TTC audiobook finished

[johnridley]

Richard Wolfram, "Einstein's Relativity and the Quantum Revolution"
About 12 hours. I should have bailed, it was very elementary. I was hoping he'd get a little deeper but it didn't happen.

I think next TTC will probably be one of the astronomy courses; there's one that covers how objects in the universe (novas, black holes, galaxies, etc) come about. If done at a deep enough level, it should be good. I really should get into some of the philosophical stuff too; there's a ton there. Maybe some greek or later philosophy, or maybe some historical stuff; I haven't looked at the titles very closely.

[edited to change TLC (The Learning Channel) to TTC (The Teaching Company). had a brain misfire I guess]

Comments

[erikvolson.livejournal.com]

My mom and brother are TLC addicts -- esp the Music courses, but the bro covers pretty much the lot.

[kevinnickerson.livejournal.com]

I don't think it will be very in depth, they're introductory courses, not grad school. (I'm working throught the psych one now)

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Several of the ones I've been through have been relatively in-depth. This one was a 10,000 foot flyover of the subject.

I tend to judge these by how many times I have to rewind. This one I never rewound at all; he never covered anything that I didn't understand on the first pass (in fact, the stuff he covered that I didn't already know would have taken about 30 seconds to say).

My favorite lecture series so far, I THINK it was "Joy of Science", I re-listened to many of the entire lectures 2 or even 3 times, and I did a lot of 5 minute rewinding in there as well. That's a very satisfying lecture. I learned a HUGE amount.

Joy of Science is a pretty long series, 60 x 30 minutes, but he still went into a lot of stuff. Even given the fact that he covered everything from "bang the rocks together, guys" to chemistry, molecular biology and QM, he covered more quantum mechanics than this quantum mechanics lecture which was 24 lectures.

[mbcrui.livejournal.com]

Tech's Astronomy class is available on iTunes. It might be a bit simplistic for you, but just thought I'd mention it.

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Might be worth looking into, but I'm not going to install iTunes to get anything. Is there a way to get it as a non-DRMed file outside of iTunes?

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Also, does "available on iTunes" mean "I need an iPod to play it"? I have several players but none of them are iPods (and I'm glad of it). Sorry for the questions, I don't know anything about iTunes other than it's a big hunk of bloat (and as we've found out this week, a pretty large potential vulnerability) that I don't want on my machine.

[mbcrui.livejournal.com]

I think you have to use iTunes to download the podcast, but you don't have to have an ipod to watch it. If you send an email to Bob Neimoff, the prof, he may have it in a different format and will send it to you.

Teaching Company User Forums

[vanorsow.livejournal.com]

John,

I post lecture reviews from all the new Teaching Company courses. You may be interested in Sean Carroll's course on dark energy. Give it a try and please register if you like it:

http://teachingcompany.12.forumer.com/

Doug van Orsow
forum moderator

Re: Teaching Company User Forums

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

Thanks. I'll have to see if the library can get me a copy. I don't think I'm quite ready for dark energy yet, but I probably will eventually.