spec

Stuart Halloway shows how Clojure's spec library lets you build programs that are both agile and robust. He covers declarative, predicate-based specification layered on interactive REPL development.

A screencast tutorial on Specter, a Clojure library for navigating and transforming nested data structures declaratively, demonstrated in a REPL.

A clip from Jim Jefferies' Netflix special BARE in which he comedically dissects American gun culture and gun control arguments.

Ben Krasnow of Applied Science builds and operates a simple mass spectrometer, using it to measure potassium isotopes in a salt substitute. He explains the design choices and the theory behind it.

A short TFiR clip in which Linus Torvalds explains his view that respect should be earned rather than given, in defense of his blunt and insulting style.

Veritasium explains magnetism as a consequence of special relativity. Length contraction of moving charges makes a current in a wire attract or repel a nearby moving charge.

A recording from real hardware of Tim Follin's multichannel 1-bit music for Agent X on the ZX Spectrum. It shows several voices coaxed out of the single-bit beeper.

David Shaw of D. E. Shaw Research presents Anton, a special-purpose machine that speeds up biomolecular simulations about a hundred-fold. The lecture covers molecular dynamics and how simulation helps understand how drugs bind.

A spectrogram visualization of the sounds in a dial-up modem handshake, with an annotated image explaining each noise. It shows how the handshake's tones map to the negotiation steps.

The Brass Eye special 'Paedogeddon!' by Chris Morris, a black-comedy satire of British media moral panic that duped celebrities and politicians into endorsing nonsense. It is the final episode of the series.

Rich Hickey's keynote on software versioning, arguing that breaking changes are the real problem and that libraries should only grow by providing more and requiring less. It critiques semantic versioning and ties into Clojure spec.

A five-minute excerpt of Rich Hickey's Clojure Made Simple talk, with new slides, ranting about HttpServletRequest and specificity. He argues for using generic maps instead of many specific classes and getters.

Cheng Lou's react-europe 2016 talk lays out a mental framework for thinking about abstraction levels in JavaScript tooling, from Angular and Grunt to Webpack and React. It uses that framework to reason about the cost of abstractions and how to choose between competing solutions.

A 1995 episode of The Computer Chronicles devoted to Gary Kildall, creator of CP/M. It works as a retrospective and tribute to the personal computer pioneer.

A 2012 debate between Peter Thiel and George Gilder on whether technological progress and economic growth are accelerating or decelerating, moderated by William Davidow.

Destin Sandlin of Smarter Every Day fires .22 Magnum and .38 Special bullets at Prince Rupert's drops, filmed at 170,000 frames per second. The slow-motion footage shows the bullet shattering against the glass tadpole while the drop initially survives.

Rob Pike presents the Go 2 draft specifications at the Sydney Golang Meetup, covering the Go 2 process and several proposals including generics. The Q&A contains a well-known exchange about the name of the language.

A short Channel NewsAsia interview clip in which MasterCard's Southeast Asia president voices distrust of cryptocurrencies produced by anonymous computers in anonymous places. It is part of the Perspectives series and runs about four minutes.

Part one of Montemayor's animated-map documentary on the Battle of Midway, told using only the information available to the Japanese side. It focuses on Nagumo's dilemma.

The first video in a 55-part series by Michel van Biezen that introduces the Kalman filter and builds from the rationale through algebraic examples to the full matrix treatment. The videos are short, blackboard-style lectures.

Rick Reed of WhatsApp speaks at MeetBSD about running a messaging service on FreeBSD and Erlang at huge scale. He covers the stack, tuning and the challenges of millions of connections per host.

A showcase of the author's fifth-generation quad-core computer built entirely from Minecraft redstone, after two years of development. It features cache, a hardware stack, a GPU driving a 15x15 display, and serial I/O ports.

Elon Musk's 2016 IAC presentation on the technical challenges and architectures for building a self-sustaining human presence on Mars.

Scott Forstall demonstrates Siri on stage at Apple's October 2011 iPhone 4S event, showing the voice assistant handling natural requests like checking the weather and getting things done by asking.

A short clip of Romain Dumas and the all-electric VW I.D. R breaking the overall Pikes Peak hillclimb record with a 7:57 run, over 16 seconds faster than the previous best, with footage of the crowd's reaction.

A two-minute sine tone sweeping exponentially from 20 Hz to 20 kHz, covering the human hearing range at constant acoustic pressure.

A short clip from Bill Hicks' final special, Revelations, in which he describes life as just a ride. It is a philosophical, calming monologue.

Leslie Lamport argues that programmers, like architects, should write rigorous specifications before coding, especially for concurrent and distributed systems. The talk introduces the case for writing specs (the TLA+ mindset) as a way of thinking above the code.

A short clip of Venetian Snares' track 'Look' from Songs About My Cats (2001), shown as a spectrogram. The audio encodes an image in its frequency content.

A one-minute clip from Ricky Gervais's 2018 Netflix special in which he riffs on people getting offended by internet commentary, framed as 'guitar lessons' in humanity. It is a short stand-up excerpt.

Chandler Carruth shows how to squeeze more performance out of already-optimized C++ code, covering how the CPU executes it. The talk goes into pipelining, branch prediction and speculative execution using benchmarks.

Essential Craftsman announces the start of a spec house build on a scenic lot, kicking off a long series. The channel covers every step of building a house from the viewpoint of a general contractor.

A speculative-fiction video by Tom Scott, framed as coming from a future, about an AI called Earworm that enforces copyright so aggressively that humanity ends up forgetting a century of pop culture. It is animated and narrated as part of his series of videos from a future.

A short Simpsons clip in which Principal Skinner explains the cycle of introducing a new species to deal with a previous pest. It is a joke about ecological interventions that backfire.

An HBO special in which Jerry Seinfeld, Chris Rock, Ricky Gervais and Louis CK discuss the craft of stand-up comedy. They talk about writing jokes, technique and how they handle old material.

A comedy-music medley from the Australian band The Axis of Awesome showing that dozens of famous pop songs use the same four-chord progression. The performers cycle through a long list of hits over the same chords.

A clip from George Carlin's "You Are All Diseased" special in which he riffs on germs, the immune system and white blood cells. It argues that modern obsession with cleanliness is misplaced.

A clip from George Carlin's 2005 special Life Is Worth Losing, in which he argues that the powerful don't want an educated public capable of critical thinking.

Slavoj Zizek speaks at an architecture congress in Pamplona about how toilet design in France, England and Germany reflects national ideology. The clip is about four minutes long.

A comedy song by Garfunkel and Oates in which both play the same woman at 29 and at 31, charting a swift slide in her romantic prospects.