From The New York Times:
Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates believes that if he had been able to watch physicist Richard Feynman lecture on physics in 1964 his life might have played out differently…
However, Mr. Gates, who is also well known for his sharp and varied intellectual interests and his philanthropic commitment to education, said this week that he had purchased the rights to videos of seven lectures that Dr. Feynman gave at Cornell University called “The Character of Physical Law,” in an effort to make them broadly available via the Internet.
Microsoft Research announced on Wednesday that Mr. Gates, who purchased the rights to the videos privately from the Feynman estate, BBC and from Cornell University, in cooperation with Curtis Wong, a Microsoft researcher, has created a Web site that is intended to enhance the videos by annotating them with related digital content.
Note you will need to download Microsoft’s Silverlight to get around the site. When you access the site, you will get prompted to download it automatically.
via @courosa
Why cant he just put em on youtube? he wants us to install Silver light?
Agreed. I’m pleased to see this material made more accessible, but to be universally accessible it would need to be put on the net in a format that anyone can run, on what ever platform they run. YouTube would be better than silverlight given the penetration of flash, but even better would be putting them online using HTML 5 tag…
At first I wasn’t going to watch these because they require Silverlight and I had avoided it so far. However, they looked too good to pass up. So I decided to install it in a virtual machine that could be deleted when I was done.
I’ve watched the first three so far and they are very very good. I also noticed that Silverlight allows note taking and real time links (only in the first video so far).
So, while I wish these were downloadable in a format I could watch off line in VLC, it was worth installing Silverlight in a VM.
Bill’s web site seemed to be down when I tried (still is) so I Googled and found the lectures already on another site using flash.
I’m sure Bill’s like links & annotation will be great but in the mean time:
http://www.vega.org.uk/video/subseries/8
site is still down.
concept: A+
implementation: F-