static electricity

Richard Feldman's GOTO Copenhagen 2022 talk on why dynamic languages like Python, Ruby, PHP and JavaScript rose in the 1990s and why each now has a popular static type checker. It argues that modern static typing recovers the advantages that made dynamic languages attractive.

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.

Veritasium argues that electric energy is carried by fields around the wires rather than by electrons moving through them, using a thought experiment with a large circuit.

Developmental and synthetic biologist Michael Levin speaks at a Harvard Extension student event on bioelectricity, body intelligence and regenerative medicine. He discusses how cell electrical networks guide growth and form.

AlphaPhoenix uses a custom high-speed measurement setup to watch voltage waves travel down wires and split at a fork. It answers how electricity knows where to go and how quickly that process happens.

Matt Might's Curry On talk on ending errors in code, both software and the human genome. He covers conservative approximation of the halting problem via static analysis and a computational approach to precision medicine.

Curt Jaimungal interviews biologist Michael Levin of Tufts about consciousness, bioelectricity, emergence, and cancer research. The conversation challenges reductionist views of life.

Julien Verlaguet of Facebook describes applying static analysis and type inference to a very large PHP codebase, using OCaml. The work led to the Hack language.

Troy Hunt argues that even static, non-secret websites need HTTPS, demonstrating attacks such as injected content and China's Great Cannon. It accompanies his blog post of the same name.

Disney Research's demo of quasistatic cavity resonance, which uses a purpose-built room or cabinet to generate magnetic fields that deliver kilowatts of power wirelessly to mobile receivers inside.

Michael Levin's NeurIPS 2018 talk on bioelectric computation outside the nervous system, showing how cell electrical networks shape development and regeneration. It covers morphological information processing in living tissue.

Biologist Michael Levin explains the bioelectric layer that coordinates cells to build organs and bodies, showing footage of two-headed worms and introducing xenobots. He discusses implications for medicine and the nature of life.

Veritasium explores how electrical energy actually travels in a circuit, arguing that it flows through electromagnetic fields around the wires rather than through the electrons. It builds a long-cable experiment with Caltech to test when a distant bulb lights.

Lex Fridman talks with Tufts biologist Michael Levin about bioelectricity, embryogenesis, xenobots and how cells collectively pursue goals. They range into cognition, evolution and the possibility of aliens.

Michael Levin's keynote at the ALife 2020 conference, 'Robot Cancer', on how bioelectric signaling in embryogenesis and regeneration informs unconventional computing, cognition and the 'software of life'. He argues biology offers lessons for building adaptive machines.

NightHawkInLight shows how to make ultra-white radiative paint that cools surfaces below ambient temperature without electricity. He walks through the research papers and the household-materials process.

MIT's Donald Sadoway presents the liquid metal battery as a design for grid-scale stationary electricity storage, at an Imperial College London event in 2018. He covers the grid benefits of massive-scale storage.

Michael Levin presents his lab's work on how cellular collectives use bioelectric networks to make anatomical decisions. Topics include pattern memories, regeneration and synthetic living organisms.

Andrew Ng speaks at the Stanford MSx Future Forum about how AI is transforming industry after industry, comparing its impact to electricity. The talk also touches on evil-AI worries, jobs and basic income.

Yanis Varoufakis argues that Europe's electricity price spikes stem from how the energy market was designed and privatised, plus corporate profiteering. He proposes ways out.

Andrew Kelley's Zig SHOWTIME talk on an experiment to ship static Linux executables that can do graphics and gaming, followed by an interview. It covers the problems of Linux binary stability, dynamic linking and the graphics ABI.

GameSpot meets the VP of Senseg, a company adding electrostatic touch feedback to tablets and touch surfaces, and demonstrates the technology.

USLaunchReport footage of the September 2016 SpaceX Falcon 9 static fire anomaly that destroyed the rocket and AMOS-6 satellite at Launch Complex 40.

Rich Hickey's Clojure/Conj 2018 keynote argues that Maybe/Option types and rigid type signatures are a poor way to model data that changes over time. He builds the case around optionality, schema growth and compatibility, and presents the ideas behind Clojure spec as an alternative.

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.

Herb Sutter's CppCon 2015 plenary on writing safe, modern C++ by default using the C++ Core Guidelines. It includes a demo of lifetime-checking static analysis tooling.

John Carmack's keynote at QuakeCon 2011, an hour and a half of wide-ranging talk about id Software, Rage, engine open-sourcing, patents and programming practices.

Robert Bussard's 2006 Google Tech Talk on inertial electrostatic confinement fusion, a compact approach he argued could be cheap and clean, using boron-hydrogen fuel without neutron radiation. It runs about 93 minutes and covers the physics, funding history and his proposed development path.

A 13-minute OSCON 2010 talk in which Rob Pike argues about what is wrong with mainstream languages like C++, Java and C#, and presents Go as a response. He discusses verbosity and what lightness means in a language.

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 2006 Google Tech Talk by Robert Bussard on inertial electrostatic confinement (polywell) fusion as a cheap, clean alternative to conventional thermonuclear reactors. He argues it could be made viable with modest funding.

Steve Mould shows Spintronics, a set of mechanical components such as resistors, capacitors and transistors linked by chains, that give an intuitive feel for how electrical circuits work.

Matthias Felleisen's keynote uses weather prediction as an analogy for type systems, arguing they forecast problems so you can act on them. It draws on his experience developing Typed Racket.

Rasmus Lerdorf marks 25 years of PHP at phpday 2019 with a look at the highlights and lowlights of the language. He argues for upgrading PHP versions, covering performance, static analysis, zero-cost profiling and dead code elimination.

Steve Yegge's Stanford seminar on GROK, Google's internal large-scale, cross-language source code analysis system. It covers how the system helps with code search and understanding across Google's huge codebase.

A clip from the BBC series Britain from Above showing UK peak power demand. It shows a grid engineer preparing for the surge as millions put the kettle on when a popular show ends.

A Business Insider investigation into the US boom in AI data centers, mapping where they are, who owns them, and how much power and water they consume. It looks at the costs borne by communities, with a focus on Virginia.

Technology Connections explains the difference between power (watts) and energy (watt-hours) and why confusing them leads to errors. It runs about 52 minutes and uses everyday examples.

Rich Hickey's talk at Clojure's tenth anniversary on the kind of programs Clojure is designed for. He argues for situated programs that deal with changing requirements, and for dynamic typing and data over static types.

Scott Wlaschin's NDC talk on using statically typed functional programming, F# in particular, to model a business domain. Types are used to represent the domain precisely and to encode business rules so that illegal states cannot be built, with the compiler acting as an instant unit test.