tic-tac-toe

A short scene from the British sitcom Yes Prime Minister in which officials describe 'salami tactics' for invading a country slice by slice. Each small step is too minor to justify a major response.

Innuendo Studios' video from the Alt-Right Playbook series on how bad-faith actors control the conversation through debate tactics and moving goalposts.

A short WIRED demo from CES 2013 of Tactus Technology's haptic touchscreen, whose panel raises physical bumps to form a keyboard.

Huygens Optics explains the Fourier transform and shows how a lens performs one optically. A DLP projector is used as a Fourier filter to do simple pattern recognition on lithographic character patterns.

Thomas Garrity discusses mathematical maturity, a concept mathematicians use for professional development, and how it can inform teaching, mentoring and careers. It was given at the IAS/PCMI Park City Mathematics Institute.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff lectures on how political debates are framed through language and metaphors tied to values, and on the moral worldviews behind progressive and conservative politics. It was given in 2005 at UC San Diego.

Historian and journalist Gwynne Dyer gives a long UBC talk on how climate change will reshape international politics. He covers food, borders, refugees and the possibility of unilateral geoengineering by affected nations.

Utah State plant scientist Bruce Bugbee presents his analysis of the energy and environmental costs of vertical and indoor farming. He argues artificial lighting cannot compete with sunlight in fields or greenhouses.

Climate Town gives a comedic, fast-paced account of how the plastics industry promoted recycling, including the resin-code recycling symbol, while knowing most plastic could not be economically recycled. It points viewers to the Frontline documentary Plastic Wars for a deeper treatment.

A two-minute 2008 clip from Sun's Fishworks team in which Brendan Gregg uses DTrace to show disk latency spiking while he shouts at a rack of drives. Bryan Cantrill narrates the demonstration.

The opening lecture of Ian Shapiro's Yale course Power and Politics in Today's World, which examines political dynamics and institutions over the past quarter century, including inequality, declining unions and new forms of authoritarianism.

A short RepresentUs explainer on how money corrupts American politics and what an anti-corruption act could do about it. It covers lobbying, super PACs and campaign finance, and pitches the group's proposed reforms. The video was later superseded by an updated version.

A two-minute clip of Andreas Antonopoulos explaining why a 51% attack on Bitcoin would not destroy it and what such an attack would cost. It is a succinct take on mining security.

John Ousterhout's Netdev 0x16 keynote arguing that nearly every aspect of TCP is wrong for the datacenter, from connections and streams to reliable delivery and congestion control. He presents the case for a replacement protocol.

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.

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.

A two-hour NANOG tutorial by Richard Steenbergen aimed at network engineers, covering optical networking technologies. This is the updated 2017 edition of a recurring talk.

A Wendover Productions documentary-style video on how Zipline delivers blood and medical supplies by drone in Rwanda. It covers the catapult launch, parachute drop and the logistics behind it.

A two-minute demo of SmartKnob View, an open-source input knob built from a brushless gimbal motor, magnetic encoder and round LCD. Closed-loop torque control gives software-defined detents and end stops.

A Channel 4 News undercover investigation in which Cambridge Analytica executives are filmed discussing bribes, honeypots, fake identities and manipulating elections around the world.

Scott Manley explains the thermal balance of spacecraft and how a satellite could be configured to radiate away the heat from datacenter-scale computing in space. His rough numbers suggest it is feasible.

Raymond Hettinger explains Python's dataclasses module, showing the problem it solves and its key design decisions. He places it in a progression from tuples and dicts through named tuples and attrs.

Robin Deits presents the JuliaRobotics organization and shows how Julia is used to visualize, simulate and control a humanoid robot. The talk touches on real-time performance and composability across packages.

A FRONTLINE documentary on whether efforts to fix plastic pollution made it worse. It looks at the battle over plastics and recycling and how little plastic is actually recycled.

John Oliver explains how plastics harm the planet and why recycling is not the solution consumers have been led to believe. He argues corporations and policymakers must act, not just individuals.

A live 2007 performance of Todd Snider's song 'Statistician's Blues' at the Great American Music Hall. The song satirizes statistics and how readily people believe them.

Joel Spolsky's 2009 Google Tech Talk on why StackOverflow was built, how it addresses the mess of searching for programming help, and the community design behind it. He also takes jabs at paywalled answer sites.

A short Great Big Story piece about Hagoromo, a Japanese chalk brand so prized that mathematicians stockpiled it, with some reportedly dealing it on the side. It tells the quirky tale of a writing tool whose supply became scarce.

A Kurzgesagt animation on using gene drives to modify mosquitoes against malaria, and whether we should. It explains the mechanism and the ethical trade-offs.

An IEEE Spectrum compilation of humanoid robots falling over during the 2015 DARPA Robotics Challenge Finals.

Applied Science shows how telecentric and hypercentric optics differ from normal lenses, producing no or negative perspective. The video builds a telecentric system from a Fresnel lens and demonstrates a lens that can see around objects.

James Hamilton of AWS gives a Velocity 2010 keynote on datacenter infrastructure innovation, focused on power and cooling costs and a breakdown of where datacenter spending goes.

A stand-up routine by Stewart Lee on political correctness, offering a satirical defense of inclusive language.

A Vox Strikethrough video arguing that CNN models its political coverage on sports shows like First Take, pitting pundits against each other. It claims this favors drama over truth and degrades public understanding.

The closing scene of Ratatouille where critic Anton Ego delivers his review, reflecting on the role of critics and the value of new things.

CGP Grey explains the history and legal status of territorial claims on Antarctica. It covers the overlapping national claims and the Antarctic Treaty that freezes them.

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

Footage of the first manned flight of an electric multicopter, flown by Volocopter (then e-volo) in October 2011. The 90-second flight was a Guinness World Record.

The final scene of the 1983 film WarGames, in which the WOPR computer runs through nuclear war scenarios and concludes that the only winning move is not to play. It is a six-minute clip uploaded in higher quality than earlier copies.

A very short clip from Yes, Prime Minister in which Sir Arnold and Sir Humphrey run through a piece of circular political reasoning. It is the origin of the so-called politician's logic.