Physics for Future Presidents

in Online Courses, UC Berkeley | March 1st, 2008

Just a quick fyi that we’ve added a pop­u­lar UC Berke­ley course, Physics for Future Pres­i­dents, to our col­lec­tion: Free Online Cours­es from Great Uni­ver­si­ties. You can down­load the com­plete course to your MP3 play­er. Just scroll down the page and look under “Physics.”

If you’d rather expe­ri­ence this course in video, you can watch the course on YouTube. I’ve post­ed the first lec­ture below, and you can find the rest of the lec­tures here.

10 Ways to Make Your iPod a Better Learning Gadget

in Apple | February 28th, 2008

The iPod can super­charge your learn­ing. But it’s often a mat­ter of find­ing the right soft­ware and con­tent. Below, we’ve list­ed sev­er­al new pieces of soft­ware that will let you suck more edu­ca­tion­al media (DVDs, web videos, audio files, etc.) into your iPod. And we’ve also list­ed some impor­tant pieces of con­tent that will make your iPod a bet­ter learn­ing gad­get. So here it goes and be sure to vis­it our Pod­cast Library and our relat­ed piece 10 Signs of Intel­li­gent Life at YouTube:

1) Put Wikipedia on Your Ipod: Ency­clopo­dia is a free piece of soft­ware that brings Wikipedia to the iPod. Ency­clopo­dia can be installed on iPod gen­er­a­tions 1 through 4, as well as iPod Min­is. Def­i­nite­ly worth a try.

2) Watch DVDs on Your iPod: This free, open source soft­ware works on MacOS X, Lin­ux and Win­dows, and makes it sim­ple to load and watch DVDs on your video iPod. Here are some help­ful instruc­tions to get you start­ed.

3) Load YouTube Videos to Your iPod: Con­vert­Tube allows you to take any YouTube video and con­vert it to a for­mat that works on your iPod. It’s as sim­ple as enter­ing a url and click­ing “con­vert and down­load.” If you want to give the soft­ware a test run, try con­vert­ing these UC Berke­ley cours­es that were recent­ly launched on YouTube. Or these Nobel Prize speech­es.

4) Make Oth­er Video For­mats iPod-Ready: Life­hack­er recent­ly men­tioned three oth­er pieces of soft­ware that will make a vari­ety of oth­er video for­mats iPod-ready. For Win­dows, see Vide­o­ra; for Mac, see iSquint. Or more gen­er­al­ly see Zamzar. In a nut­shell, these items will turn a wide range of video for­mats into the one video for­mat (MPEG‑4) that your iPod likes.

5) Con­vert MP3 files into One Big iPod Audio­book File: Down­load­ing free audio­books can often require you to work with a series of sep­a­rate mp3 files, which can make things rather cum­ber­some. This soft­ware does you a favor and mash­es the files into one man­age­able file. And it has a fea­ture that will let your Ipod remem­ber where you stopped if you decide to take a break. (If this one appeals to you, be sure to see item # 10.)

6) Cre­ate eBooks for the iPod: This bit of soft­ware turns text files into ebooks that you can read on your iPod. After you load a text file, it will make the text read­able through iPod Notes (which you can find under “Extra Sett­tings”). Then, voila, a portable text. Thanks to Pachecus.com for point­ing this one out.

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William F. Buckley v. Gore Vidal — 1968

in History | February 27th, 2008

William F. Buck­ley, Jr., the intel­lec­tu­al force behind the strand of con­ser­vatism that peaked with Ronald Rea­gan, died yes­ter­day. (See NY Times obit.) Here, we have some vin­tage Buck­ley. The video clip below fea­tures Buck­ley and Gore Vidal going at it, almost com­ing to blows, dur­ing the con­test­ed pres­i­den­tial cam­paign of 1968. It offers a good reminder that Amer­i­can polit­i­cal dis­course has­n’t been agree­able for quite some time. Com­par­a­tive­ly, things look down­right civ­il today.

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Not Always a Nation of Dunces

in Current Affairs, Video - Politics/Society | February 27th, 2008

Here’s a nice coun­ter­point to our post last week cov­er­ing Susan Jacoby’s new book The Age of Amer­i­can Unrea­son and her lament that Amer­i­ca has declined into a morass of anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism and low expec­ta­tions.

Let’s set the scene: A reporter selects a young Barack Oba­ma sup­port­er at a ral­ly and starts pep­per­ing him with ques­tions about the can­di­date. And it all feels like a staged effort to demon­strate that the mobi­lized youth has no real han­dle on the issues. He’s just blind­ly buy­ing the hype. With­out wast­ing time, the reporter leads the young man into a con­ver­sa­tion on the com­plex­i­ties of health care. It’s the per­fect set­up. But then it sud­den­ly becomes clear that the reporter chose the wrong kid (who is a nat­u­ral­ized immi­grant, by the way) to play the fool. Watch the video below (and check out this fol­low up video that gives you more of the back sto­ry).

via Think on These Things

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How to Learn a Foreign Language

in Language Lessons | February 26th, 2008

We stum­bled across this video (below) over on YouTube. It offers a quick sur­vey of web resources that will teach you for­eign lan­guages for free. Among oth­er items, the video men­tions our For­eign Lan­guage Pod­cast Col­lec­tion and, for that, we want­ed to say thanks to who­ev­er put this togeth­er.

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The Best Place on the Web for Film Junkies

in Film | February 26th, 2008

Some of you may know GreenCine as a high­brow video-rental com­pa­ny, one that serves as an alter­na­tive to Net­flix and Block­buster. But the best thing about Greencine is its blog, main­tained by David Hud­son and updat­ed sev­er­al times a day. A though­ful and unpre­ten­tious col­lec­tion of reviews, inter­views, fes­ti­vals and oth­er worth­while online film dis­cus­sions, refresh­ing­ly free of snark or inva­sive opin­ion­at­ing. Think of it as a very, very smart aggre­ga­tor. This par­tic­u­lar cineaste makes it her home­page.

Online Writing Courses at Stanford (Spring)

in Stanford | February 24th, 2008

Quick fyi: Start­ing Mon­day, you can sign up for online writ­ing cours­es at Stan­ford. (See list below.) Offered by Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies and the Stan­ford Cre­ative Writ­ing Pro­gram (one of the most dis­tin­guished writ­ing pro­grams in the coun­try), these online cours­es give begin­ning and advanced writ­ers, no mat­ter where they live, the chance to refine their craft with gift­ed writ­ing instruc­tors and smart peers. Just to be clear, the cours­es are not free, and they will start the first week of April. For more infor­ma­tion, click here, or sep­a­rate­ly check out the FAQ.

(Full dis­clo­sure: I helped set up these cours­es and think they’re a great edu­ca­tion­al oppor­tu­ni­ty. But nonethe­less take my opin­ion with a grain of salt.)

Spring Cours­es:

• Cre­ative Non­fic­tion
• Trav­el Writ­ing
• Writ­ing the Fea­ture Mag­a­zine Arti­cle
• Craft­ing Auto­bi­o­graph­i­cal Fic­tion: Truth and Imag­i­na­tion
• Mem­oir Writ­ing: A Mil­lion Lit­tle Truths
• Putting a Spin on Sci­ence Writ­ing
• Fic­tion Writ­ing: Voic­es that Live

By the way, if you live in the San Fran­cis­co Bay Area and want to keep the mind engaged, give some thought to Stan­ford Con­tin­u­ing Stud­ies. Our full spring cat­a­logue is here.

Paul McCartney Goes Classical

in Music | February 21st, 2008

Sir Paul talks about his clas­si­cal album “Ecce Cor Meum” (Behold My Heart). It was per­formed live at Roy­al Albert Hall, and it’s now being released on DVD.

via The New York­er’s Goings On blog

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Lawrence Lessig’s Last Speech on Free Culture (Watch it)

in Current Affairs, Law, Stanford, Video - Politics/Society | February 20th, 2008

Below we have post­ed the last lec­ture that Lawrence Lessig will ever present on Free Cul­ture. It’s an area where he has spent the past decade work­ing, and this talk offers an excel­lent intro­duc­tion to Lessig’s thought and work on this issue. Giv­en at Stan­ford on Jan­u­ary 31, the pre­sen­ta­tion is one that Steve Jobs could appre­ci­ate. Very well done. So give it a watch below (or here). Also, if you’d like to get free dig­i­tal copies of Lessig’s major writ­ings on Free Cul­ture, look here.

As for what Lessig plans to do next. He has talked about com­bat­ing cor­rup­tion in Wash­ing­ton (some­thing he talks about here). That’s part of the plan, but he may do it by run­ning for Con­gress. Read this arti­cle in the Wall Street Jour­nal and check out the new site: Lessig08.com

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A Nation of Dunces Revisted: Video + Podcast

in Current Affairs | February 20th, 2008

Here’s a quick fol­low up to our post on Susan Jacoby’s new book, The Age of Amer­i­can Unrea­son.  Since the orig­i­nal post, we have pulled togeth­er some media fea­tur­ing Jaco­by and her views on Amer­i­ca’s drift toward anti-intel­lec­tu­al­ism.

First, you can watch her recent inter­view with Bill Moy­ers: Video — Mp3 — iTunes — Feed.

Next, lis­ten to this radio pro­gram — “Anti-Intel­lec­tu­al­ism in the US” — that fea­tures Jaco­by and a pan­el of thinkers: Mp3 — iTunes — Feed — Web site.