relay trick

Mentalist Derren Brown plays nine skilled English chess players, including four grandmasters, simultaneously on his TV show. The trick behind the apparent win is the point of the segment.

Magician Kostya Kimlat performs a card trick on Penn & Teller: Fool Us that fooled the duo, using Penn's favorite card trick as a basis.

Patrick Stewart on the BBC's Parkinson talk show talks humorously about going bald, how it affected his career and relationships, and how he came to accept it.

Mark Handley of UCL explains, with simulation visualizations, how early Starlink satellites without inter-satellite links could still give low-latency wide-area communication by hopping via ground relays. He shows it can beat fibre on many long paths.

A two-minute clip from The Devil Wears Prada in which Miranda Priestly explains how the cerulean color of a casual sweater traces back through runway designers to the bargain bin. It is a monologue about how high fashion trickles down to mass-market clothing.

Patrick Boyle's deadpan account of Saudi Arabia's Neom and The Line megaproject, a planned 170 km linear city that has been scaled back to a fraction of its size. He covers the feasibility problems and the financing.

Patrick Boyle analyzes SpaceX's IPO prospectus, covering its financials, speculative products, AI business, related-party dealings, compensation, and a governance structure with minimal shareholder rights.

Brad Fitzpatrick records himself struggling to silence a set of first-generation Nest Protect smoke alarms that keep beeping and triggering one another.

Ian Hubert shows quick, unconventional tricks for greenscreen compositing in Blender, as a follow-up to his motion tracking video.

A 2016 conference talk by a mobile game CEO on the tricks of free-to-play monetization, including player profiles and how to target high-spending whales.

Technology Connections takes apart a 1970 Wurlitzer 3400 jukebox to show how electromechanical relays and switches automated its behavior without a computer.

Chris Seaton talks about JRuby+Truffle, explaining how the Truffle and Graal combination optimises the tricky parts of Ruby and why it outperforms other Ruby implementations.

Rhonda Patrick gives an IHMC talk on how genetic variation affects micronutrient absorption and metabolism, and how diet changes gene expression. It also covers epigenetics, including heritable changes, and stress tolerance.

Patrick Boyle examines SpaceX's planned IPO at a roughly $1.75 trillion valuation. He covers the merging of other Musk companies, orbital data center claims and the fast-track index rules that may help the listing.

Patrick Winston's long-running MIT lecture on public speaking teaches heuristic rules for talks. It covers how to start, use time and place, boards, props and slides, and how to inform, persuade and finish.

Technology Connections takes a long, detailed look at how a 1970s electromechanical pinball machine works, from relays to stepper motors and mechanical logic. It is the first part of a series.

Sandi Metz's RailsConf 2013 talk offers practical guidelines for deciding what to test and how, so tests stay cheap and stable. She argues for testing the public interface rather than implementation and using mocks appropriately.

Technology Connections explains how dishwashers work and how to use them well, including detergent use, the prewash cycle and why pre-rinsing hurts. It follows his earlier dishwasher videos.

A roughly hour-long live hacking session in which Go team members Andrew Gerrand and Brad Fitzpatrick write the new version of tip.golang.org, the site serving leading-edge Go documentation. It is unedited pair programming on a real Go project.

David Nolen presents Om Next, the redesign of the ClojureScript Om library, drawing on Relay, Netflix's JSONGraph and Datomic. He covers the tradeoffs in handling the client-server boundary over immutable data.

A three-minute clip of magician Ricky Jay performing a card manipulation routine, including table faro shuffles. The routine builds in intensity and ends with a surprising finish.

A Channel 4 News undercover investigation in which Cambridge Analytica executives are filmed discussing bribes, honeypots, fake identities and manipulating elections around the world.

Mathologer shows a simple idea, the commutator, that lets anyone who can solve the first layer design their own full Rubik's cube solution. The same idea carries over to other symmetric twisty puzzles such as the Megaminx.

Technology Connections takes apart the step-by-step electromechanical logic of a 1970s pinball machine. He shows how relays, steppers and switches track state and score without electronics.

Steve Mould explains motion amplification and video magnification, techniques that find tiny changes in video invisible to the eye and exaggerate them. He covers the MIT research and industrial uses such as diagnosing vibrating machinery.

Chef Chris Young shows a simplified triple-cooked method for making crisp frozen fries in an air fryer, based on Heston Blumenthal's technique.

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 CBC News clip in which GMO advocate Patrick Moore claims glyphosate, the key ingredient of Monsanto's Roundup, is safe to drink, then declines when offered a glass.

Patrick Boyle examines why birth rates are falling in nearly every country and argues the standard explanations do not hold up. He presents data suggesting fewer couples forming is a major driver.

A ten-minute card-magic act by Dani DaOrtiz performed on Penn & Teller: Fool Us in 2022. It is built on timing, misdirection and psychology, and the method defeated the show's hosts.

Technology Connections explains why car turn signals appear to drift out of sync at stoplights and how thermal and other flasher designs work. It also covers how synchronization could be achieved.

A three-minute demo of a series circuit with three LEDs that behaves in a surprising way, posed as a question of how it works.

A short clip of Louis CK on Conan riffing that everything is amazing and nobody is happy, about complaining over modern wonders like air travel and wifi. The uploader added a note about the comedian's later misconduct.

A two-minute clip from the documentary The Fog of War in which Robert McNamara recalls Fidel Castro explaining how close the world came to nuclear war during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

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.

Michael Steil's 33c3 talk explains essentially everything about the Game Boy: CPU, video hardware, peripherals, and the tricks used by games and demos. It revives the era of counting clock cycles around hardware limits.

Rob Pike's Google I/O 2012 talk shows how goroutines and channels solve tricky concurrency problems with simple Go code. It features a playful goroutine demo with gophers passing messages and a search engine example.

Andrei Alexandrescu's CppCon 2019 talk revisits sorting, showing how branchless tricks, hybrid strategies and a cost metric can speed up std::sort-style algorithms on modern hardware.

Michael Hendricks of PriceCharting shares tricks and pain points from running Prolog in production for 18 months at Strange Loop. It argues Prolog is a productive modern language beyond logic puzzles, and includes a demo of changing code mid-execution.

Morphcat Games explains how they fit Micro Mages, a full-featured NES game, into 40 kilobytes. It covers compression of sprites and level layouts and other space-saving tricks.