reference frames

A PBS Space Time episode hosted by Gabe Perez-Giz on the nature of spacetime and whether space and time are fundamental. It builds up reference frames and causality in a short, dense format.

Lex Fridman interviews Jeff Hawkins, founder of Numenta and author of On Intelligence, about the Thousand Brains Theory and reverse-engineering the neocortex. They also cover Hierarchical Temporal Memory and brain-inspired AI architectures.

Tony Hoare's InfoQ talk in which he describes introducing null references in ALGOL W in 1965 and calls it his billion-dollar mistake. He discusses language designer responsibility and run-time checks.

MIT Media Lab shows an imaging system capturing a trillion frames per second, fast enough to film light pulses travelling through objects in slow motion.

A 2018 GDC talk by NetherRealm's Michael Stallone on the engine changes, optimizations and tooling needed to roll back and re-simulate up to 8 frames in 16 ms in Mortal Kombat and Injustice 2. It is a deep dive into deterministic rollback netcode.

Matt Parker explains the history behind NTSC television running at 29.97 frames per second rather than 30, tracing it to the backward-compatible addition of color. He walks through the arithmetic behind the odd ratio.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2016 talk on lifetime safety in C++, aiming for code free of leaks and dangling pointers by default. It covers smart pointers, ownership, reference counting pitfalls and deferred reclamation resembling garbage collection.

The first episode of Clickspring's series building a John Wilding skeleton clock from raw stock in a home machine shop. It covers making the frames along with the tools needed for the job.

Ramesh Raskar presents femto-photography, a technique that captures a trillion frames per second, fast enough to show light itself moving through a scene. He discusses possible uses such as cameras that see around corners or inside the body.

Eric Weinstein interviews economist Timur Kuran on The Portal about preference falsification and how societies where people hide their real views can tip into revolutions.

Robert Miles explains reward modelling, in which an AI learns what humans want from their preference comparisons instead of a hand-written reward function. He walks through the 2017 paper on deep reinforcement learning from human preferences.

The first lecture of an MIT course on Douglas Hofstadter's Godel, Escher, Bach, covering themes like self-reference, recursion and incompleteness. The full lecture series is on YouTube.

The official music video for Tommy Tutone's 1981 hit 867-5309/Jenny. The chorus is built around a phone number.

A short clip from John Carpenter's They Live showing how the special sunglasses reveal hidden messages behind ads and media.

A short clip of Richard Feynman answering an interviewer's question about why magnets repel, explaining that a 'why' question depends on a shared framework of understanding. It illustrates how hard it is to explain fundamentals to a layperson.

Tom Scott tours the rotating room artificial gravity facility at Brandeis University's Graybiel lab. It shows how humans cope with rotation-based gravity and the odd effects such as Coriolis forces.

The Slow Mo Guys visit a lab with a camera capable of filming at 10 trillion frames per second, fast enough to see light travel. They show the setup and the resulting footage.

A scene from Children of Men in which Theo visits Nigel in the Ark of the Arts to get transit papers. It features Nigel's line "I just don't think about it" and a one-handed chorded keyboard.

A short clip from the movie Office Space in which a character insists he has people skills.

A HOPE09 talk on how modern computer chips are manufactured, from 22nm transistors to ultra-clean fabs and the tricks used to pattern tiny features with light. It frames chipmaking as hacking electrical engineering and physics.

Mirabai Knight's PyCon 2013 talk on Plover, a free cross-platform stenography engine that lets people write at up to 240 WPM on ordinary hardware, including a demo of coding by steno.

Jonathan Blow's DevGAMM 2019 talk argues that software knowledge is being lost between generations and that growing layers of abstraction could lead to a decline in technological civilization.

Dr. Jason Fung, a nephrologist, explains therapeutic fasting as a treatment for obesity and type 2 diabetes. He frames it around the two-compartment problem of fat storage and insulin resistance.

Kate Gregory argues at CppCon 2015 that C++ should be taught without starting from C: no char* strings, printf or raw arrays at first, with references before pointers.

Rick Hartley's AltiumLive keynote on differential pairs in PC boards. He argues the rules from cables and twisted pairs do not carry over, and covers which pair geometry gives the best impedance control, the right spacing, routing practice and how much skew is acceptable.

A short animated simulation comparing how Multics and Unix were developed, showing why Unix's small composable programs and pipes gave it a efficiency advantage. It frames Unix as a moonshot achievable by a small team.

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.

A two-minute video of Conway's Game of Life running inside Conway's Game of Life, built from OTCA metapixels and Golly. It zooms smoothly between scales.

Cory Doctorow's Talks at Google lecture on the coming civil war over general-purpose computing. He argues that locked-down devices, DRM, and surveillance threaten user control of computers.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on state lotteries. It argues that the claim that lotteries fund education is misleading, because the money is fungible and often diverted to general funds.

John Oliver interviews Edward Snowden about NSA surveillance, including street interviews showing people have not thought about what the government can see. The segment famously frames the issue through private photos.

Larry Hastings explains what Python's GIL is, what problems it solves and how it works, and presents his Gilectomy project to remove it, including the performance and C-extension obstacles.

A SXSW talk by W Watson that uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, with nods to Zizek, to critique popular programming languages. It argues that people choose and defend languages for emotional and ideological reasons rather than rational ones.

Kurzgesagt makes a selfish case for improving the world, arguing that helping people far away raises prosperity and innovation for everyone, including yourself. The animated video frames this as egoistic altruism and positive-sum cooperation.

Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard, starting with Musical Phonology. He draws analogies between music and linguistics, including references to Chomsky.

An excerpt of the 2005 Harvard debate in which Steven Pinker gives his prepared case on biological sex differences and the under-representation of women in science. It covers cross-cultural patterns in preferences and abilities and the overlap between male and female distributions.

hbomberguy investigates the modern flat earth movement and why people come to believe it. The video treats the community with a measured, humorous tone and looks at the social causes behind the belief.

Slaughterbots is a fictional short film, backed by Stuart Russell, depicting swarms of cheap autonomous drones that use facial recognition to assassinate targets. It was made to argue for banning autonomous weapons.

A George Carlin stand-up bit on euphemisms, tracing how language gets softened, such as shell shock becoming PTSD, until it loses its emotional force.

Raph Koster's 2014 GDC Next talk on what science says about creativity, with practical steps game designers and developers can use to be more creative. It frames creativity as applying existing patterns in new contexts.