Ze Frank is back with a new show. It’s very nice to see, and so far I’d say I’ll remember it in five years as fondly as I recall The Show. I think this is the best episode he’s posted so far.

Alternate title: Why Humans Would Lose the Robot Wars

Seriously, these things are impressive. Like, scary impressive. The presentation style is dry, but the last few demonstrations are awesome. (And again, a little disturbing.)

(via Waxy)

Holy cow this Kottke post is awesome! A very well made video, and a very interesting piece of relevant information that’s not in the video.

This essay, delivered as a video, is an uncommon idea explained with great clarity. I implore you to look past the from — someone monologuing to the camera for 15 minutes makes me very likely to turn away — and give her amazingly rare points a hearing.

(vía /r/videos)

A life lived well.

(copied from Alex Tabarrok)

I don’t love this TEDx talk from Nick Crocker, but I like it. It does a good job bringing together most of my disparate thoughts about how you can successfully change your life, a topic I’ve been thinking a lot about in the last dozen months. Among other faults though, is that I currently bristle at any mention of “the marshmallow experiment” (though in fairness, Crocker talked about it better than many).

(via Stellar)

I’ve never had much interest in photography or video production, but I watched a few of these featured Vimeo Video School lessons that showed up without context on Stellar, and I was hooked. The videos are well-produced, fun, and brief and the accompanying text is solid. Together they mean that in under an hour I tripled my rudimentary understanding of photography without trying. What more could you want?

There’s been a great deal of much deserved love for Steve Jobs this past week in the wake of his resigning as Apple’s CEO. This short video is the first piece churned up by that really struck me as appropriate for this space.

(via Daring Fireball)

A way to see your culture differently: spend five minutes watching some “Lost Boys” move from Sudan to the United States.

(via Stellar Interesting)

Ze Frank revisits what was probably my favorite episode from “the show”. He shares some interesting and related ideas, like this:

From those experiences I came up with a dictum that I try and use as often as possible. “Execute as quickly and faithfully as possible.” What I like about this is the “quickly” and “faithfully” pull in opposite directions. The first reminds you to act without delay and the second tells you to try not to cut corners.

Inspired by this post from John Gruber, I searched for the title of one of Carl Sagan’s books and came up with multiple amazing things.

My two favorites are from different parts of the text. One from palebluefilms — which uses the same audio as most videos this search yields — is about our significance, the one from thelostproductionsUS — that Gruber highlighted — is about our potential.

I’d like this video to have been a  bit more how-to and a bit less CV, but it still made me want to try harder to make awesome things.

In response to a spat of gay teen suicides, sex-advice columnist Dan Savage called for an “It Gets Better” campaign, to tell GLBTQ (and questioning) teens that life won’t always be so hard. The title link is to the overflowing YouTube group, though if you were to only do a few, I’d suggest those from Mr. Savage (and husband), Tim Gunn, and Fort Worth City Councilman Joel Burns.

(Last two links via Merlin Mann and Buzzfeed, respectively.)

I’m not in love, but this is a pretty nice video.

(via reddit)

Jane McGonigal, whose TED talk I linked earlier this year, tells the story of how she implemented the idea of making the real world more game-like to recover from a concussion.

(via kottke)

Responding to the question of “What do you wish you’d known at 18?”, Stephen Fry gives a damn good and rambling rundown of the proper perspective on life. (Audio is left-channel only, if that’s a big issue for you.)

(via MeFi)

Ever since I watched this episode of “the show” over three years ago (wow) it’s stayed in the back of my mind. And since Firefox (or user error) busted my cycle of having 40+ tabs open persistently — some were from September — it’s been at the forefront. So whether you’ve seen it before or you haven’t go watch zefrank explain something that could change your life.

I had no idea. (via mLG)