reference frames

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.

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

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

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

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

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.

The earliest filmed version of the Turbo Encabulator technical-jargon parody, shot in the late 1970s with narrator Bud Haggert. It deadpans a stream of meaningless engineering language.

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.

Dollar Shave Club's low-budget launch ad, in which the founder jokes his way through the case for cheap mail-order razors.

Music video for Public Service Broadcasting's "Go!" from the album The Race For Space, built from NASA audio and archival material of Apollo-era voices.

A three-minute clip in which Douglas Crockford explains why he allowed the JSLint reference implementation to be used for evil. It recounts the license clause and how corporate lawyers reacted.

A two-minute clip of Richard Feynman on the difference between knowing the name of something and actually knowing it. He uses the example of knowing a bird's name in every language and still knowing nothing about the bird.

SpaceX's recap of the Falcon Heavy debut launch, with side booster landings and a Tesla Roadster with Starman sent into orbit.

Google's short promo for Project Starline, a booth that shows a life-size, three-dimensional view of the person you are talking to. It presents the technology as a magic window for friends, families and co-workers who are far apart.

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.

A short clip of Bill Hicks's stand-up bit telling marketers and advertisers to kill themselves, which is a harsh critique of advertising.

A short Whitest Kids U' Know sketch, with Spanish subtitles, in which a man repeatedly announces he wants to kill the president. It satirizes how speech and threats are policed.

Google ATAP's 2015 introduction to Project Soli, a radar-based sensor on a chip that tracks sub-millimeter hand motions for gesture interaction in small devices.

The official music video for They Might Be Giants' "Istanbul (Not Constantinople)" from the 1990 album Flood.

A 54-second clip from the film Office Space in which two coworkers talk about what they would do with a million dollars. The answers contrast blue-collar and white-collar attitudes toward work.

A short Apple promotional video about Liam, a robot that disassembles old iPhones so their materials can be recovered. It frames the robot as part of Apple's product life cycle and recycling story.

A short demo of the Deep Visualization Toolbox, which shows the activations inside a convolutional neural network as it processes live camera input. Viewers see individual units responding to edges, faces and text.

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 short BicycleDutch episode showing how Dutch protected intersections continue cycle paths through the junction without needing extra street width.

The viral Dumb Ways to Die music video, a cheerful animated song created for a Melbourne rail safety campaign. It lists absurd ways to die and ends with warnings about trains.

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.

A short MIT Aerospace Controls Lab demo from 2011 of a variable pitch quadrotor flying.

Johnny Cash's live performance of A Boy Named Sue at San Quentin in 1969, a comic country song about a man named Sue seeking revenge on his father.

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.

A short clip from Person of Interest season 2 where Root and John gain full access to The Machine and its resources. It shows the AI guiding people with targeting data.

A one-minute Fortnite parody of Apple's 1984 ad, released when Epic Games challenged the App Store and Apple removed Fortnite from iOS. It frames Apple as the monopolist.

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.

The Rubberbandits perform "Horse Outside", a comic Irish song about a horse waiting outside, from the RTE show Republic of Telly.

The 1957 BBC Panorama April Fools' hoax report showing a Swiss family harvesting spaghetti from trees, republished by Switzerland Tourism. It is a short deadpan newsreel clip with a plummy narrator that famously fooled viewers who knew little about pasta.

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.

A short scene from the Amazon series Patriot in which a spy character gives a deadpan, jargon-filled lecture about pipes and nut plate spacing. It is a comedic bit of corporate-cover absurdity.

A two-minute scene from It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia in which Mac and Dennis discuss the unspoken implication of going out on a boat. It is the full scene, unedited.

A one-minute clip from the 1992 film Sneakers in which characters defeat a voice-authentication system by splicing recorded phrases, ending on the line "My voice is my passport." It was posted to illustrate a post on government surveillance.

A movie clip from Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home in which Dr. McCoy, appalled by primitive 20th-century medicine, tries to smuggle Chekov out of a hospital.

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.