shor's algorithm

Erik Demaine's MIT 6.006 lecture introducing dynamic programming through Fibonacci numbers and shortest paths. It covers memoization, subproblems and optimal substructure.

A 2013 lecture in which Vitalik Buterin explains what quantum computers are and what they can and cannot do. He then discusses what they could mean for Bitcoin's cryptography.

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.

Philosopher Jeffrey Kaplan summarizes Peter Singer's 1972 essay 'Famine, Affluence, and Morality', arguing that failing to give to save lives is morally comparable to letting a child drown. It is a short lecture on the argument's structure.

The first lesson from Timothy Snyder's short video series accompanying On Tyranny, arguing that most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given when people comply in advance. It runs about eight minutes.

Psychology professor Marty Lobdell gives a one-hour lecture on how to study effectively, covering short focused sessions with breaks, study environment, note-taking and memory techniques. It was aimed at students who cram without improving.

A short excerpt from Dr Russell Barkley's 2012 Burnett Lecture on ADHD, focused on treatment. He argues ADHD is a disorder of executive function and self-regulation, and that environments should be designed to compensate.

James Mickens of Harvard gives a funny lecture at HBS's Future Assembly arguing that blockchains are a very bad idea. He covers their trust, legal and practical shortcomings for real-world problems.

John Ousterhout's slides-and-voiceover lecture on Paxos, made for the Raft user study comparing how students learn Raft and Paxos. It is a full introduction to the Paxos consensus algorithm.

Sean Carroll introduces his video series on the biggest ideas in physics, such as symmetry, space and matter, as informal discussions with follow-up Q&A videos. This is the short opening video of the series.

Robert Sapolsky's lecture on how the body's stress response, evolved for short-term physical emergencies, harms long-term health when triggered by psychological stressors. It was given as the inaugural Fenton-Rhodes Lecture.

A short lecture in which Kurt Vonnegut graphs the simple shapes of stories, such as Man in Hole and Boy Gets Girl. He sketches how fortune rises and falls over a narrative.

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.

A professor from Illinois compares the cost of building, fueling and operating a nuclear plant against a natural gas plant, using visual charts. It shows how construction time and interest rates dominate, when the investment pays off and when costs cross over.

An RSA Animate in which Steven Pinker explains how the mind builds infinite meanings from finite language, and why people often speak indirectly. It covers ambiguity, politeness and mutual knowledge, including the emperor's new clothes example.

Leo Dirac explains how transformer models have replaced LSTMs in NLP. He gives background from bag of words through RNNs and LSTMs, then a technical deep dive into multi-headed self-attention and positional encoding, with sample code.

John Ousterhout lectures on the Raft consensus algorithm, made for the Raft user study comparing how students learn Raft and Paxos. It covers leader election and log repair.

Historian Timothy Snyder explains the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity, two ways of thinking about time that frame his books On Tyranny and The Road to Unfreedom.

Chris Shore of the Centre for Computing History explains how Colossus was built, how it worked, and how it affected the course of World War II. It is an hour-long museum lecture on the codebreaking computer.

Dr. Russell Barkley explains how different ADHD medications work and how they differ from one another, in a short clip.

A panel at The National WWII Museum on the Battle of Kursk, moderated by Keith Huxen with historians Robert Citino and John Parshal. The discussion covers the armored engagement and the German, Soviet and US approaches to tank production.

Clayton Christensen explains the jobs-to-be-done idea in five minutes, using the fast-food milkshake example. The point is that understanding the job a product is hired to do makes it easier to improve.

The first lecture of David MacKay's Cambridge course on information theory, pattern recognition and neural networks. It introduces the core ideas of his book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms.

MIT 22.01 lecture by Michael Short explaining the Chernobyl accident technically, including RBMK reactor positive feedback, xenon poisoning and the cascade of human errors during the test.

Physicist Albert Bartlett's full-length lecture on how steady exponential growth in population and energy use collides with finite resources. It uses examples like bacteria in a bottle and covers peak oil.

A short clip of Jordan Peterson explaining Pareto distributions, using Soviet farm collectivization and the resulting famine as context. It also covers how outcomes concentrate in a few people.

A short clip of Robert Sapolsky on how social hierarchy generates chronic stress, drawing on baboon research. It links rank-related stress to heart health and life expectancy.

A one-minute clip from Richard Feynman's 1979 Auckland lecture in which he answers whether you see an object or only its light. It is a short, playful take on perception and on the use of philosophy.

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.

A short clip of Richard Feynman on the difference between merely knowing how to reason mathematically and understanding why physical theories work. He discusses holding multiple equivalent ideas and guessing new laws.

A short clip of Milton Friedman explaining who benefits from occupational licensing requirements, arguing they mainly protect practitioners from competition.

Associate Professor Simon Michaux presents estimates of the metals needed to build one generation of renewable technology to replace fossil fuels. He argues current production and reserves fall far short, with copper a key shortfall.

Robert Sapolsky's Stanford lecture on chaos and reductionism, which he calls one of the hardest of the course. It examines the limits of breaking systems into parts to understand them and introduces chaotic systems.

A short clip of Milton Friedman arguing with students that equal pay laws are counterproductive, and that markets penalize discrimination because cheaper equally productive workers are an advantage to hire.

A short clip of Milton Friedman explaining his free-market view of monopoly, namely that monopolies persist mainly through government help. It is excerpted from the Milton Friedman Speaks series.