west wing

A short clip from The West Wing in which staffers meet a group advocating the Peters projection and challenge the Mercator map. It was shown as geography humor at a Salt Lake GIS user group meeting.

Engineering Explained uses physics to show why today's electric cars, including Teslas, are poor at towing, pointing to battery energy density and weight. It examines Cybertruck and F-150 towing claims.

A one-minute clip from Insider showing an Airbus airliner's wings flexing far more than most people expect during a wing load test. It is meant to reassure nervous flyers about turbulence.

Aging Wheels tests how towing trailers affects the range of electric trucks, including a Silverado EV. It shows that trailer aerodynamics matters far more than added weight.

A short clip from The West Wing in which characters argue for the Gall-Peters map projection over Mercator. It dramatizes how standard maps distort the relative size of countries.

Laura Try recounts her 3,000-mile row across the Atlantic as part of a crew of four women in the 2018 Talisker Whisky Atlantic Challenge.

A short GoPro film of Uli Emanuele's wingsuit BASE jump through a roughly 2 meter wide cave opening, after three years of preparation. It follows his climb to the exit point and the flight itself, shot on a HERO2 camera.

Stuntman Gary Connery jumps from a helicopter at 2,400 feet in a wingsuit and lands without a parachute on a runway of stacked cardboard boxes, the first such landing.

A one-minute clip of Alexander Overwijk drawing a near-perfect freehand circle, one metre across, in under a second on a chalkboard. He is a repeat winner of the World Freehand Circle Drawing Championship.

Physicist Geoffrey West speaks at an FQXi conference on time about complexity and scaling laws. He covers how metabolism, growth and lifespan scale across organisms and how the same mathematics applies to cities and companies.

A one-minute clip from Cambridge's Prof. Holger Babinsky that debunks the equal transit time explanation of lift. It shows how air actually flows over a wing.

Geologist Nick Zentner of Central Washington University gives an hour-long public lecture on the great earthquakes of the Pacific Northwest, including the Cascadia subduction zone and the evidence for past megaquakes. It is part of his Downtown Geology Lecture Series, recorded in Ellensburg in 2016.

Astronomer David Kipping of Cool Worlds talks with Mick West to break down the three declassified Pentagon UFO videos. They explain the footage through camera artifacts, glare, and perspective effects.

A two-minute clip of Richard Feynman on the difference between knowing the name of something and actually knowing it. He uses the example of knowing a bird's name in every language and still knowing nothing about the bird.

A short video of a Boeing 777 wing being tested to destruction, finally breaking at 154 percent of its designed limit load. The wing is flexed upward until it fails.

A two-minute Westworld scene in which Robert Ford and Bernard Lowe discuss whether consciousness exists. Ford argues that the self is a fiction for hosts and humans alike.

A Hot Fuzz clip in which Nicholas Angel struggles to understand the West Country accent of locals.

A 1999 Qwest commercial in which a weary traveler at a remote motel is told every room offers every movie ever made, on demand. It was shot at Roy's Motel in Amboy, California.

A very short clip from the TV series Westworld about whether it matters if you cannot tell a human from an artificial being.

A one-minute 1999 Qwest commercial where a hotel clerk promises every movie ever made in any language, any time.

Guy Steele's 1998 OOPSLA keynote on designing a programming language that its users can grow. He builds the talk using only one-syllable words and terms he has defined, to demonstrate the idea.

A 29C3 panel with whistleblowers Jesselyn Radack, Thomas Drake and William Binney. They talk about what happens when exposing secret government power becomes a crime, and about surveillance abuses.

James Hoffmann demonstrates his recommended technique for brewing coffee with a Hario V60 or other cone-shaped dripper, with notes on water and filter papers.

Mick West shows new night-vision reference footage indicating the Navy's supposed flying pyramid UFO is just an out-of-focus light, likely a plane near LAX, rendered triangular by bokeh. He identifies other lights as Jupiter and stars.

Adam Neely examines Phil Ewell's paper arguing Western music theory is framed by a white racial perspective. He covers North Indian theory, alternative frameworks, Schenker and responses to the paper.

Robert C. Martin's Ruby Midwest 2011 keynote argues that software architecture should express the application's intent rather than its framework. He covers separating entities, interactors and boundaries so the web, database and framework are details.

Catherine West's RustConf 2018 closing keynote on building a game in Rust and organizing a large codebase. It builds up an entity component system and generational indices step by step.

Alan Kay's tribute to Ted Nelson at the Intertwingled festival, presented using a revived Smalltalk-78 system running on emulated 1970s Xerox PARC hardware. It shows live, user-programmable software from that era.

3Blue1Brown introduces Fourier series, from the heat equation to drawing arbitrary shapes with rotating circles. It builds a visual intuition for decomposing functions into sine waves.

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.

Noel Rappin's MountainWest RubyConf talk introduces Smalltalk to Ruby programmers. He compares the two languages' object models, blocks, 1-based arrays, simple syntax and live programming environment, and walks through sample code.

Bret Victor's talk on Drawing Dynamic Visualizations. It argues that visualization tools offer either the directness of hand drawing or the dynamics of programmed graphics, and shows a tool that combines both.

Joe Armstrong, creator of Erlang, and Jeremy Ruston, creator of TiddlyWiki, discuss hypertext, Ted Nelson's idea of intertwingled knowledge, and a way to combine TiddlyWiki with Erlang. It is a Code Mesh LDN 2018 talk.

A Climate Town episode on who uses America's water, particularly Western water. It looks at agriculture such as alfalfa and animal feed, and at water-rights rules that discourage conservation.

David Weston's BlueHat IL 2023 talk traces the evolution of Windows security and previews Windows 11 and hardware advances. It ends with upcoming changes such as Rust in the kernel and fonts, signed binaries and adminless Windows.

A design essay on why products designed in Western contexts often fail when deployed in developing countries. It covers expert blindness and cultural assumptions, with examples such as malaria nets and the One Laptop Per Child project.

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

A short compilation of aircraft flying through clouds and moist air, showing the spiraling vortices that wings leave behind. The footage shows wingtip vortices and the way planes disturb cloud layers.

A long video essay arguing against the claim that Blazing Saddles could not be made today. It looks at the film as satire of the sanitized Western genre and what it did to that genre.

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.