PBS
The Retro Awesomeness of Adventure Time
Adventure Time is an animated kids show on the Cartoon Network that is super popular, not just with the kids, but with full grown adults too! Why would a bunch of serious adults, including Mike's Mom, watch Adventure Time? We think its...
Crash Course
Where Are My Children: Crash Course Film Criticism
Before the Hayes Code was enacted, movies were a lot more brazen than we sometimes tend to think. Director/Producer Lois Weber spent much of her career making movies that challenged audiences. Her film, "Where Are My Children" is no...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Making a TED-Ed Lesson: Visualizing complex ideas
How can animation convey complex, intangible concepts? A visual metaphor, or an idea represented through imagery, can take an idea as massive as Big Data and tie it to the familiar depiction of a growing tree. TED-Ed animators explain...
Crash Course
LARP: Crash Course Games
Today we're going to talk about LARPs or live action role-playing games. Larping tends to conjure up the image of a bunch of nerds hitting each other with foam weapons but it's much more than that. LARPs merge performance, community, and...
Crash Course
Representing Numbers and Letters with Binary: Crash Course Computer Science
Today, we’re going to take a look at how computers use a stream of 1s and 0s to represent all of our data - from our text messages and photos to music and webpages. We’re going to focus on how these binary values are used to represent...
Crash Course
In the Mood For Love: Crash Course Film Criticism
Cinematic love stories come in all shapes and sizes. Movies are really good at both capturing and projecting emotions. And one of the best directors at the modern love story is Wong Kar-Wai. In this episode of Crash Course Film...
TED Talks
TED: The data behind Hollywood's sexism | Stacy Smith
Where are all the women and girls in film? Social scientist Stacy Smith analyzes how the media underrepresents and portrays women -- and the potentially destructive effects those portrayals have on viewers. She shares hard data behind...
Crash Course
Artificial Intelligence & Personhood: Crash Course Philosophy
Today Hank explores artificial intelligence, including weak AI and strong AI, and the various ways that thinkers have tried to define strong AI including the Turing Test, and John Searle’s response to the Turing Test, the Chinese Room....
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Silvia Moreno-García: Titan of terror: the dark imagination of H.P. Lovecraft
Arcane books of forbidden lore, disturbing secrets in the family bloodline, and terrors so unspeakable the very thought of them might drive you mad. These have become standard elements in modern horror stories. But they were largely...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Development of English drama - Mindy Ploeckelmann
When presented with the problem of hoards of illiterate commoners, English clergymen in the 11th century created plays to spread word about the Bible. Eventually, the plays moved out of the church and into the streets. Mindy Ploeckelmann...
TED-Ed
TED-ED: Why should you read Tolstoy's "War and Peace"? - Brendan Pelsue
"War and Peace." A tome. A slog. The sort of book you shouldn't read in bed because if you fall asleep it could give you a concussion. Right? Only partly. "War and Peace" is a long book, sure, but it's also a thrilling examination of...
Crash Course
Three Colors - Blue: Crash Course Film Criticism
Movies are really good at making us feel. Happy, sad, excited, etc... Part of that is because they use so many different types of media all at once. Photography, music, performance, and editing all play into their ability to communicate...
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Inside a cartoonist's world - Liza Donnelly
From cave drawings to the Sunday paper, artists have been visualizing ideas -- cartoons -- for centuries. New Yorker cartoonist Liza Donnelly walks us through the many stages every cartoon goes through, starting with an idea and turning...
TED Talks
Jim Toomey: Learning from Sherman the shark
Cartoonist Jim Toomey created the comic strip Sherman's Lagoon, a wry look at underwater life starring Sherman the talking shark. As he sketches some of his favorite sea creatures live onstage, Toomey shares his love of the ocean and the...
SciShow
Why We Love Movie Villains (According to Psychology)
Sometimes we find ourselves falling for the cute vampire or German bank robber, and this might say a lot about how we think about ourselves.
TED-Ed
TED-Ed: Why should you read "One Hundred Years of Solitude"? - Francisco Diez-Buzo
Gabriel Garcia Marquez's novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude" brought Latin American literature to the forefront of the global imagination and earned Garcia Marquez the 1982 Nobel Prize for Literature. What makes the novel so...
MinutePhysics
Time Travel in Fiction Rundown
For ages I’ve been thinking about doing a video analyzing time travel in fiction and doing a comparison of different fictional time travels – some do use wormholes, some relativistic/faster than light travel with time dilation, some...
TED Talks
Torsten Reil: Animate characters by evolving them
Torsten Reil talks about how the study of biology can help make natural-looking animated people -- by building a human from the inside out, with bones, muscles and a nervous system. He spoke at TED in 2003; see his work now in GTA4.
TED Talks
TED: 4 larger-than-life lessons from soap operas | Kate Adams
Soap operas and telenovelas may be (ahem) overdramatic, but as Kate Adams shows us, their exaggerated stories and characters often cast light on the problems of real life. In this sparkling, funny talk, Adams, a former assistant casting...
PBS
Can Video Games Become the Next Spectator Sport?
As our South Korean friends can confirm, video games can most definitely be a spectator sport. But will they ever catch on in a huge way in the good ol' U.S. of A?
Crash Course
Lost in Translation: Crash Course Film Criticism
It's time to take a look at a quieter, sweeter, and maybe happier film in this series. Sophia Coppola's "Lost in Translation" is a wonderful romantic comedy that doesn't play by the usual rules of its genre. In this episode, Michael...
TED Talks
TED: Why I keep speaking up, even when people mock my accent | Safwat Saleem
Artist Safwat Saleem grew up with a stutter -- but as an independent animator, he decided to do his own voiceovers to give life to his characters. When YouTube commenters started mocking his Pakistani accent, it crushed him, and his...
TED Talks
ShaoLan: Learn to read Chinese ... with ease!
For foreigners, learning to speak Chinese is a hard task. But learning to read the beautiful, often complex characters of the Chinese written language may be less difficult. ShaoLan walks through a simple lesson in recognizing the ideas...
TED Talks
TED: What does the future hold? 11 characters offer quirky answers | Sarah Jones
Sarah Jones changes personas with the simplest of wardrobe swaps. In a laugh-out-loud improvisation, she invites 11 "friends" from the future on stage—from a fast-talking Latina to an outspoken police officer—to ask them questions...