tune.

Footage of Bungie's Jason Jones revealing Halo to the public at Macworld on July 21, 1999. It shows the early third-person version of the game.

A compilation of the first four iPhone commercials from the June 2007 launch. The ads walk through using the device and stress real web browsing.

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 three-minute clip of Dwight D. Eisenhower's farewell address of January 17, 1961. In it he warns of the unwarranted influence of the military-industrial complex.

The closing scene of Ratatouille where critic Anton Ego delivers his review, reflecting on the role of critics and the value of new things.

A one-minute 2007 clip of Barack Obama, during his campaign, opposing warrantless wiretaps. It was later reposted with a campaign call to action.

The classic MrWeebl animated music video Badgers, a short looping song of badgers, a mushroom and a snake. It is a staple of early internet absurdist humor.

Raw footage of nerdcore rapper Monzy performing outside Stanford's computer science building, shot for the documentary Nerdcore for Life. The set includes his song about the kill -9 Unix command.

The Monty Python sketch in which a man uses a mistranslated Hungarian phrasebook with absurd results, followed by the courtroom scene.

A segment from the animated film The Twelve Tasks of Asterix, in which Asterix must get Permit A 38 from a maze-like building run by unhelpful bureaucrats. He wins by asking for a nonexistent permit.

The opening credit sequence of the 1960s British spy series The Prisoner, with Patrick McGoohan. It is a short intro to a cult TV show.

A short classic Sesame Street clip in which a mother sends her young daughter to the store to buy a loaf of bread, a container of milk and a stick of butter.

A short demo of Sun Microsystems' Looking Glass, a 3D desktop GUI concept for a future operating system.

An Onion News Network satirical panel segment debating whether the government should stop pouring money into a giant desert hole during a recession.

A Red Dwarf clip where Kryten fixes a toaster and finds it to be the most annoying machine in the universe, endlessly offering toast.