rock

The Schoolhouse Rock! cartoon song 'I'm Just a Bill', in which a bill explains how it travels through Congress to become law.

A Chris Rock sketch giving comedic advice on how to behave during police encounters to avoid getting hurt.

A spoof industrial promo for the Rockwell Retro Encabulator, a deadpan stream of technobabble about an imaginary machine. It is a classic engineering in-joke.

Footage of DC-X Flight 8 from July 1995 at White Sands, in which the Delta Clipper Experimental reusable rocket turned over into a re-entry profile and re-oriented itself for landing.

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.

Short footage of the 1983 Soyuz T-10-1 pad fire, in which the launch escape tower pulled the crew away seconds before the rocket exploded.

Tom Lehrer performs his satirical song about rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, with an introduction. It is a two-minute musical clip.

Tom Lehrer performs his satirical song about rocket scientist Wernher von Braun, with an introduction, in a short clip posted for the Apollo 11 anniversary. It lampoons von Braun's moral flexibility.

The official music video for Blues Traveler's song Hook, remastered in HD. The song is known for using the melody of Pachelbel's Canon while its lyrics comment on how hooks work.

The official remastered music video for Queen's Another One Bites the Dust from The Game (1980).

Comedian and cellist Rob Paravonian rants about having to play Pachelbel's Canon in D, and shows how many pop songs reuse its chord progression. It was recorded live at Penn State.

The full webcast of SpaceX's Falcon 1 Flight 4, the first privately developed liquid-fueled rocket to reach orbit, on 28 September 2008. It includes the crew's cheering and Elon Musk's statement afterward.

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.

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.

A Hitachi promotional cartoon in the style of Schoolhouse Rock explaining perpendicular magnetic recording for hard drives.

A short That Mitchell and Webb Look sketch in which a rocket scientist and a brain surgeon trade jibes over whose job is harder. It is a BBC comedy clip from 2009.

Nate Harrison's 2004 video history of the Amen Break, a six-second drum sample from a 1969 b-side that became the basis of hip-hop sampling, jungle and drum and bass. It is also a meditation on cultural ownership and creativity.

Carl Sagan's narration of the Pale Blue Dot passage, reflecting on the Voyager photograph of Earth as a tiny speck in space. It is a short meditation on humanity's smallness and shared home.

MC Frontalot's nerdcore rap about the text adventure Zork, made for Jason Scott's Get Lamp documentary and featuring a cameo by Steve Meretzky. It was filmed over an evening in a basement.

William Shatner's spoken-word cover of Pulp's 'Common People', from his album Has Been.

The original music video for Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen, a spoken-word piece built on Mary Schmich's 1997 column of life advice, produced by Baz Luhrmann.

Nardwuar interviews Pharrell and Shay of N.E.R.D. in Vancouver, using his trademark deep research and gifts. The extended version runs about ten minutes.

The official video for Baba Yetu, Christopher Tin's Swahili-language choral piece written as the theme to Civilization IV. It was the first video game music to win a Grammy.

Stevie Wonder performs 'Superstition' on Sesame Street in 1973, with kids dancing along. It is a feel-good live music performance.

Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor on organ, shown with a Music Animation Machine bar-graph score instead of traditional notation.

A player piano is made to reproduce human speech, here reciting a European Environmental Criminal Court proclamation in German at the 2009 World Venice Forum. This upload adds subtitles so the words become understandable.

Masagin is a realtime demoscene production by Farbrausch and Neuro with music by paniq, using animated recursive SVG graphics made in Inkscape. It is a psychedelic, nested-dials audiovisual piece.

Bobby McFerrin uses audience participation at a World Science Festival event to demonstrate how instinctively people follow the pentatonic scale.

The main theme from Eduard Artemyev's score to the 1979 Soviet film Siberiade, an electronic piece that features the ANS synthesizer.

Robotic Liberation by PWP is a music video demo performed entirely by an unexpanded Commodore VIC-20 and a 1541 disk drive, using only a few kilobytes of RAM and a 16 KB disk. It uses demoscene effects to tell a story.

Australian comedy group Axis of Awesome perform a sketch showing that dozens of pop hits share the same four chords. It was recorded at the 2009 Melbourne International Comedy Festival.

A short comparison of the retail release of Metallica's Death Magnetic against the Guitar Hero 3 version of the same song. It switches between the two so you can hear and see the heavy clipping in the retail master.

The official video for Boards of Canada's Dayvan Cowboy, built from reassembled documentary footage. It forms a dreamlike journey from space to the sea and shore, including Kittinger's 1960 high-altitude jump and surfing footage.

A cappella parody song by The Richter Scales, set to Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire', lampooning the Web 2.0 startup bubble. It won a Webby for viral video in 2007.

Footage of Stefani Germanotta, later Lady Gaga, performing 'Captivated' and 'Electric Kiss' at NYU's Ultraviolet Live talent show in 2005-era college days. It shows her singing and playing before she became famous.

A score-following video of Iannis Xenakis's 1950s orchestral piece Metastasis, showing his graphic, mathematically derived notation as the music plays. It is a landmark of post-war modernist composition.

Jake Thackray performs the folk song Molly Metcalfe, which opens with an explanation of the traditional northern English sheep-counting system (yan, tan, tethera). It is a short, witty piece of British folk songwriting.

A short clip of a Renault F1 engine playing God Save the Queen by precisely controlling its RPM, recorded at Goodwood. It demonstrates how finely the drivetrain can be controlled.

A short Frank Zappa interview clip on the decline of the music business, contrasting old cigar-chomping executives with younger industry people.

The official video for Brother Ali's 'Uncle Sam Goddamn', a politically charged rap song critiquing the United States, produced by Ant.