Here are my favorite videos, a new one each month!
April 2025
Since the term "fascism" is on everyone's lips, this is an excellent unbiased introduction.
March 2025
Every day I am more convinced that microplastics is the new lead. The 10x stat is scary.
February 2025
Today I learned that Robert Habeck wrote the preface of the new German translation of George Orwell's classic 1984. Robert Habeck is the Vice-Chancellor of Germany. While being Vice-Chancellor, Habeck sued hundreds of German citizens for digital hate crimes against ... him, Robert Habeck. Some of these citizens had the police raid their homes for just reposting a funny meme about Habeck. The irony of installing a Ministry of Love while writing a preface for 1984.
January 2025
Stossel calling out the media.
December 2024
So many ... coups.
November 2024
Colbert needs to select his audience more carefully.
October 2024
When the Physics Nobel Prize was revealed, I joked on Reddit that the Chemistry prize will go to DeepMind. But I wasn't the only one who correctly anticipated the Chemistry Nobel Prize. Here is a video of my colleague Indy Gupta performing a song in his lecture.
September 2024
Moving to the Bay Area, Palo Alto to be precise. We live in a quiet residential area. As European, you expect to hear a lot of cars and motorcycles. But there are almost no motorcycles, and surprisingly many bicycles on the road. So can we even sleep with windows open in these hot summer nights? (Also, against our expectations, our house does not have air conditioning.) Alas, we cannot. Because of some dopey regulation, trains must use their horn three times at all railroad crossings. And since we live in a city, railroad crossings are plenty, so basically the trains honk their horn all the way from San Francisco to San Jose. The last train passes at 1am, the first train passes at 5am. So there is a 4 hour window of sleep. We don't live very close to the train line, so we cannot really hear the trains, but we can certainly hear their horns.
August 2024
Quiz Question: Which Swiss city has most skyscrapers? For concreteness, let's define a skyscraper as a building which is at least 100 meters high. So not very high, but we are talking about Switzerland. According to Wikipedia, there are only 11 skyscrapers in all of Switzerland . One is in Winterthur, one in Ostermundigen, one is in Zurich. The other 8 are in just two cities. Four are in Basel, and four (all right next to each other, and in that sense the only "skyline" in Switzerland) in ...
July 2024
When "Comedy Central" hosts the main voice of reason.
June 2024
This spring I rediscovered the 2023 album Madres by Sofia Kourtesis. Relaxing, a touch of house, with latin influences. Tough to choose a track though, since somehow they're all equally excellent. Best listen to the whole album.
May 2024
Really love the fragile experimental pop songs by Saya Gray. Every song on the QWERTY II EP is exciting in its own way.
April 2024
3Blue1Brown is the gold standard of modern teaching. Alternatively, I recommend this hilariously nerdy video explaining GPT-2 in a spreadsheet.
March 2024
Malik Elassal. What a set. What a finish.
February 2024
Jon Stewart is back at The Daily Show. That alone would be worth the video of the month, but this is independent journalism at its best.
January 2024
Video from the CUSO Winter School in Computer Science in Champery. The video has two parts. In the first part I explain the basics of Graph Neural Networks. In the second part I explain how this is related to "Thinking Slow". The first part is based on the invited talk at PODC 2023, the second part is based on the invited talk at OPODIS 2023.
Earlier Videos
I started this one video each month tradition in January 2010. You will find the early years here.