short 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.

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.

Bobby McFerrin uses audience participation at a World Science Festival event to demonstrate how instinctively people follow the pentatonic scale.

Jeff Geerling interviews Raspberry Pi co-founder Eben Upton about the Pi shortage, the RP2040, RISC-V, the Sony investment and the origin of the name.

Wendover Productions explains the wave of supply shortages in 2021, arguing the causes go beyond COVID. It covers how just-in-time manufacturing was applied, container imbalances and the chip shortage.

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.

A short romantic comedy by Ted Nelson about the 'microcircuitry of love', with Doug Engelbart as his father and Stewart Brand as the villainous CEO.

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.

A PyData London 2018 talk on how JPMorgan scaled its Athena Python platform over ten years to about 35 million lines of code and thousands of developers. It covers infrastructure, tooling and culture for analytics and visualization at that scale.

A five-minute clip from The Big Short (2015) in which FrontPoint Partners confront Morgan Stanley risk assessors and an S&P ratings representative about inflated mortgage bond ratings.

Kurzgesagt animates Andy Weir's short story The Egg, in which a person learns that they are every human who has ever lived. It adds music and narration to the original text.

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.

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.

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

Victoria Warmerdam's Oscar-winning Dutch short film in which a woman fails a series of Captcha tests and is plunged into a strange new reality. It is a dark, Black Mirror-like sci-fi comedy.

Roaring Kitty's July 2020 analysis of GameStop, arguing a bullish deep-value case when the stock was about $4 and short interest exceeded 100%. It covers fundamentals, cash balance and technicals.

James Hamilton, AWS VP and distinguished engineer, gives an insider view of the innovations behind the AWS cloud at re:Invent 2014. He covers custom hardware, networking, regions and availability zones, and infrastructure at scale.

Hyrum Wright shares lessons from five years of mass code migrations in Google's huge C++ codebase. He covers why to migrate, how hard it really is, and how Google updates core libraries and their users continually.

Asianometry explains that the worst of the 2021-22 chip shortage sits in trailing-edge semiconductors, not the leading-edge chips usually covered. It covers why those older-node fabs are so hard to expand and fix.

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.

John Graham-Cumming of Cloudflare talks at dotScale 2015 about handling roughly 10 trillion log lines a month. The talk touches on Cloudflare's hardware, its logging stack and its use of Lua in Nginx.

Sunspring is a sci-fi short film starring Thomas Middleditch. Its screenplay was written by an LSTM neural network trained on sci-fi scripts, and the team shot and edited it in 48 hours.

A clip from the 2015 film The Big Short in which FrontPoint Partners investigate mortgage lending in Florida and place their first trade. It shows brokers and a stripper-adjacent loan scene illustrating subprime lending to unverified borrowers.

Adam Robinson-Yu's GDC 2020 talk on how he shelved a big project to prototype what became A Short Hike. He covers the solo development process and technical choices like a pixel shader over low-poly models.

MORE is Mark Osborne's Oscar-nominated stop-motion short about a joyless inventor in a drab, conformist society who yearns for his younger days. It won Best Short Film at Sundance in 1999.

A 13-minute hand-animated short film that takes a symbolic journey through the unconscious, built around Carl Jung's idea of confronting the Shadow. It mixes 2D animation with spiritual and apocalyptic imagery.

Slaughterbots, a short dystopian film in which swarms of small autonomous drones are programmed to kill targets matching a profile. It opens as a slick product launch before turning into a terror scenario.

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.

A short CGP Grey bonus video explaining the shortest-splitline algorithm, which draws electoral districts by repeatedly splitting a state along its shortest dividing line while balancing population. It is offered as a neutral, algorithmic fix for gerrymandering.

A scene from The Big Short in which Jared Vennett pitches credit default swaps on mortgage bonds to a hedge fund team, using a Jenga tower to illustrate collateralized debt obligations.

A cappella parody song by The Richter Scales, set to Billy Joel's 'We Didn't Start the Fire', lampooning the Web 2.0 startup bubble. It won a Webby for viral video in 2007.

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.

An 8-minute National Geographic short film about David Bamberger, who bought 5,500 overgrazed acres in the Texas Hill Country and restored the land and its aquifers over about 50 years.

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.

Google engineers describe Google's internal build system, a unified, language-agnostic system used across the company. It was presented as a 2012 NYC tech talk.

A short film adaptation of Terry Bisson's story 'They're Made Out of Meat', in which alien explorers discuss with disbelief that humans are sentient beings made of meat. It won a grand prize at the 2006 SIFF short film festival.

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.

Brian Will follows up his earlier anti-OOP video by walking through four short code examples, including Java code in the style of Uncle Bob, to show how object-oriented design complicates simple programs. It argues that OOP hides and scatters state and adds needless indirection.

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.

SpaceX engineers present at NVIDIA's GPU Technology Conference on a multi-physics code that simulates the full-scale Raptor methane engine. It covers GPU-based turbulent combustion modeling with adaptive grids and wavelet compression.