reference frames

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.

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

Anders Hejlsberg whiteboards how compilers are taught versus how modern ones are actually built. He explains the shift to compilers as services with incremental, error-tolerant, IDE-oriented design, as in Roslyn and TypeScript.

A 1983 Los Angeles lecture by KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov on how the Soviets carried out ideological subversion of target societies through propaganda. He walks through demoralization and normalization stages.

Dan Britt lectures on the history of climate, covering orbital cycles, ice ages and conditions millions of years ago. It frames current climate debate with deep-time context.

A short clip of Richard Feynman on the difference between merely knowing how to reason mathematically and understanding why physical theories work. He discusses holding multiple equivalent ideas and guessing new laws.

Guy Kawasaki's UC Berkeley Haas talk on the top ten mistakes entrepreneurs make, covering a startup from inception to exit.

David Graeber's RSA lecture on bullshit jobs, expanding on his essay about why so many people do work they believe is pointless. He discusses what this says about the modern economy and the way society values work.

Clayton Christensen explains his theory of disruptive innovation at Oxford's Said Business School, using examples from steel, Toyota, Sony, Walmart and Godrej. He applies the theory to why some economies stagnate and others grow.