register-based vm

Dan Bornstein's Google I/O 2008 talk on the internals of Dalvik, the virtual machine that runs Android code. It covers the motivation for its design, the dex format and its register-based interpreter, plus tips for writing code that suits the platform.

Cliff Click of Azul Systems gives a Google Tech Talk on running Java business applications on a machine with about a thousand cores. He covers hardware and software codesign, including garbage collection hardware and the JIT.

A three-minute demo of ProFORMA, a system from Cambridge that builds textured 3D models live from a video of an object.

A Google Tech Talk by the author of Kilim, a Java library for lightweight actor-style message passing. It argues that message passing can replace shared-memory concurrency and claims performance competitive with or better than Erlang for huge numbers of actors.

Douglas Crockford's 2009 Google tech talk on the good and bad parts of JavaScript, based on his book. He argues for using a reliable subset of the language and avoiding its flawed features.

The first video in potholer54's climate series, giving a basic look at how climate scientists infer that man-made carbon gases are changing the climate. It is a short explainer meant to present the scientific evidence plainly.

Alan Kay demonstrates GRaIL, a graphical input language system from around 1968 in which hand-drawn strokes become boxes, connections and dataflow-style programs.

David Rock gives a Google Tech Talk based on his book Your Brain at Work, using neuroscience to explain why focus and productivity are hard at the office. He gives strategies for managing mental energy and distraction.

Researcher Kamal Meattle describes how an arrangement of three common houseplants placed in specific spots can measurably clean the air in a home or office. It is a short TED talk based on his work in a plant-filled building.

A clip from the film The Lives of Others showing Wiesler as a ruthless, efficient Stasi interrogator who uses a recorded interrogation to train new officers. HN uses other scenes from the same film as well.

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.

An edited excerpt of Steve Jobs introducing Mac OS X at Macworld San Francisco in 2000. It covers the Aqua interface, Quartz graphics built on PDF, and the Classic, Carbon and Cocoa application environments.

A 2006 promotional video for sCrAmBlEd?HaCkZ!, a music software project that analyzes and reassembles sampled audio and video in real time, tied to themes of sampling and copyright.

Neuroscientist Beau Lotto runs the audience through color and pattern illusions to show that perception is shaped by context and evolutionary history rather than being a direct readout of the world. The talk is playful and hands-on, and it argues that the brain interprets ambiguous signals.

A roughly ten-minute demo of Microsoft's Intentional Programming research system, showing its editor and an unusual way of working with code. It is the first of two clips cut from a longer video.

Matthias Wandel shows his wooden machine that adds binary numbers using marbles. It demonstrates computation with purely mechanical logic.

A short 2007 demo of Pizza Party, a command line program that orders Domino's pizza from a UNIX-like terminal. The video shows the designers placing an order using the software.

Part 2 of an old Microsoft Research demo of Intentional Programming, showing the compiler side of a system that stores programs as abstract structure rather than text. The uploader says the companion editor clip is clearer.

A kiai master offers a 5000 dollar challenge that he can beat any MMA fighter, and his supposed energy techniques have no effect on the fighter.

A one-minute UK road safety advert showing a family car crash in which an unbelted rear passenger kills his mother in a head-on collision. It is a notoriously graphic public information film.