ridley scott

A 4K upscaled restoration of Apple's 1984 Macintosh Super Bowl ad directed by Ridley Scott. The restoration combines various sources and an AI upscaler.

A sketch from the Scottish comedy show Burnistoun in which two men cannot get a voice-recognition elevator to understand the word eleven in their accents.

Tom Scott plays the Royal Game of Ur against British Museum curator Irving Finkel, who deciphered its rules from a cuneiform tablet. Finkel teaches the game and explains its history as the oldest playable board game.

Jason Scott's DerbyCon 2012 talk on rescuing the Prince of Persia source code from old floppy disks, working with the game's author Jordan Mechner. It is a story of digital archaeology and recovering data from ancient media.

Scott Meyers' keynote at DConf 2014, drawing on 25 years of C++ experience to offer the D language community a plea about what it should avoid. It centers on the accumulated complexity and pitfalls of C++ as a cautionary tale.

Scott Wlaschin shows how statically typed functional languages, using F# examples, can model a business domain so that invalid states cannot be represented. The type system acts almost like an instant unit test at compile time.

Scott Chacon introduces Git by showing what happens under the hood for basic commands: staging, committing, data storage, branching, merging and pushing. He contrasts it with Subversion and shows history viewing with log.

Gil Scott-Heron's 1970 spoken-word piece, in an official audio upload. It contrasts the Apollo moon program with poverty and neglect at home.

Tom Scott's Royal Institution discourse on science communication in the age of social media, how recommendation algorithms shape popularity, and why view counts can matter more than truth. It includes a segment on parasocial relationships.

Jason Scott's DEF CON 18 talk tells the history of software piracy over thirty years, centered on the feuds and drama among rival warez groups. It is full of archival material and insider lingo.

Scott Galloway's TED talk uses data to argue that young Americans are financially worse off than earlier generations, calling it a great intergenerational theft. He covers root causes and what could change it.

Second half of a 2017 Computer History Museum live event in which former Apple software chief Scott Forstall is interviewed by John Markoff about creating the original iPhone. He tells stories about Steve Jobs and the team and the origins of the iPhone software.

Tom Scott's Ignite London talk about a flash mob that went very wrong.

Scott Aaronson's Harvard CMSA talk traces what mathematical truths are knowable, from Godel and Turing to the Busy Beaver function. He covers recent work on Busy Beaver values.

Scott Galloway's DLD15 talk assessing the competitive positions of Amazon, Apple, Facebook and Google. He argues about where each is strong and weak, including Amazon's need for physical retail.

A one-minute clip of Scotty from Star Trek giving advice to engineers about managing expectations in estimates. It is a comedic bit of workplace wisdom.

The famous 1984 Super Bowl commercial introducing the Apple Macintosh, directed by Ridley Scott and based on Orwell's novel.

Tom Scott shows a robot double of himself, built from an Engineered Arts Mesmer robot, delivering a VPN advertisement in his place.

Tom Scott explains why electronic voting is a bad idea. Elections must be trusted by everyone and attacks on software scale in ways attacks on paper do not, so open source or blockchain fixes do not solve it.

Tom Scott writes a more honest VPN ad, with the sponsor's name redacted, and explains why the typical claims in VPN advertising are misleading. He notes the sponsor was not happy about it.

Tom Scott investigates the claim that the microwave was invented to heat hamsters, and interviews James Lovelock about freezing and microwave-thawing hamsters in the 1950s. It traces early magnetron uses beyond radar.

The first episode of Jason Scott's eight-part BBS documentary, covering the predecessors and beginnings of the dial-up bulletin board system. It includes interviews with pioneers such as Ward Christensen and Randy Suess, who created the first dial-up BBS in 1978.

Tom Scott explains the design of the British BS 1363 plug and socket, including fuses, shutters and safety features, and why he thinks it beats other plugs.

Tom Scott examines why YouTubers must declare paid endorsements while TV, film and other media face no such rule, comparing regulations in the UK and US.

Tom Scott tells how John Reber's plan to dam San Francisco Bay was disproved by the Army Corps of Engineers' giant hydraulic Bay Model in Sausalito. The model showed the plan would have been dangerously wrong.

Tom Scott stands by a construction site and explains why reversing vehicles now use a white-noise hiss instead of beeping. The sound is easier to locate directionally and less annoying to neighbours.

Scott Manley covers how GPS works and how civilian accuracy went from a planned 100 meters to about one meter. He explains the technology and the removal of restrictions that made this possible.

Tom Scott explains why confetti and snow wreck video quality, using interframe compression and bitrate. He demonstrates it live by changing the quality on screen.

Tom Scott argues that grammatical gender is a silly concept and that the singular 'they' is an established gender-neutral pronoun. The description carries later corrections and reflections he added in 2019.

Tom Scott makes the difference between a million and a billion dollars tangible by using distance on a road trip instead of volume. The drive makes the scale of a billion intuitively felt.

Tom Scott and Matt Gray talk at Electromagnetic Field about making Emojli, an emoji-only messenger that began as a joke, how it was built and why they never want to do it again.

Tom Scott visits the USPS Remote Encoding Center in Salt Lake City, where keyers decipher mail images machines cannot read. It shows the lengths taken to decode bad handwriting.

Tom Scott visits a rotating house near San Diego and explains how electricity, gas and water keep working on the rotating part. It includes a 3D render of the utility connection system.

Tom Scott describes trying ChatGPT to fix his Gmail labels and being unsettled by how capable it was. He argues that we cannot know where we are on the technology curve, comparing it to Napster.

Tom Scott explains how he built his emoji keyboard, which turned out to be a series of bodged-together tools including AutoHotkey and LuaMacros. He tells stories about the value of quick-and-dirty solutions.

Scott Manley looks at SpinLaunch, which aims to throw launch vehicles out of a spinning launcher at hypersonic speed. He covers its recent Mach 1 test of a one-third scale launcher and the engineering problems that remain.

Tom Scott explains phatic expressions such as hello, thank you and how are you, which carry social meaning rather than information, and why replies like no problem can seem rude to some people.

Tom Scott features Kurtis Baute inside a sealed homemade biodome as carbon dioxide builds up, showing how stale air with elevated CO2 affects cognitive function. Sources include studies on CO2 and cognitive scores.

Tom Scott visits the Swiss Military Museum to see the last surviving 1970s tank-driving simulator. It uses a real camera moving over a miniature model landscape rather than any computer graphics.

Tom Scott visits Penistone to explain the Scunthorpe problem, showing why naive web and profanity filters block innocent words.