sci-fi writing

Andrei Tarkovsky's 1972 film Solaris, in which a psychologist is sent to a space station orbiting a planet with an alien intelligence and meets his dead wife there. It is the full movie, uploaded by Mosfilm.

A short clip of Richard Feynman explaining the scientific method: guess, compute consequences, compare to experiment, and why vague theories like astrology cannot be proven wrong.

A one-minute clip of Richard Feynman describing the scientific method: guess a law, compute its consequences, and compare with experiment. If it disagrees with experiment, it is wrong.

A five-minute CG sci-fi short film by Danil Krivoruchko, based on Peter Watts's novel Blindsight. It follows a revived crew member recalling a first contact mission, and took four years to make with artists worldwide.

Lex Fridman has a three-hour conversation with Joscha Bach about artificial consciousness, the workings of the mind, intelligence and the possibly simulated nature of reality.

Lex Fridman interviews Travis Oliphant, creator of NumPy, SciPy and Anaconda, about scientific Python and its history. It runs about three hours.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on how media outlets report incomplete or untrue findings as settled science. It covers sensational headlines, small studies and pressure on researchers.

Larry McEnerney of the University of Chicago Writing Program argues that good writing is defined by what readers value, not by rules or the writer's own ideas. He explains why academic habits fail outside academia and how to write so readers find the work valuable.

Lex Fridman interviews physicist Roger Penrose on consciousness, the limits of computation, quantum mechanics and his cyclic cosmology. It covers his views on AI and the big bang.

A two-minute Westworld scene in which Robert Ford and Bernard Lowe discuss whether consciousness exists. Ford argues that the self is a fiction for hosts and humans alike.

A two-minute clip of Richard Feynman on the social sciences, discussing what counts as real science versus pseudo science.

Larry McEnerney of the University of Chicago Writing Program gives a graduate-student session on writing effectively. His core idea is that readers care about value to them, not the writer's thinking process.

A 2004 short film adaptation of Terry Bisson's story "They're Made Out of Meat", in which aliens discuss the astonishing discovery of meat-based intelligent life. It stars Tom Noonan and Ben Bailey.

The Quantified Scientist, a sleep researcher, tests Apple Watch sleep tracking against a research-grade Dreem 2 headband, comparing accuracy for sleep stages, deep and REM sleep. The review is data-focused rather than feature-focused.

NFPA video in which wildfire researcher Jack Cohen explains that embers (firebrands), not the flame front, are the main cause of homes igniting in wildfires. He shows how landscaping and removing debris around the home reduce risk.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum lectures at the Royal Institution on the invention and decipherment of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, and why it is so hard to translate.

Stuart Halloway of Cognitect argues for debugging with the scientific method: form hypotheses, try to falsify them, and write everything down. The talk is given to the Clojure community but applies to any language.

A four-minute tour of the TeXmacs scientific editor, showing math typing, figures, citations, a drawing tool, document styles, HTML export, presentations and animations.

David Beazley's PyData Global 2021 keynote, an oral history of early scientific Python. He tells how Python ended up running on a Connection Machine supercomputer at Los Alamos.

Slaughterbots is a short sci-fi film in which swarms of cheap autonomous drones are programmed to kill targets by profile. It was made as arms-control advocacy against autonomous weapons.

The first video in potholer54's climate series, giving a basic look at how climate scientists infer that man-made carbon gases are changing the climate. It is a short explainer meant to present the scientific evidence plainly.

A re-upload of Rupert Sheldrake's TEDx talk The Science Delusion, which TED removed from its channel. He challenges what he calls the dogmas of modern science, including whether fundamental constants are constant.

ScienceClic gives a 15-minute animated introduction to quantum field theory, covering fields, spin, conserved quantities, the standard model and interactions.

A one-minute New Scientist clip showing a Japanese experiment in which drivers on a circular track produce a spontaneous traffic jam that travels backward. It illustrates phantom traffic jams without any obstacle.

A short clip from a Richard Feynman interview in which he explains fire, describing how burning wood releases sunlight stored by the tree, which built itself mostly from air. It showcases his curiosity and plain-spoken explanations.

A two-minute clip of Richard Feynman explaining why he considers much of social science pseudoscience. He stresses how easy it is to fool yourself and how much care real knowledge takes.

Last Day of War is an award-winning CGI animated short by Dima Fedotov in which automated machines keep following orders and prepare a bomber after all humans are dead.

John Searle's Talk at Google on consciousness and artificial intelligence, hosted by Google's Singularity Network. He presents his philosophy of mind and Chinese room argument that computation is syntactic and cannot capture semantics.

A 3-minute CGI animated sci-fi short by Dima Fedotov. An automated war system keeps a lone bomber attacking a long-dead city after humanity has been wiped out, until life finds a way to survive.

A one-minute clip from the film Elysium in which Matt Damon's character is stuck with an automated AI parole officer and gets asked whether he would like to talk to a human.

A film-analysis video essay linking Blade Runner 2049's Cells Interlinked sequence to Nabokov's Pale Fire. It examines the poetry and meaning behind the film's references.

Charles Stross's 34C3 talk on how science fiction gets the future wrong. He argues that corporations are slow, human-powered AIs that optimize for profit, and that regulation lags behind accelerating technology.

The BBC TV version of the Babel Fish passage from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, with Ford and Arthur aboard a Vogon ship, narrated over the show's hand-drawn animated Guide entry.

Maggie Mae Fish analyzes the documentary My Octopus Teacher as an eco-horror film, critiquing it as a story of a man projecting his own needs onto a wild animal.

Who Killed Captain Alex is Uganda's first action movie, made for under $200 by Nabwana IGG in Wakaliga. This version has English subtitles and a video joker (VJ Emmie) providing running commentary.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science shows that a plain laser diode can measure sub-micron vibrations from centimeters away using self-mixing interferometry, and can also be used for range-finding.

Martin Kleppmann's Local-First Conf talk reviewing where the local-first idea came from, where it stands five years after the essay, and what the community should work toward. He argues for generic sync infrastructure.

A SAAMI-produced training video for firefighters explaining what happens when sporting ammunition burns, including that unchambered cartridges lack the energy to penetrate much. It includes test footage of ammunition in fires.

Jerobeam Fenderson shows how to draw a mushroom on an oscilloscope in XY mode using stereo audio, then animates it by modulating with a larger wave. Pd and Max4Live patches are provided.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day tours a Kodak factory to show how photographic film is manufactured. This is part one of a three-part series covering the large-scale coating and production process.