the machine

Joscha Bach's 35C3 talk offers an AI perspective on the soul, covering perception, mental representation, agency, consciousness and selfhood as things that can arise in a computational system like the brain.

The opening scene of The Wire season 5, in which detectives use a copy machine as a fake lie detector to get a confession.

Machine Thinking argues the 1751 machine, a metal-cutting lathe associated with Vaucanson, triggered the biggest explosion of wealth in history by enabling precise manufacturing of other machines.

An illustrated 23-minute summary of David Friedman's talk based on The Machinery of Freedom. It describes how law, police and courts could work as market services in a stateless society, covering private law, polycentric law and objections.

Michael Wesch's five-minute video about Web 2.0, showing how the read/write web, XML and user-generated content change how people create and share information.

Noam Chomsky's 2011 University of Oslo lecture on Newton's contributions to the study of mind. He argues Newton abandoned mechanical explanation and lowered the bar for scientific intelligibility, with consequences for the limits of human understanding. Q&A starts at 45:33.

The 'Machine that goes PING!' sketch from Monty Python's The Meaning of Life, in which hospital staff fuss over a machine while ignoring the patient.

An episode of Tim Hunkin's The Secret Life of Machines that explains how a washing machine works, using models, cut-aways and animations. It was first aired in 1988.

A NeXT, Inc. promotional video showing its highly automated factory and the manufacturing of the NeXT Cube, including automated circuit board assembly.

Part 1 of an episode of the British educational TV series The Secret Life of Machines, about how vacuum cleaners work and their history. It mixes humor with explanation of household technology.

Kyle Hill of Because Science explains and demonstrates, using real cards, how Magic: The Gathering can be used to build a Turing machine, a computer inside the card game.

Technology Connections takes apart the step-by-step electromechanical logic of a 1970s pinball machine. He shows how relays, steppers and switches track state and score without electronics.

Val Bennett's reggae cover of Dave Brubeck's Take Five, titled The Russians Are Coming. It was used as the theme tune of The Secret Life of Machines.

The first episode of Clickspring's series building a John Wilding skeleton clock from raw stock in a home machine shop. It covers making the frames along with the tools needed for the job.

Tim Hunkin's 1987 TV series episode on how vacuum cleaners and related household machines work, remastered and upscaled in 2021. It is part of the six-episode 'Secret Life of Machines' series with hands-on demonstrations of everyday technology.

Johnny Harris investigates why McDonald's ice cream machines are so often broken, covering the Taylor machines, the repair restrictions on franchisees and the Kytch workaround device.

A 70-minute video essay by Jimmy McGee on gambling, addiction and game design, tracing horse racing, slot machines and collectible card markets. It is the first in a series on making money from games.

A two-hour complete longplay of the 1993 MS-DOS puzzle game The Incredible Machine, in which players assemble Rube Goldberg contraptions to complete simple tasks.

The first episode of Clickspring's series on reproducing the Antikythera Mechanism by hand, laying out the plan and the history. The series follows a machinist building the ancient Greek device with traditional tools and methods.

Wintergatan's video of the Marble Machine, a hand-built music instrument that plays a song using about 2000 marbles on a mechanical clockwork-style mechanism.

Dan Gelbart shows his home-built air bearing CNC lathe and grinder, which reaches about 1 micron accuracy. He demonstrates the machine and its parts.

Clickspring makes the pin-and-slot epicyclic gearing of the Antikythera Mechanism, the module modelling the Moon's variable motion in the Greek theory, by hand.

A short video of railroad workers in Storfors, Sweden, using thermite to weld rail sections together.

The first lecture of Andrew Ng's Stanford CS229 Machine Learning course, giving an overview of the course. It introduces supervised and unsupervised learning, learning theory and reinforcement learning.

The first lecture of David MacKay's Cambridge course on information theory, pattern recognition and neural networks. It introduces the core ideas of his book Information Theory, Inference, and Learning Algorithms.

Johns Hopkins APL shows Les Baugh, a bilateral shoulder-level amputee, controlling two Modular Prosthetic Limbs by thought after a short training period. Nerves rerouted to his chest drive the arms.

Chris Lattner and Brennan Saeta present Swift for TensorFlow at the TensorFlow Dev Summit 2019, covering language-integrated automatic differentiation and tooling for machine learning in Swift.

Will Wilson explains autonomous testing: using deterministic simulation and fuzzing, building on FoundationDB's approach, to test software continuously. It sets out the ideas behind his later company Antithesis.

A short SIGBOVIK 2017 presentation by Tom Wildenhain showing that PowerPoint animations are Turing complete, with a working Turing machine built in slides. The talk is delivered deadpan as a serious research result.

Veritasium traces analog computers from the Antikythera mechanism and Kelvin's tide-predicting machines to fire control and modern analog approaches. It explains how these machines computed continuously rather than digitally.

Destin Sandlin tours a progressive metal stamping factory, showing machines that stamp millions of metal parts and the tooling behind them.

Remastered episode of Tim Hunkin's The Secret Life of Machines about the radio, covering its development including Hertz and Marconi experiments and Armstrong's FM radio in animated form.

The Thought Emporium's update on the home-brewed gene therapy he took to cure his lactose intolerance. It reports how the effect held up over two years and what future versions might look like.

The Thought Emporium synthesizes chicken noodle soup from pure chemicals, following an original patent for artificial chicken flavor. The video explores how many chemicals it takes to make a convincing soup.

The first episode of Google's Machine Learning Recipes series. It introduces machine learning and builds a first supervised-learning classifier in about six lines of Python using scikit-learn.

Mark Rober and Jabril build an app that uses machine learning to decode baseball sign sequences. The video also explains neural networks in a simple, accessible way.

Modern Vintage Gamer explains how Eric Chahi built Another World on the Amiga 500, using 2D polygons, rotoscoping and clever techniques to run well on a stock 7MHz machine.

John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on US voting machines, covering how they work, their security weaknesses, and how elections could be made more secure.

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.

Machine Thinking tells the story of the Cold War Heavy Press Program, the giant forging presses that make parts for aircraft, missiles and turbines.