scope creep

A short clip of the Simpsons episode in which Homer designs a car with absurd requirements, used here as a lesson in project requirements and scope.

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.

Ben Krasnow shows the first image from his home-built scanning electron microscope, after months of work, and walks through how the parts operate together.

Planets is a track from the audiovisual album Oscilloscope Music, in which the audio signal drives an analog oscilloscope directly. The left channel sets horizontal deflection and the right sets vertical, so the sound draws vector graphics.

A 2019 Android Dev Summit session on the scoped storage model in Android 10. It gives a plan overview and best practices for apps adapting to the new restrictions.

David Kipping presents his proposed Terrascope, a telescope that uses Earth's atmosphere as a lens to achieve enormous magnification. He covers the history of telescopes and his path to the idea, plus Sol-scope and Jupiter-scope variants.

Real Engineering explains the engineering behind the James Webb Space Telescope, including its folding mirror, sunshield, orbit and cooling systems, and why deployment was so difficult.

Shahriar of The Signal Path tears down and experiments with Keysight's UXR real-time oscilloscope, which offers 110GHz bandwidth and 256GS/s sampling, and compares architectures from Keysight, LeCroy and Tektronix.

A roughly 90-minute film of John Dobson building a Dobsonian telescope step by step, including hand-grinding the mirror.

A NASA video on the 29 days after the James Webb Space Telescope's launch, when thousands of parts must deploy in sequence on the way to its destination a million miles away.

PBS Space Time explains the proposal to use the Sun's gravity as a giant lens, sending a train of small light-sail spacecraft to the focal point roughly 550 AU out. It covers how such a telescope could image exoplanets in surprising detail and the engineering challenges involved.

A demo of Quake's E1M1 rendered as vector graphics on a Hitachi oscilloscope. A laptop generates the audio signal that the scope draws.

A roughly ten-minute scene from the movie The Pentagon Wars showing how the Bradley Fighting Vehicle's requirements ballooned through committee demands into a compromised design. It is a satirical dramatization of military procurement.

Fraser Cain interviews JPL physicist Slava Turyshev about using the Sun's gravity as a lens to image distant exoplanets. They cover how the lens works, how a spacecraft would align with it, and mission design.

A timelapse compilation of the night sky above the Very Large Telescope at Paranal, Chile, using ESO photographers' footage set to music. It shows the stars wheeling overhead and the observatory at work.

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.

Der8auer visits Tescan and uses an electron microscope to compare real transistor sizes on Intel 14nm and AMD 7nm chips. It shows that process node names do not match physical measurements.

AlphaPhoenix builds a scaled-down version of the Veritasium electricity thought experiment using about a kilometer of wire and an oscilloscope. He measures how the signal actually propagates and explains the result.

Benn Jordan explains how Flock Safety's license plate cameras log and share vehicle locations, and explores how adversarial AI can defeat them. It covers weak security and the surveillance risks of private police-camera networks.

David Sachs of InvenSense explains how gyroscopes, accelerometers and compasses work on their own and together, demonstrated on a modified Android handset. He covers sensor fusion algorithms and why rotation math such as Euler angles matters.

Ben Eater explains why he builds computers on breadboards, including testing their signal behavior on an oscilloscope. It is a companion to his 6502 breadboard computer series.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science uses a scanning electron microscope to compare new and worn toothbrush bristles. He shows how the microscopic texturing wears down with use.

IBM's record-setting stop-motion film made by moving individual carbon monoxide molecules with a scanning tunneling microscope, illustrating atomic-scale memory research.

Dave Jones of EEVblog investigates why a 4K BenQ monitor switches itself off, tracing it to static discharge from an office chair. He uses an oscilloscope to examine the static impulses.

Explains the proposed NASA JPL plan to use the Sun as a gravitational lens, sending solar sail craft to its focal region to image an exoplanet's surface. It covers the distances involved, how imaging with the Sun would work and the mission design.

Mike Monteiro's Creative Mornings talk "Fuck You, Pay Me" with his lawyer Keith Levine, on contracts, scope creep and making sure designers and freelancers get paid. This copy has Portuguese subtitles.

Veritasium explains what a black hole should look like, using J.P. Luminet's 1979 work and a cardboard 3D model to show how light bends around it. It was made just as the first black hole image was released.

A two-minute minutephysics video explaining why turning a bicycle requires first steering briefly the other way. It covers counter-steering and balance with slow-motion footage and 3D animation.

Animator Joel Haver explains how he makes his short films using rotoscoping and the EbSynth tool, along with the software he uses. The method is a labor-intensive, frame-by-frame process.

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.

A 1953 US Navy training film on the basic mechanisms in fire control computers: shafts, gears, cams and differentials. It shows how these mechanical parts compute ship and target firing solutions.

A one-minute clip from HBO's Silicon Valley in which Gavin Belson describes the supposed persecution of billionaires in modern America by comparing it to the Holocaust. It is a satirical scene about tech-executive self-pity.

In an Ars Technica War Stories episode, Prince of Persia creator Jordan Mechner describes how he made the game on the Apple II, fighting hardware memory limits and the platform's decline. It covers the rotoscoped animation and the engineering tricks involved.

Breaking Taps explains how the cryogenic mirror actuators on the James Webb Space Telescope achieve nanometer precision using flexures. It shows a 3D-printed replica and how one motor handles both coarse and fine motion.

Douglas Crockford's Google Tech Talk explains monads without category theory or Haskell, implementing them in JavaScript and tying them to Ajax and promises. He also touches on odd asides such as coloring code by scope.

This Place argues that the uncanny valley is a flawed concept, since 'human likeness' is too broad and the supporting evidence is cherry-picked. It proposes that the creepiness really comes from how animated characters and robots move.

Dave Jones builds the Evil Mad Scientist discrete-component 555 timer kit, then tests it and explains the internal circuitry of the 555 at transistor level. He finishes with scope waveforms.

Verge Science's pilot of its Trial & Error series follows amateur scientist Jon Larsen on a hunt for micrometeorites. It shows how tiny space rocks can be found on rooftops and confirmed under a microscope.

Christian Schafmeister presents CANDO at the 2016 European Lisp Symposium. It is a compiled Lisp-based language for designing macromolecules and nanoscale materials, built on the Clasp implementation of Common Lisp.

A very short microscope clip of a neutrophil chasing a Staphylococcus aureus bacterium, originally from David Rogers at Vanderbilt University. It is a widely reposted piece of immune-system footage.