word lens

A one-minute demo of Word Lens, an iPhone app that translates printed text in real time by overlaying the translation on the camera view. It was later folded into Google Translate.

Explains the proposed NASA JPL plan to use the Sun as a gravitational lens, sending solar sail craft to its focal region to image an exoplanet's surface. It covers the distances involved, how imaging with the Sun would work and the mission design.

John Wiegley's BayHac 2017 talk walks through Haskell lenses by example, showing many practical uses beyond simple record access. It is aimed at people who want to become productive with the lens library.

Edward Kmett's talk to the NY Haskell User Group on the lens library, building from fmap and function composition up to lenses, folds and traversals. It shows how these composable combinators access and modify parts of data structures.

Tom Wildenhain's SIGBOVIK 2018 presentation of WordTeX, a Microsoft Word template that mimics LaTeX typesetting output. It is a joke research project executed with serious effort.

Matt Mullenweg joins ThePrimeagen's Twitch stream to discuss the WordPress and WP Engine dispute, including trademark use and contributions.

3Blue1Brown uses Wordle as an excuse to teach information theory and entropy, building a solver that picks guesses by expected information and incorporating word frequencies.

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.

A short Conan segment in which George R. R. Martin explains that he writes his Game of Thrones books on WordStar 4.0 on a DOS machine.

PBS Space Time explains the proposal to use the Sun's gravity as a giant lens, sending a train of small light-sail spacecraft to the focal point roughly 550 AU out. It covers how such a telescope could image exoplanets in surprising detail and the engineering challenges involved.

Fraser Cain interviews JPL physicist Slava Turyshev about using the Sun's gravity as a lens to image distant exoplanets. They cover how the lens works, how a spacecraft would align with it, and mission design.

Tim Minchin performs Prejudice, a comedic song about the power of words and the language used to abuse and demean.

Tom Scott performs a fictional story at GeekyConf about the day Google accidentally stops checking passwords, letting anyone into any account. It works as a parable about how a single point of failure in login can unravel everything built on it.

Dan Callahan presents Mozilla Persona, a decentralized, cross-browser authentication system that removes site passwords, at PyCon 2013. He explains how the protocol works and how to add it to a Python site.

A 1979 BBC Nationwide report asking whether word processors and networked microprocessors could end office commuting. It shows early word processing and a woman working from home, with surprisingly prophetic predictions.

Finnish comedian Ismo does a stand-up routine on Conan about the many meanings of the English word 'ass'. He riffs on the confusing quirks of English as a second language.

A short German satirical clip from Jung & Naiv at 32C3 mocking the German government's overuse of the word 'cyber'. It mixes press conference footage with jokes.

The scene from the 2001 film Swordfish in which Hugh Jackman's character is forced to hack while under pressure. The clip is widely known for its absurd depiction of hacking.

A 2012 Onion News Network satire in which HP announces a push into cloud computing and insists it knows what the cloud is.

A short clip of Inigo Montoya's line from The Princess Bride, 'You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.' It has no educational content beyond the film quote.

Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, the creators of ZFS, present 'ZFS: The Last Word in File Systems' at the 2008 SNIA Software Developers' Conference. They explain the design, including copy-on-write, checksumming and avoiding the write hole.

David Kipping presents his proposed Terrascope, a telescope that uses Earth's atmosphere as a lens to achieve enormous magnification. He covers the history of telescopes and his path to the idea, plus Sol-scope and Jupiter-scope variants.

Steven Pinker presents his book The Stuff of Thought at Google in 2007. He covers language as a window into human nature, including taboo words, swearing and the psychology and game theory of indirect speech like bribery.

Weird Al's whiteboard-animated music video parodying corporate buzzword culture, from the album Mandatory Fun. The lyrics are packed with business jargon.

Josh Wardle, later the creator of Wordle, talks at SF Tech Poetics about why April Fools' Day in Silicon Valley is often lame. He shares lessons from building The Button and Place at Reddit.

A Studio C sketch in which Captain Literally, a superhero who takes the word literally in its strict sense, causes absurd and painful outcomes. It is a short comedy bit about the misuse of the word.

A brief clip of Inigo Montoya from The Princess Bride saying 'You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.'

A CollegeHumor sketch from the Hardly Working series in which a pair of startup founders pitch a website using incomprehensible buzzwords and branding nonsense. It parodies Silicon Valley startup culture.

The famous scene from The Graduate in which a family friend gives Benjamin the career advice 'one word: plastics'. It is a roughly one-minute film clip.

A short clip of Bill Clinton's grand jury testimony in which he says it depends on what the meaning of the word 'is' is. It comes from questioning about Monica Lewinsky.

A through-the-lens comparison of the Oculus Quest 2, HP Reverb G2 and Valve Index, capturing what each headset's display actually looks like. It also previews a 90Hz mode coming to Quest 2.

A short pronunciation clip showing how to say the word 'synecdoche'. It has almost no other content.

A 1975 Saturday Night Live sketch in which Chevy Chase gives Richard Pryor a word association test during a job interview, escalating into trading racial slurs. It is a landmark piece of racial satire.

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.

William Shatner's spoken-word cover of Pulp's 'Common People', from his album Has Been.

Veritasium explains what a black hole should look like, using J.P. Luminet's 1979 work and a cardboard 3D model to show how light bends around it. It was made just as the first black hole image was released.

Vsauce's explainer on Zipf's law, the pattern in which the frequency of a word is inversely related to its rank. It shows the pattern across many domains and discusses why it remains unexplained.

The original music video for Everybody's Free to Wear Sunscreen, a spoken-word piece built on Mary Schmich's 1997 column of life advice, produced by Baz Luhrmann.

Todd Becker's Ancestral Health Symposium talk arguing that myopia is driven by near-work and can be reversed, covering the biology and epidemiology and experimental evidence for reversal by using weaker lenses.

DIY Perks shows how to turn old or smashed TVs and monitors into realistic artificial window lights, using the backlight and Fresnel lens to simulate distant daylight.