taste gap

A two-minute video of Ira Glass on the creative process, describing the gap between taste and skill when starting out and urging you to keep producing until your work matches your taste.

The Explosions&Fire channel taste-tests the chloride salts of the alkali metals (lithium through cesium), plus some alkaline earth metals and ammonium. The presenter describes the flavors, and the results are more pleasant than expected.

A five-minute clip of Ira Glass on the gap between good taste and early creative work. He says beginners know their work falls short and must keep producing to close the gap.

A one-minute clip of Steve Jobs saying Microsoft has no taste. It is vintage interview footage about design and product sensibility.

Drone footage over Tesla's Fremont factory in January 2021 that captures a Gigapress die-casting machine in operation.

A short tour of the Megaprocessor, a microprocessor built at enormous scale from tens of thousands of discrete transistors. The builder shows what the machine is made of and where it now lives, at the Centre for Computing History in Cambridge, where visitors can play Tetris on it.

Adam Ragusea explores why Hershey's chocolate tastes the way it does to many non-Americans, tracing it to butyric acid and Hershey's history, and why familiarity makes Americans love it. He compares it with British Cadbury.

Channel 4 News's full interview with Jordan Peterson, in which Cathy Newman presses him on the gender pay gap, patriarchy, campus protests and postmodernism. It was widely discussed for its confrontational style.

A Numberphile video with Dr James Grime on Sloane's Gap, the observation that integers in the OEIS are not evenly represented and some numbers are underrepresented. It explains the clusters of 'interesting' numbers.

A 1996 clip of Steve Jobs saying that Microsoft lacks taste and is not a creative company.

Cody's Lab obtains pure heavy water (D2O) and drinks it as a taste test, reporting its flavor and feel. It is a short self-experiment.

A short clip about DARPA's ARGUS-IS, a 1.8 gigapixel wide-area camera array flown on a Boeing unmanned helicopter. It produces a huge mosaic video that can watch a city-sized area from 20,000 feet.

A short clip of Steve Jobs saying Microsoft has no taste, from an interview about Windows. It is an excerpt reposted by a fan channel.

A very short animated song and public service announcement saying it is fine to dislike things as long as you are not rude about it.

A four-minute clip from Dr. Strangelove in which the President and General Turgidson argue over the 'mineshaft gap' after a nuclear war. Peter Sellers and George C. Scott play it as Cold War satire.

Adam Ragusea examines whether olive oil is unsafe for high-heat cooking and whether it tastes bad when heated. He cites studies showing it is among the most stable cooking oils and that smoke-point worries are overblown.

TED curator Chris Anderson interviews Linus Torvalds about his personality, his engineer's pragmatism, and the creation of Linux and Git. Torvalds also discusses taste in code and why he open sourced Linux.

Hans Rosling uses data and animated statistics to show how world population is changing, why birth rates fall as child survival and wealth rise, and why population is expected to peak around 11 billion. It also tackles common misconceptions about Africa and family planning.

Hans Rosling uses augmented-reality animation to show 200 countries over 200 years in four minutes, built from 120,000 data points. It tracks life expectancy and income to show the world's development.

Hans Rosling uses the Gapminder animated-data tool to debunk myths about world development, with sportscaster-like energy. It shows trends in health, income and child survival across countries.

Patrick Boyle's deadpan account of Saudi Arabia's Neom and The Line megaproject, a planned 170 km linear city that has been scaled back to a fraction of its size. He covers the feasibility problems and the financing.

Robert Erdmann, a materials scientist at the Rijksmuseum, gives a PyCon keynote on the ultra-high-resolution imaging of Rembrandt's Night Watch. He covers the automated gantry camera system, the Python software that drives it, and the large volumes of image data involved.

A clip of psychologist Jordan Peterson discussing why few women reach high-paying, high-pressure jobs. He talks about the tension between a demanding career and having a family.

A Lambda Days keynote by Simon Peyton Jones and Tim Sweeney introducing Verse, Epic's functional logic language for the metaverse. It covers existential variables, unification and expressions yielding multiple values.

A Vox explainer on why California's high-speed rail project is years late and far over budget, with only a few concrete structures built by 2022. It covers the political, legal and routing challenges behind the delays.

David Christiansen gives a Strange Loop 2018 introduction to dependent types, where one language serves for both compile-time and run-time code and programs unite with proofs. It draws on his book The Little Typer.

Richard Wilkinson presents data showing that societies with larger income gaps do worse on health, lifespan, trust and other measures. He argues the effects track inequality itself rather than average income. It is a 17-minute TED talk.

Hans Rosling makes the case that the washing machine was the greatest invention of the industrial revolution. Using Gapminder graphics, he shows how electricity and economic growth free up time for reading and learning.

A two-minute clip from The Devil Wears Prada in which Miranda Priestly explains how the cerulean color of a casual sweater traces back through runway designers to the bargain bin. It is a monologue about how high fashion trickles down to mass-market clothing.

An IKEA Singapore ad parodying Apple product launches by presenting the 2015 catalogue as a revolutionary 'bookbook' device. It is a short, tongue-in-cheek spoof of Apple-style marketing.

Hans Rosling uses population statistics to explain why the world population will level off rather than grow without limit. He shows that falling child mortality and rising prosperity lead to smaller families.

Sal Khan of Khan Academy argues that schools push students forward with gaps in their foundations, and that students should instead master concepts at their own pace. He compares it to building a house on an unfinished foundation.

Anna Rosling Rönnlund presents Dollar Street, a project photographing homes in dozens of countries, from stoves to beds to toilets, and sorting them by income. She shows how data visualization can change how we see the world.

A short infographic video on the distribution of wealth in America, contrasting what people believe, what they consider ideal, and the actual numbers. It highlights how top-heavy US wealth is.

Chris Urmson's SXSW 2016 talk on Google's self-driving car project, covering 1.3 million self-driven miles and the gap between hype and reality. It shows sensor visualizations and playbacks of hard situations the cars met, and discusses failures such as the low-speed bus collision.

An episode of the Norwegian documentary series Brainwash, in which a comedian interviews academics from different sides about gender differences and gender equality. It looks at why more equal societies can still show unequal career choices.

CGP Grey explains how traffic jams come from human driving behavior such as tailgating and reaction delays, and how leaving gaps and smoothing speed would reduce congestion. It also touches on self-driving cars.

A short video from the trafficwaves.org site showing how traffic jams and standing waves form, including the fight between cheaters and blockers at an exit-lane backup. It also touches on how individual driving behavior affects the flow.

A two-minute comedy sketch in which a woman describes her problems while a visible nail sticks out of her head, and her partner keeps trying to fix it instead of listening. It dramatizes the gap between wanting empathy and being offered solutions.

Salman Khan's TED 2011 talk on Khan Academy. He shows that it goes beyond video lectures to self-paced practice and analytics for teachers, and argues for filling gaps in understanding.