Gresham College is an unusual institution of higher learning in Holborn, Central London. It enrols no students and grants no degrees.
Instead, Gresham College provides lectures free and open to the public, and has done so since its foundation in 1597, long before there was any university in London. The success of the college led to the incorporation of The Royal Society.
Almost all lectures have audio and video available for download and/or streaming.
Since late 2005, Seed Magazine has been producing a series of cribsheets (or cheatsheets, as they are more commonly known in the UK) for “living in the 21st century”.
These one-page introductions to contemporary scientific issues are really useful as reference sheets on a number of disparate topics. So far, subjects covered include stem cells, string theory, quantum computing, and synthetic biology, among others.
If I were naming them, I’d call them: cribsheets for talking about 21st century topics.
The Washington Post recently asked a host of ’smart people’ for recommendations on what book will help us make sense of the current economic climate.
Those asked include Peter Orszag (Director, Congressional Budget Office); Greg Mankiw (professor of economics at Harvard University); and John Allen Paulos (author and mathematics professor at Temple University). However, my favourite reply came from Mark Cuban, the owner of the Dallas Mavericks, chairman of HDNet, and the founder of Broadcast.com (sold to Yahoo in ‘99 for $6 billion):
“I don’t think there is such a book. In my humble opinion, people who actually believe they can understand all the issues are the ones that got us to where we are today. In reality, there are so many variables and so little data, it’s all a guess. I don’t think a book exists that can explain it. Is there a book out there called ‘No One Has a Clue What Is Going On and the Whole World Is Guessing’?”
via Paul Kedrosky
Bartleby, the free (as in beer) ‘Internet publisher’, has available a fascinating graphic depicting the evolution of language (all those stemming from the single Proto-Indo-European language, anyway).
Now I know the historic route of my native tongue (as opposed to my cradle tongue), Welsh: it’s closest ‘relatives’ are Cornish and Breton (in that order) as they are all Brythonic languages that in turn stem from Insular Celtic.
The International Documentary Association celebrated its 25th anniversary last year by asking its members to select the top 25 documentaries in history. These were the results:
Three Michael Moore and not a single Adam Curtis? Give me a break! Just as importantly, what about The World at War, The Ascent of Man and Civilisation? I thought this was the International Documentary Association.
via Kottke