virtual threads

Harvard physicist Eric Mazur explains how he realized his students were memorizing rather than understanding, and how he changed his teaching. He presents peer instruction and data showing improved student performance.

Psychology professor Marty Lobdell gives a one-hour lecture on how to study effectively, covering short focused sessions with breaks, study environment, note-taking and memory techniques. It was aimed at students who cram without improving.

An RSA Animate drawn from a Sir Ken Robinson talk arguing that current education systems are modeled on the industrial age. It discusses divergent thinking, standardization, and how schools disengage kids.

James Mickens of Harvard gives a funny lecture at HBS's Future Assembly arguing that blockchains are a very bad idea. He covers their trust, legal and practical shortcomings for real-world problems.

Physicist Carlo Rovelli gives a public lecture at the Royal Institution on how our understanding of time has changed, from Boltzmann and Einstein to quantum theory and loop quantum gravity. He blends physics, philosophy and art to argue that time is stranger than everyday intuition suggests.

Russian-American journalist Vladimir Pozner lectures at Yale on how US foreign policy toward Russia after the Soviet collapse shaped Putin, then takes audience questions on election interference, the Skripal poisoning and media independence.

Cardiologist Dr. Pradip Jamnadas lectures on the rationale for dietary restriction and fasting, covering insulin resistance, glucose intolerance, and low-carb eating over about 81 minutes.

Part two of Alan Kay's Stanford Startup School lecture on inventing the future. He draws on his time at Xerox PARC and elsewhere to discuss how to think about new technology and what makes ideas useful.

A recording of physicist Albert Bartlett's well-known lecture on the arithmetic of exponential growth, applied to population and energy use. He argues that steady percentage growth in a finite world cannot continue and sneaks up suddenly.

Tom Wildenhain's guest lecture for CMU's Esoteric Programming Languages course shows that PowerPoint transitions and slides are Turing complete without macros, building up to a mind-bending fractal ending.

A Virginia Tech presentation by Sid Smith about collapse, fossil fuels and overshoot, arguing that industrial civilization faces a decline and how one might live with that. It was later expanded into a video series.

An 11-minute clip of Milton Friedman explaining the incentives of unions and how they affect employment. He argues unions restrict labor supply, raising pay for some workers while hurting low-skill workers.

University of Chicago lecture in which John Mearsheimer argues the West, through NATO and EU expansion, bears primary responsibility for the Ukraine crisis. He also discusses how to end it and its consequences.

Anders Hejlsberg whiteboards how compilers are taught versus how modern ones are actually built. He explains the shift to compilers as services with incremental, error-tolerant, IDE-oriented design, as in Roslyn and TypeScript.

Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky lectures on the evolution of behavior, including the Prisoner's Dilemma and tit-for-tat strategies in animals. It is part of his Human Behavioral Biology course.

A 1983 Los Angeles lecture by KGB defector Yuri Bezmenov on how the Soviets carried out ideological subversion of target societies through propaganda. He walks through demoralization and normalization stages.

Turing Award winner Michael Stonebraker gives the 2018 Donald B. Gillies Memorial Lecture at Illinois. He discusses the gap between academic research and industry problems, publishing incentives, and the influence of large industry users on research.

Lecture 1 of Harvard's Statistics 110 with Joe Blitzstein, introducing sample spaces, the naive definition of probability, counting, binomial coefficients and the sampling table.

Randy Pausch, a Carnegie Mellon computer scientist and virtual reality pioneer who was dying of cancer, gives his 'Last Lecture' about achieving childhood dreams and living well. The recording is a full-length talk of about 104 minutes.

John Gustafson presents posits, a proposed drop-in replacement for IEEE 754 floats that is simpler in hardware and more flexible in precision. The seminar includes a live demo and machine learning results.

A Stanford EE380 seminar by Michael P. Frank of Sandia National Laboratories on generalized reversible computing. It surveys unconventional computing approaches as transistor scaling nears its limits and energy efficiency stops improving.

Sacha Arnoud, Waymo's Director of Engineering, gives a lecture in MIT's 2018 deep learning for self-driving cars course on the rise of machine learning in autonomous vehicles. It covers how Waymo uses deep learning and how it handles tricky driving situations.

A philosophy lecture by Professor Moeller on the philosophy of identity. It builds on a discussion of Abigail Thorn's video and covers authenticity, sincerity and how online profiles reshape identity.

A 1990 lecture by James Gosling on NeWS, Sun's networked window system in which clients send PostScript programs to the server for execution. It covers the high-level imaging model and compares NeWS with similar systems.

Professor Jeff Dahn lectures on why lithium-ion batteries die and how chemistry changes could make them last decades.

The first lesson from Timothy Snyder's short video series accompanying On Tyranny, arguing that most of the power of authoritarianism is freely given when people comply in advance. It runs about eight minutes.

A recording of Charlie Munger's 1995 Harvard speech on the psychology of human misjudgment. He walks through a list of cognitive biases such as incentives, social proof, and overoptimism.

A lecture by Swami Sarvapriyananda at IIT Kanpur on the Mandukya Upanishad and the question 'Who am I?'. It explains the four states of consciousness in Advaita Vedanta.

MedCram's Dr. Roger Seheult summarizes a discussion with Dr. Michael Mina on cheap, paper-based at-home COVID-19 antigen tests. It explains why lower sensitivity can still work well for screening infectious people.

A pulmonologist and critical care physician explains how COVID-19 can lead to pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome. He covers evidence-based ARDS treatments such as low tidal volume ventilation.

A short clip from Udacity's Web Development course in which Reddit co-founder Steve Huffman describes how Reddit grew early on. He explains seeding the site with content from fake accounts.

A short clip of Richard Feynman on the difference between merely knowing how to reason mathematically and understanding why physical theories work. He discusses holding multiple equivalent ideas and guessing new laws.

Andrej Bauer's IAS talk introduces constructive mathematics and what it feels like to do mathematics without excluded middle. It is framed as a tour for classical mathematicians.

Associate Professor Simon Michaux presents estimates of the metals needed to build one generation of renewable technology to replace fossil fuels. He argues current production and reserves fall far short, with copper a key shortfall.

Chalmers Johnson, author of Blowback and Sorrows of Empire, lectures on parallels between the decline of the Roman and Soviet empires and the United States. He argues the US shows the same symptoms: overextension, corruption, and an inability to reform.

The second talk in the Mill CPU series by Mill Computing, covering the Belt, the Mill's operand-passing model that replaces general registers. It explains the cost of register renaming in conventional wide CPUs and how the Belt reaches high instruction-level parallelism.

The Futur's guide to pricing design and creative work, arguing against hourly rates and for value-based pricing. It features Blair Enns and says to price the client, not the job.

Scott Aaronson's Harvard CMSA talk traces what mathematical truths are knowable, from Godel and Turing to the Busy Beaver function. He covers recent work on Busy Beaver values.

An American Airlines training video by Captain Warren VanderBurgh on control malfunctions and flight instrument anomalies. It discusses real incidents such as runaway trim and instrument failures and how crews should respond.

A two-minute clip of Richard Feynman on the social sciences, discussing what counts as real science versus pseudo science.