rowing

Guy Steele's 1998 OOPSLA keynote on designing a programming language that its users can grow. He builds the talk using only one-syllable words and terms he has defined, to demonstrate the idea.

The Thought Emporium builds a homemade multi-electrode array, grows human neurons on it and attempts to take readings. It is the first part of a series aimed at connecting living neurons to a computer.

A short clip from Udacity's Web Development course in which Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman describes how Reddit grew early on. He explains seeding the site with content from fake accounts.

The first video in a series on extremely large numbers, introducing the topic with examples. Later parts go deep into the fast-growing hierarchy.

Martin Kleppmann argues that databases are global shared mutable state and proposes treating them as an ever-growing log of immutable facts. Derived data such as caches, indexes and views is then built by stream processors like Apache Samza. The talk draws on Kafka and LinkedIn's experience with commit logs.

Joe Armstrong, co-inventor of Erlang, gives a funny and opinionated Strange Loop talk on the tangled state of software: build tools, package managers, entropy and the physical limits of computation. He argues for ideas like naming things by content hash and throwing away your first version.

Jonathan Blow's DevGAMM 2019 talk argues that software knowledge is being lost between generations and that growing layers of abstraction could lead to a decline in technological civilization.

Dan Geer's Black Hat 2014 keynote argues that cybersecurity is a matter of power and policy rather than wishful thinking. He covers surveillance, the vulnerability market, software liability and privacy as the capacity to misrepresent yourself.

The original trailer for Threads, the 1984 British TV film depicting the aftermath of a nuclear attack on Sheffield. The trailer hints at the film's bleak tone.

Physicist Geoffrey West speaks at an FQXi conference on time about complexity and scaling laws. He covers how metabolism, growth and lifespan scale across organisms and how the same mathematics applies to cities and companies.

Kirsten Dirksen visits retired mailman Russ Finch in Alliance, Nebraska, who grows oranges, figs and pomegranates in a backyard greenhouse without paying for heat. The greenhouse uses the stable temperature of the earth, with underground earth tubes, to heat and cool itself.

A 36C3 talk by Bunnie Huang arguing that open source is necessary but not sufficient for trustworthy hardware, because verifying hardware is destructive and so creates a time-of-check/time-of-use gap. It surveys supply chain security and classes of hardware attacks, and presents the Betrusted approach to narrowing that gap.

An 86-minute Milton Friedman talk arguing that inflation is a monetary phenomenon caused by money supply growing faster than goods, and that the cure is less government spending and money printing.

Mathematician Colin Wright demonstrates juggling and explains the mathematics of juggling patterns, including notation that led to new throwing patterns. It is a public presentation at the Museum of Mathematics aimed at a general audience.

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.

Matt Ranney of Uber talks at GOTO Chicago 2016 about what Uber learned from growing past 1,000 production microservices. He covers regrets, sprawl and organizational effects.

Louis CK speaks at a 2010 NYPL tribute to George Carlin about how Carlin's habit of discarding material and writing a new hour each year changed his own career. He becomes emotional describing it.

Military History Visualized charts ship production by the United States and Japan from December 1941 to September 1945. The growing numbers show why Japan, despite a stronger starting navy, could not win a long war.

A DEF CON 24 talk on how a cyber mercenary group could forge identities and create the conditions for overthrowing a government. It is entertainingly outlandish and includes a drone-mounted saw for cutting power lines.

Andrei Alexandrescu's CppCon 2015 talk on handling exceptional control flow declaratively in C++. It uses scope guards with success and failure variants, built on std::uncaught_exceptions, to replace ad hoc RAII classes and rethrowing try/catch blocks.

A short scene from Malcolm in the Middle in which Hal tries to fix a light bulb and is pulled into a growing chain of side repairs.

A man spends six months and $1500 making a chicken sandwich entirely from scratch: growing vegetables, making salt from seawater, milking a cow for cheese, grinding wheat, collecting honey and killing a chicken.

Billionaire Nick Hanauer warns fellow wealthy people in a TED talk that growing inequality could lead to social upheaval like pre-revolutionary France. He argues a higher minimum wage would grow the middle class and prosperity.

Josef Holzer walks through his family's Krameterhof, one of Europe's oldest permaculture farms in the Austrian mountains, with fish ponds, terraces, fruit trees and grazing animals. It showcases water management and microclimates.

A one-minute clip of slime mold placed on a map with food at the cities around Tokyo, growing a network that approximates the Tokyo-area railway system.

Short British Pathe newsreel footage of the 1940 collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge as it twisted and swayed in the wind. The only casualty was a dog left in a stalled car.

A three-minute side-by-side comparison of scenes from Star Wars (1977) and the WWII film The Dam Busters (1955). It shows how closely the Death Star trench run mirrors the earlier film.