symbols

Sixty Symbols interviews Nottingham cosmologist Tony Padilla, who says string theory deserves to be taken seriously. He explains how strings emerged from the equations rather than being invented.

Brady Haran interviews Brother Guy Consolmagno, director of the Vatican Observatory, for Sixty Symbols. It is part of a three-video set along with the observatory's telescopes and its meteorite collection.

Professor Mike Merrifield of Nottingham explains in a mostly uncut conversation why light travels slower in glass. He treats light as a wave and describes how the material's electrons produce secondary waves that combine to slow it.

A full upload of Alan Kay's 1987 talk, with demos of several Smalltalk-era software systems and ideas about visual, kinesthetic and symbolic reasoning. It includes a Smalltalk program written by a 12-year-old and footage of the Rand tablet.

Tom Scott explains for Computerphile how Unicode and UTF-8 grew out of messy older character encodings to become the web's standard. It covers why the design works and how it handles worldwide text.

Alex Ionescu's OffensiveCon 2019 keynote on how reverse engineering is done on Windows without conventional reversing. It covers legal ways to obtain names of variables, exported functions and structures.