"Essentially, Jeff installed a printing press to close the inventory gap with Amazon.  The Espresso Book Machine sits in the middle of Harvard Book Store like a hi-tech visitor to an earlier era. A compact digital press, it can print nearly five million titles including Google Books that are in the public domain, as well as out of print titles. We’re talking beautiful, perfect bound paperbacks indistinguishable from books produced by major publishing houses. The Espresso Book Machine can be also used for custom publishing, a growing source of revenue, and customers can order books in the store and on-line.

You can walk into the store, request an out-of-print, or hard-to-find title, and a bookseller can print that book for you in approximately four minutes."

"This interactive tutorial will teach you how to use the sequent calculus, a simple set of rules with which you can use to show the truth of statements in first order logic. It is geared towards anyone with some background in writing software for computers, with knowledge of basic boolean logic." Blog post: http://blog.ezyang.com/2012/05/an-interactive-tutorial-of-the-sequent-calculus/

"I am a totally blind college student who’s had several programming internships so my answer will be based off these. I use windows xp as my operating system and Jaws to read what appears on the screen to me in synthetic speech. For java programming I use eclipse, since it’s a fully featured IDE that is accessible." Amazing.

"On one level, it’s [Eurosong] a simple pop music contest, a throwback to the 1950s, when men wore tuxedos, fostering cultural unity seemed like a good way to stop World War III, and Luxembourg still had a shot at winning international competitions. On another level though, it’s a fascinating insight into the complex interconnected web that is European geopolitics1."

“It takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others. He added his little mite — that is all he did. These object lessons should teach us that ninety-nine parts of all things that proceed from the intellect are plagiarisms, pure and simple; and the lesson ought to make us modest. But nothing can do that.” – Mark Twain

"Street artist JR made a wish in 2011: Join me in a worldwide photo project to show the world its true face. Now, a year after his TED Prize wish, he shows how giant posters of human faces, pasted in public, are connecting communities, making change, and turning the world inside out. You can join in at insideoutproject.net"

"Revise constantly."

"Oops! Nobody wants to see the 404: Page Not Found. But as Renny Gleeson shows us, while he runs through a slideshow of creative and funny 404 pages, every error is really a chance to build a better relationship."

"How do you make a great public space inside a not-so-great building? Liz Diller shares the story of creating a welcoming, lighthearted (even, dare we say it, sexy) addition to the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, DC."

"Because, if you did, someone is going to check your work. A group of researchers have already begun what they’ve dubbed the Reproducibility Project, which aims to replicate every study from those three journals for that one year. The project is part of Open Science Framework, a group interested in scientific values, and its stated mission is to “estimate the reproducibility of a sample of studies from the scientific literature.” This is a more polite way of saying “We want to see how much of what gets published turns out to be bunk.”"

"R is a strange, deeply flawed language that nevertheless has an enthusiastic and rapidly growing user base. What about R accounts for its popularity in its niche? What can language designers learn from R's success?"

"The Haskell School of Music — From Signals to Symphonies is a textbook on functional programming in Haskell, with a strong focus on computer music concepts and applications. The book describes Euterpea, a computer music library developed in Haskell, that allows programming computer music applications both at the note level and the signal level. The book also teaches functional programming in Haskell from scratch. It is suitable for use in the classroom to teach functional programming concepts, Haskell language details, computer music and audio processing concepts and applications — or all of the above."

"A video tutorial about the International Phonetic Alphabet and the English language. This is the first in a series of several videos that will help you understand English pronunciation so that you can learn another language's pronunciation."

"Steve Schapiro talks about his experience as a special photographer on the set of Taxi Driver, capturing the film's most intense and violent moments from behind the scenes."

"It all started with Snow Crash.
If I hadn’t read it and fallen in love with the idea of the Metaverse, if it hadn’t made me realize how close networked 3D was to being a reality, if I hadn’t thought I can do that, and more importantly I want to do that, I’d never have embarked on the path that eventually wound up at Valve."

"Sir Ken Robinson provides the closing statement for the LWF 12 conference under the theme "leading a learning revolution"."

""Secrets can take many forms -- they can be shocking, or silly, or soulful." Frank Warren, the founder of PostSecret.com, shares some of the half-million secrets that strangers have mailed him on postcards."

"In 2006, Rick Falkvinge, a Swedish software entrepreneur, founded a new political party centred around the subjects of file sharing, copyright and patents. He called it the Pirate Party and it rose to prominence after a government crackdown on the file-sharing site, the Pirate Bay. Since then, the Pirate Party has swept Europe and beyond to become an international political movement, active in 40 different countries with representation in the European parliament.
In Sweden, it's the largest party for voters under the age of 30 with 25% of the vote, and in September 2011, the German Pirate Party won an unprecedented 8.9 per cent of the vote and now has several members in the Berlin state parliament. Focused on the subjects of government transparency, internet privacy and copyright law, the Pirate Party hosts Wikileaks on its servers and uses new technology to leverage political power in new and interesting ways. In 2011, Foreign Policy magazine called Falkvinge one of the top 100 global thinkers."

"The trouble is that this book, and many courses, put way too much emphasis on rigurous proofs of obvious statements, and people can easily get the impression that this is what theory is about. What we should really teach is that we're looking for brilliant ideas with a mathematical guarantee. The emphasis is on brilliant."

"Software engineers Alan, Bartholomew and Igor discuss Google Code Jam 2012 in this Hangout on Air from April 4. 2012. The guys discuss the history of coding competitions, how they got involved with Code Jam and answer questions from users about this year's competition."

"Chip Kidd doesn’t judge books by their cover, he creates covers that embody the book -- and he does it with a wicked sense of humor. In one of the funniest talks from TED2012, he shows the art and deep thought of his cover designs."

"In October of 1973, Bruce Severy — a 26-year-old English teacher at Drake High School, North Dakota — decided to use Kurt Vonnegut's novel, Slaughterhouse-Five, as a teaching aid in his classroom. The next month, on November 7th, the head of the school board, Charles McCarthy, demanded that all 32 copies be burned in the school's furnace as a result of its "obscene language." Other books soon met with the same fate.
On the 16th of November, Kurt Vonnegut sent McCarthy the following letter. He didn't receive a reply."

Abstract: "We prove NP-hardness results for five of Nintendo's largest video game franchises: Mario, Donkey Kong, Legend of Zelda, Metroid, and Pokemon. Our results apply to Super Mario Bros. 1, 3, Lost Levels, and Super Mario World; Donkey Kong Country 1-3; all Legend of Zelda games except Zelda II: The Adventure of Link; all Metroid games; and all Pokemon role-playing games. For Mario and Donkey Kong, we show NP-completeness. In addition, we observe that several games in the Zelda series are PSPACE-complete."

"Comic author Rob Reid unveils Copyright Math (TM), a remarkable new field of study based on actual numbers from entertainment industry lawyers and lobbyists."

"In his lab at Penn, Vijay Kumar and his team build flying quadrotors, small, agile robots that swarm, sense each other, and form ad hoc teams -- for construction, surveying disasters and far more."

"Nothing is always absolutely so."

I've skimmed the notes on dynamic programming and they seem great! I love the informality of lectures notes that books usually don't have. "This page contains all my lecture notes for the algorithms classes required for all computer science undergraduate and graduate students at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign."

"The DA CHIP project started back in 2008 as an open competition organised on the 8bitcollective website by two french artists, Je deviens dj en 3 jours and Zombectro."

Superb and inspirational. "Bret Victor invents tools that enable people to understand and create. He has designed experimental UI concepts at Apple, interactive data graphics for Al Gore, and musical instruments at Alesis."

"This is a pretty long post, but with Teller's permission, I'd like to share with you the secrets he gave me 14 years ago to starting a successful career in magic." via http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3596124

"Our speaker at the June 2011 CreativeMornings/NewYork was Yancey Strickler co-founder of Kickstarter (kickstarter.com/)."

"Whenever you have a physical object to be reconfigured, geometric folding often comes into play. This class is about algorithms for analyzing and designing such folds."

"Data structures play a central role in modern computer science. You interact with data structures even more often than with algorithms (think Google, your mail server, and even your network routers). In addition, data structures are essential building blocks in obtaining efficient algorithms. This course covers major results and current directions of research in data structures..."

"R. Stanley Williams from HP Labs gives a keynote presentation on memristor technology at the UC San Diego Center for Networked System's Winter Research Review 2010."

"Haskell is my first baby, born slightly before my son Michael, who is now at university. From somewhat academic beginnings as a remorselessly pure functional programming language, Haskell has evolved into a practical tool used for real applications and, amazingly, is still in a state of furious innovation."

Good analogy in the beginning of the review. Discussion on hn: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3518429

"This is the web site for an in-progress textbook about practical engineering with the Coq proof assistant. The focus is on building programs with proofs of correctness, using dependent types and scripted proof automation."

"What does a bill like PIPA/SOPA mean to our shareable world? At the TED offices, Clay Shirky delivers a proper manifesto -- a call to defend our freedom to create, discuss, link and share, rather than passively consume."

"Anyway, I think I have a bit of a unique perspective. I've seen MIT admissions from the perspective of the applicant, a student, a teacher, and now as an alumnus conducting interviews of prospective students. The fact that you mentioned MIT specifically really made me feel like I should take the time to produce a good response!"

Great answer on quora. "Over on Google+, Timothy Gowers liked this comment so much he wished it were published someplace like the Notices of the American Mathematical Society."

"Ever wonder what would happen if you happened upon Simon Peyton-Jones, author of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) and a key contributor to the Haskell functional programming language (well, he basically invented it), and John Hughes, fellow Haskellite, computer scientist, creator of QuickCheck, and author of the landmark paper, "Why Functional Programming Matters," sitting on a park bench, in the rain, right next to Sydney's iconic opera house? Well, let's find out, shall we?"

Although it didn't catch up there are some interesting (advanced) materials. "This is an attempt to give a quick guide to the top few levels of the Tricki. It may cease to be feasible when the Tricki gets bigger, but we might perhaps be able to automate additions to it. Clicking on arrows just to the right of the name of an article reveals its subarticles. If you want to hide the subarticles again, then you should click to the right of them rather than clicking on the name of one of the subarticles themselves, since otherwise you will follow a link to that subarticle."

"This book has been scanned, OCR'd, typeset in LaTeX, and brought back to print (and your monitor) by a collaborative effort under a Creative Commons license."

"I caught up with Simon Peyton-Jones, author of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) and a key contributor to the Haskell functional programming language, at YOW! 2011. Simon is a pure functional guy. That said, he's OK with side effects as long as you can control them (so, monads are great!)."

Good lecturer.

Great talk and good QA.

"Whilst heading up the Manhattan Project during World War II, theoretical physicist Robert Oppenheimer quickly became aware of a promising young physicist by the name of Richard Feynman. Sensing that Feynman would be incredibly valuable at UC Berkeley come the end of the war, Oppenheimer wrote the following letter to then chairman of its physics department, Raymond Birge. To label the letter a glowing recommendation would be an understatement, but even so, and despite Oppenheimer's efforts, Feynman turned down the subsequent offer."

"How can we begin to understand the way the brain works? The same way we begin to understand a city: by making a map. In this visually stunning talk, Allan Jones shows how his team is mapping which genes are turned on in each tiny region, and how it all connects up."

"Artist and TED Fellow Aparna Rao re-imagines the familiar in surprising, often humorous ways. With her collaborator Soren Pors, Rao creates high-tech art installations -- a typewriter that sends emails, a camera that tracks you through the room only to make you invisible on screen -- that put a playful spin on ordinary objects and interactions."

"During a recent talk David Weinberger asked me (paraphrasing) whether and how the nature of scientific knowledge will change when it’s produced by large networked collaborations?

It’s a great question. Suppose it’s announced in the next few years that the LHC has discovered the Higgs boson. There will, no doubt, be a peer-reviewed scientific paper describing the result.

How should we regard such an announcement?"

"Below I’ve collected some links to advanced computer science courses on-line. I’m concentrating on courses with good lecture notes, rather than video lectures, and I’m applying a rather arbitrary filter for quality (otherwise this becomes a directory with less semantic utility)."

"Today I want to talk about why some proofs are hard to understand, not hard to discover." Discussion in the comments section is interesting.

Blog on mathematics. "My name is Akhil Mathew. I’m a rising sophomore at Harvard studying mathematics. I blog about the subject here, at Climbing Mount Bourbaki. / For me, blogging is a useful way for me to better understand the subject; I’ve long enjoyed writing notes to myself, and the internet medium allows me to communicate mathematics with others. It also gives me additional motivation to check for errors. / My interests are rather amorphous and frequently change. The varying topics discussed here will reflect that. Right now, however, they are centered on algebraic geometry."

"4Clojure is a resource to help fledgling clojurians learn the language through interactive problems. The first few problems are easy enough that even someone with no prior experience should find the learning curve forgiving."

"Artist Aaron Koblin takes vast amounts of data -- and at times vast numbers of people -- and weaves them into stunning visualizations. From elegant lines tracing airline flights to landscapes of cell phone data, from a Johnny Cash video assembled from crowd-sourced drawings to the "Wilderness Downtown" video that customizes for the user, his works brilliantly explore how modern technology can make us more human."

"I have taught an undergraduate compilers course for over a decade. In the last many years, I have used my own textbook "Basics of Compiler Design", which I have decided to make available online. Permission to copy and print for personal use is granted."

"In an ideal world, this page will grow and eventually list all solutions to sicp. Suggested guidelines: prefix the solution number with sicp-ex-, so the pages will list nicely in the wiki
only use concepts explained up to that point; e.g. don't use cons, car, cdr etc in section 1 solutions, solutions should be in Scheme, not Common Lisp (this is a Scheme wiki, after all)"

"Even if I am definitely not a veteran of infovis research (far from it) I started reading my first papers around the year 2000 and since then I’ve never stopped. One thing I noticed is that some papers recur over and over and they really are (at least in part) the foundation of information visualization..."

"(May 21, 2011) Andrew Ng (Stanford University) is building robots to improve the lives of millions. From autonomous helicopters to robotic perception, Ng's research in machine learning and artificial intelligence could result one day in a robot that can clean your house."

"Forvo is the largest pronunciation guide in the world. Ever wondered how a word is pronounced? Ask for that word or name, and another user will pronounce it for you."

"I’ve posted to YouTube a series of 22 short videos giving an introduction to quantum computing."

"Gerald Jay Sussman compares our computational skills with the genome, concluding that we are way behind in creating complex systems such as living organisms, and proposing a few areas of improvement. "

"In 2005 I attended an International Lisp Conference at Stanford. McCarthy was present throughout the proceedings but kept a low profile until the final discussion session, when he rose from his seat to make this pronouncement:

If someone set off a bomb in this room, it would wipe out half of the worldwide Lisp community. That might not be a bad thing for Lisp, because it would have to be reinvented."

Full courses. Short Videos. Free for everyone.

"A remarkable transformation is now underway in how scientists make discoveries. Mass online collaborations are being used to prove mathematical theorems; online markets are allowing scientific problems to be outsourced; and online citizen science projects are enabling amateurs to make scientific discoveries. These and other projects show how we can use online tools to amplify our collective intelligence, and so extend our scientific problem-solving ability. This promise is only part of the story, however, for today there are many cultural barriers inhibiting scientists from using online tools to their full potential. I will discuss these cultural barriers, and how they can be overcome."