scale

A short film in which friends build the first true-to-scale model of the solar system, with full planetary orbits, on a Nevada dry lakebed. It conveys the real distances and sizes involved.

A satirical animated dialogue in which a naive developer insists MongoDB is web scale while a database expert mocks him. It parodies the NoSQL versus relational debate.

Luis von Ahn, creator of CAPTCHA and reCAPTCHA, explains how small contributions from many people online can digitize books. He then introduces Duolingo as a way to translate the web while people learn languages.

A Ray Summit 2022 keynote fireside chat between OpenAI's Greg Brockman and Anyscale's Robert Nishihara. They discuss how OpenAI's training infrastructure evolved and its use of Ray.

A visual scale comparison of stars and cosmic objects, from planets up to some of the largest known stars, set to music. It is meant to convey the vastness of the universe.

The Eames Office's 1977 film Powers of Ten starts at a picnic in Chicago and zooms out by a factor of ten every ten seconds to the edge of the universe. It then zooms inward to a proton in a carbon atom.

Numberphile explains the long and short scales for naming large numbers, covering millions, billions, trillions, milliards and the Greek myriad, with James Grime and Tony Padilla.

CGP Grey explains the elegant ratio of A4 and the metric paper sizes, then zooms out across scales from the Planck length to the observable universe.

An 8-minute explainer on the Lightning Network and how it relates to Segwit, Bitcoin and Litecoin. It covers how off-chain payment channels route payments to scale blockchain transactions.

Cody's Lab builds a 200-billionth-scale model to show how far away the nearest stars are, using parallax and light speed. A short astronomy explainer on interstellar distances.

The American Museum of Natural History's film flies from the Himalayas out through the atmosphere and solar system to the afterglow of the Big Bang, using its Digital Universe Atlas four-dimensional map.

Technology Connections shows a cheap method for capturing analog video: a composite-to-HDMI upscaler feeding an HDMI capture dongle, aimed at digitizing home movies and VHS tapes.

A short video built around an animation of the roughly 10,000 galaxies in the Hubble Ultra Deep Field, placed at their measured redshift distances. It gives a brief history of deep field images and ends with a 3D fly-through.

The first lecture in Martin Kleppmann's 8-lecture distributed systems series from the University of Cambridge undergraduate course. It introduces the subject, and accompanying lecture notes are available.

A short Ericsson film demoing Erlang, showing concurrent processes, debugging tools, and hot code reloading, including crashing parts of a running system while calls continue.

A 12-minute film in which Erlang's creators demonstrate the language's fault tolerance and live-system features, including phoning each other to show it working. This version has fixed audio.

A short film about the Erlang language, showing telecom systems built from lightweight processes and demonstrating hot code swapping. It is an edited version of the original Ericsson video.

Juan Benet gives an overview and demo of the go-ipfs alpha. It shows the peer-to-peer content-addressed protocol in action, including streaming video from a home computer.

A short clip from an ACM and Computer History Museum interview in which Leslie Lamport discusses writing his paper on time, clocks and the ordering of events. He explains its link to special relativity.

Joe Kava, VP of Google's Data Center Operations, gives a short tour of a Google data center. He covers security, sustainability and the core infrastructure architecture.

Kurzgesagt explains stellar engines such as the Shkadov thruster and Caplan thruster, which could move the Sun and solar system across the galaxy over millions of years to avoid hazards and reach new regions.

A Discovery Channel computer simulation of a large asteroid impact on Earth, showing the scale of the devastation. It sits in a broader context of early Earth impacts and the moon-forming collision.

A short IBM behind-the-scenes documentary on how researchers moved individual atoms to make the world's smallest movie. It introduces the scientists and their work on atomic memory and data storage.

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.

A 10-minute 3Blue1Brown chapter explaining the determinant as the factor by which a linear transformation scales area or volume. It builds the idea geometrically with animations before any formulas.

Roy Beck's short gumball presentation using World Bank and Census data to argue that letting people immigrate to the US cannot solve world poverty because the numbers are so large. It is made by NumbersUSA, an immigration-restriction advocacy group.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile why electronic voting is a bad idea, arguing that paper ballots are transparent, auditable and hard to tamper with at scale. He covers why moving voting to phones, tablets or computers undermines trust and verifiability.

Kurzgesagt's animated take on climate change argues that, despite alarming headlines, there are real reasons for hope as technology, policy and public attitudes shift. It surveys trends and solutions while acknowledging the scale of the problem.

A short Harvard Online animated lesson on how the mitochondrial electron transport chain works. It shows proton pumping and the machinery that drives ATP synthesis.

Practical Engineering explains pumped storage hydropower, which makes up most grid-scale electricity storage. It covers how it works and why it fits only certain geographies.

Sam Zeloof shows the upgraded second iteration of his homemade silicon integrated circuit fabrication process, producing chips with around a thousand transistors in his garage. It is a short overview of what the home fab can now do.

Footage from the Chasing Ice project of the largest glacier calving event ever filmed, at Greenland's Ilulissat Glacier in 2008. A 75-minute event is condensed to a few minutes of cameras watching ice collapse.

A Bloomberg mini-documentary on how Vienna keeps housing affordable through large-scale public and social housing. It presents the city as a model strategy for others.

David MacKay's TEDxWarwick talk uses basic arithmetic to show how much land and energy renewables would need to power a country like the UK. It explains the limits of sustainable options and why they should still be pursued.

A neural-network upscaled 4K, 60 fps version of the 1906 film of a trip down Market Street in San Francisco, shot four days before the earthquake. It shows cable cars, horse carriages, early automobiles and pedestrians sharing the street.

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.

A visualization and sonification of 15 sorting algorithms, from selection sort to bogo sort, run on shuffled integers in six minutes. Each algorithm gets a size and speed scaled to its complexity.

Permaculture instructor Andrew Millison visits the village of Garavadi in Maharashtra, India, which took part in the Paani Foundation's Water Cup competition. It shows the water harvesting structures the villagers built in 45 days and how they restored groundwater and the local economy.

Neil Halloran's animated, data-driven documentary visualizes the human cost of World War II and compares it with other wars and the trend toward fewer war deaths in recent decades.

A CBS News (60 Minutes) profile of free solo climber Alex Honnold, who scales sheer rock faces without ropes. Lara Logan reports on his climbing and his apparent lack of fear, including his Half Dome ascent.