Wow, who would have thought you could revolutionize the way you listen to radio? These guys are good.

This is my first bold step: I will be stepping down from my current HVAC design job at the end of the week, and I will begin following some of the steps I think need to be successful at what I want to do. My first task; to virtually attend each of the 26 lectures of Introduction to Game Theory from Yale’s Open Courses.

I’ve read quite a bit about starting a business in the past three years, and I feel I know what I need to know. This couldn’t have happened sooner.

Here’s the first lecture:

This year, it will be mandatory that public schools include The Bible in their curriculum. This is absolute nonsense, why don’t we teach about the alternative view that the Earth is flat at the same time? It’s not as if you’ve traveled around the world yourself; how could you contradict me?

God, I love our socialized researchers and watchdogs. This is why we pay taxes!

• Eating fatty food appears to take an almost immediate toll on both short-term memory and exercise performance, according to new research on rats and people. (New York Times)

• Canadian Privacy Commissioner: Facebook has until Monday to find a way to fix its ’serious privacy gaps.’ These include the retaining of personal information after an account has been deactivated, and the sending of personal information (other than contact info) to third parties. (www.canada.com)

• Gene therapy improves vision for the blind, by creating a new fovea, the part of the retina that is most densely populated with photoreceptors. (www.technologyreview.com)

• The temperature of the sun’s outer atmosphere soars to several million degrees Kelvin (K); which is much hotter than at the sun’s surface. Scientists have been baffled by this until now. (www.spacefellowship.com)

• Seth Godin has written another unreal post, this time about the future of education. (www.sethgodin.typepad.com)

Photons and electromagnetic waves are hardly topics I choose to think about on a regular basis. Once in a while, I’ll be reminded that it takes 8 minutes for light from the sun to reach the earth, but that’s about it. My father would often say to me when I was a child, looking up to the stars, that I was seeing millions of years into the past. Technically, we see nothing but the past.

Light is both energy and mass at the same time. Light can fall; that’s why black holes are named that way—surrounding light gets sucked inside.

In 2005 it was predicted that there was an attractive and repulsive force component to light. They have since discovered the attractive force, but have only now discovered the repulsive force.

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Physics and science in general have become a passion of mine a long time ago. I now find that as time goes by, I am ever more humbled by what we have found out about nature. I recently spoke about my appreciation for Richard Feynman. Some of his lectures on physics have been made available by audio on box sets, which could be purchased at over $150 US. The first time I heard the audio of the lectures at Caltech, I had never heard of the man. To say I was mesmerized would be an understatement. He was an expert at effectively communicating science and knew how to add humor to the material being taught. It helped me begin to gather what was being taught and appreciate its meaning.

I say all this, hoping I still have your attention. If I do, you may be interested in the other discovery I made today.

In the 1960’s, a young man by the name of Bill Gates stumbled on those same lectures and loved them as much as I. Since then, he has purchased the rights to the video of his lectures and has posted them online for free, in what is called Project Tuva. The catch is that you have to download the video player required to see all that is to be seen on the website of Microsoft Research, Silverlight. It is hardly an inconvenience, as it is a 10 second download, and a quicker install, and very much worth your time, if you are interested.

Now you may watch the lectures, in excellent quality, with great extras that are still unobtrusive. I’m not in marketing, but if there was any trick I knew to get people to at least watch the first of the lectures, then I would do it.

If I got a single person to watch even a single lecture by having posted this, it would be worth far more than my time and effort. It just may lead to someone starting think about light a little bit more.

The pro-life v. pro-choice debate is an important one to be had. For one who has read the arguments from either side, it is apparent that abortion is a very important topic for many people. Unfortunately, there is usually a gap between debate and a mere exchange of words; it is a topic that has the potential to bring emotion out of the best of us, compromising the proper exchange of ideas.

My opinion on the debate is a complicated one, that has changed with time. In the past, I have been a staunch supporter of pro-choice. Since then I have given way, albeit not completely, to the pro-life aspect of the debate.

Read on… »

This is the last of Yale’s Intro to Psychology lectures. I watched the whole thing, but The professor really gets into happiness at 11:20 onward. I know few have that kind of time to lose, but I think it’s important to tell people that there really are many open courses out there, free of charge.

Time to get your learn on: