theme park

CGP Grey argues for picking a theme for the year or season instead of setting goals or new year's resolutions. He explains how a theme gives direction without a pass/fail target.

Climate Town traces the history of American parking minimums, how they came from shaky research and ITE guides, and how they shape zoning, cities and housing costs. It is a long, comedic video essay.

A feature-length Defunctland documentary on the history of Disney's FastPass and FastPass+ expedited queue systems. It covers how the systems evolved and how they were designed, with simulation of their effects on park lines.

The first episode of a Cities: Skylines series on urban politics and planning, focused on parking. It uses the game to show how parking minimums shape cities, drawing on Donald Shoup's book The High Cost of Free Parking.

A Vox explainer on how mandatory parking minimums and free parking impose hidden costs on cities. It draws on Donald Shoup's work and gives the history of parking requirements.

A hands-on comparison of self-parking systems on a Tesla Model S and 3 (including AP1 vs AP2), an Audi e-tron GT, a Ford Mustang Mach-E and a BMW i4 M50. It tests both parallel and perpendicular parking and finds Tesla's newer vision-based parking noticeably weaker than the others.

Jenny Nicholson's roughly four-hour review of her two-night stay on Disney's Star Wars Galactic Starcruiser immersive hotel. She goes through the experience, its story and production, and why it failed.

MrBtongue argues that modern theme-park MMOs lost what made earlier sandbox online games compelling, and that MMOs could be saved by returning to sandbox design.

A short South Park clip from the 'Post COVID: The Return of COVID' special in which Stan relies on his Alexa. It plays on voice assistants responding to their wake word.

A South Park clip in which Butters' dad takes a job at an Amazon fulfillment center to make ends meet. It satirizes warehouse work conditions.

Not Just Bikes contrasts typical car-dependent North American business parks with one near the airport in the Netherlands that works for driving, cycling and transit. It looks at how the design makes commuting easier.

A clip from the documentary Ride with Larry showing a retired police captain with Parkinson's trying medical marijuana for the first time. The change in tremor, dyskinesia and voice is shown unedited.

Andrew, diagnosed with early onset Parkinson's at 35, shows how deep brain stimulation surgery has controlled his motor symptoms. The short video shows his tremors with the stimulator off and on.

Matt Parker gives a hands-on Royal Institution talk on how four-dimensional shapes appear in a 3D world, with props like straw frames, Mobius strips and a knitted hat. It is a playful general-audience tour of the fourth dimension.

Boston Dynamics shows its Atlas humanoid robots running a parkour course with jumps, balance beams and vaults, demonstrating whole-body athletic control.

Matt Parker's Royal Institution talk based on his book Humble Pi, covering everyday mathematical mistakes and spurious patterns that went wrong in engineering and software. It mixes stand-up comedy with stories of coincidence and error.

Matt Parker's LMS popular lecture on how seemingly incredible results can be meaningless random patterns. He ranges from ancient Woolworths civilisations to shoelaces and DNA.

An AdaCore webinar in which NVIDIA engineers explain why and how they adopted Ada and SPARK for security-critical firmware. It covers the business case and the engineering experience of the transition.

A short Boston Dynamics clip of the Atlas humanoid robot doing parkour, jumping over a log and leaping up steps using whole-body control and computer vision to locate markers.

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.

A one-minute clip from South Park in which BP issues a hilariously insincere corporate apology over its oil spill.

A short IEEE Spectrum clip of Stanford's autonomous car Junior learning to powerslide into a parking spot. It shows several approaches to the maneuver.

Boston Dynamics shows its Atlas humanoid robot performing a gymnastics and parkour routine, using optimization-generated motions and a model predictive controller.

A short comedy clip from the TV show Parks and Recreation set in a jail scene.

The South Park clip in which underpants gnomes explain their three-phase business plan: collect underpants, then a question mark, then profit.

A one-minute clip of the Jurassic Park scene where a girl navigates the FSN 3D file manager on an SGI system and declares it a Unix system.

Patrick Stewart on the BBC's Parkinson talk show talks humorously about going bald, how it affected his career and relationships, and how he came to accept it.

Sebastien Bubeck presents the Sparks of AGI paper at MIT, showing early experiments with GPT-4 across many domains and asking whether artificial intelligence has arrived. It includes the TikZ unicorn example.

Grant Sanderson of 3Blue1Brown shows his workflow for animating math videos with Manim, with Ben Sparks. He codes scenes live, including a Lorenz attractor, and walks through example scenes.

Pianist Tom Brier sight-reads a piano arrangement of the Super Mario World ending theme, working from a first-draft score by Keeper1st. He takes some liberties with the score as he plays.

The main theme from Eduard Artemyev's score to the 1979 Soviet film Siberiade, an electronic piece that features the ANS synthesizer.

The Secret of Monkey Island intro theme played through the internal PC speaker. It is a tribute to LucasArts.

The full Malvina Reynolds recording of the folk song 'Little Boxes', a satire of identical suburban tract housing, later popularized as the Weeds theme. The upload includes the lyrics.

Tom Lehrer performs his satirical song about poisoning pigeons in the park, in a rare 1967 Norwegian broadcast recording.

A short screen capture of SGI's File System Navigator (FSN, also called Fusion) running on IRIX 6.5 on an Octane. It shows the 3D file browser seen in Jurassic Park.

Matt Parker talks Numberphile through the different kinds of numbers: algebraic, transcendental, computable, normal, and beyond. It shows how few numbers we can actually name or describe.

Matt Parker analyzes the Minecraft speedrunning controversy in which Dream was accused of cheating via improbably lucky drops. He walks through the probability and the statistical arguments in the original accusation and the reply.

Music video for Public Service Broadcasting's "Go!" from the album The Race For Space, built from NASA audio and archival material of Apollo-era voices.

Full episode of Sassy Justice, a satirical local-news show from the South Park creators starring a deepfaked consumer advocate, Fred Sassy. It uses face-swapped public figures to comment on the dangers of manipulated video.

Matt Parker of Stand-up Maths demonstrates MENACE, Donald Michie's 1961 machine made of matchboxes that learns to play noughts and crosses through reinforcement. He builds and trains a physical version.