9 ms·

The Best Teacher I Never Had

413 points by frostmatthew 11y ago

hkmurakami 11y ago
>Years later I bought the rights to those lectures and worked with Microsoft to get them posted online for free. This just floored me. I hope that some day I will acquire the generosity and perspective to use a small part of my assets for something like this.
- yarou 11y ago
  Make sure you're a ruthless monopolist first.
  - ljk 11y ago
    compared to other "great" businessman like Jobs, Gates is least evil of the bunch imo
- sanoli 11y ago
  Not to take anything away from what Gates did (and I admire his post-Microsoft goals), it's probably mush easier to do this with your assets when they are as large as his.
  - hkmurakami 11y ago
    Absolutely. But imo most of us (including myself) find it difficult to spend a token amount of our earning or net worth for a public good.
    - gohrt 11y ago
      It wasn't a public good, it was a Microsoft marketing campaign to push people onto the Silverlight platform. MS never made the Feynman Lectures free for all to read.
      - adventured 11y ago
        It was a public good and it required silverlight. Try going to a public library and checking out books without a library card (which almost always cost money). Therefore under your premise public libraries are not for the common good because they have numerous use stipulations that go with them and they inherently restrict usage via fees.
    - jkaunisv1 11y ago
      Really? I thought giving to charity was a fairly common and widespread practice around the world. If you're looking for ideas on where your money could make a difference, think about open source projects you use regularly, local food banks, EFF, Amnesty International, or check out the Awesome Foundation! And if you need help rationalizing it to yourself, consider that you could make a concrete, tear-inducing (positive) difference in somebody's life for the cost of a dinner at a decent restaurant or an Xbox game.
  - noonespecial 11y ago
    The opposite, I think. People with that much money mostly fold in on themselves and spend all of their time managing the money for their own benefit (or even as a compulsion for its own sake). The money was irrelevant, just as you think, but Bill spent his precious attention to give us Feynman instead of the nearly limitless other opportunities that money gave him. That rocks. I didn't like his business practices. I very much like his philanthropy. One doesn't "cancel out" the other or any of that nonsense. They plot on different axis.
    - edanm 11y ago
      "People with that much money mostly fold in on themselves and spend all of their time managing the money for their own benefit (or even as a compulsion for its own sake)." Do you have any source for that? That doesn't fit a lot of very famous billionaires, at least.
      - sdoering 11y ago
        Well isn`t this some sort of selection bias going on here? To draw your conclusion, I would think you are talking about the louder, more visible types of billionaires. Not necessarily a randomly selected subset of billionaires.
        edanm 11y ago
        That's a good point. And yet, I'd still like to see some kind of reason to think that that's how the other billionaires behave.
  - tempestn 11y ago
    I don't necessarily agree with you, but I don't feel like this comment is unproductive or otherwise violates HN rules. The downvotes seem unwarranted.
- rpgmaker 11y ago
  Well, I rather pay than having to install Silverlight in order to watch it.
  - acqq 11y ago
    For those who need an explanation for the above comment. The site in question: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/#data=2%7C%7C%7C0 http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/#data=2%7C%7C%... Silverlight is needed to see the "free" videos of Feyman's lectures. That's how Gates did it. Did Silverlight ever work on iOS or Android? Doesn't look so. The site was monopolistic even as it was made if it's only 5 (edit: 6) years old. http://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/get-started/install/default.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/get-started/install/...
    - rpgmaker 11y ago
      I thought they killed it 3 to 4 years ago. I never know with Microsoft.
      - jdminhbg 11y ago
        They did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight
    - voltagex_ 11y ago
      Helping fix https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/8118 https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/8118 may get you access to these.
      - acqq 11y ago
        Or, even more probably, won't help, if the DRM is also used. Then you need to reverse engineer the DRM too. DRM was the main reason for the Silverlight use. Which can even better explain why nobody is interested in making the downloader or muxer, especially after Microsoft stopped developing Silverlight in 2013(!)
- Outdoorsman 11y ago
  Agreed...a worthwhile goal... Gates was heavily influenced by Feynman, and for good reason... One of my favorite Feynman quotes: "The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion." As we practice acquiring true compassion, the more difficult of the two to master, we can easily try for everyday laughter....life ought to be fun...
  - agumonkey 11y ago
    It often feels that to learn anything you have to let go of you in subtle way to be able to align with the world and take a deep accepting look at it. Only then you're enlightened. And yeah it feels a lot like compassion or love.
  - darkr 11y ago
    > The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter You can see this influence in Windows ME
    - popmystack 11y ago
      I laughed.
- pmtarantino 11y ago
  He did the same with the Da Vinci notes if I recall correctly.
- joe563323 11y ago
  TLDR: View the videos on youtube and not on microsoft website For a moment i too thought the same, but it got spoiled soon. To view the videos you need to have sliver light and it takes a long time for just the page to download. Why cant it be just a downloadble file.
  - static_noise 11y ago
    The gifts Bill Gates gives always come with a little string attached. In recent years his propaganda became strong enough that most people don't see that anymore.
    - sleepychu 11y ago
      To be fair, until recently Netflix/Amazon etc used Silverlight, Microsoft could hardly elect to use some other video technology while they were pushing SL.
      - acqq 11y ago
        No, it's not fair. The purpose of Netflix is to earn money from the viewers. Silverlight was used only for DRM. The claimed purpose of Gates' project was "to make the material freely available" for all learners as a gift (1). He didn't have to use DRM for that if he really bought the rights. As it was executed (Silverlight was never popular, only Netflix users had to install it) it appeared as just an advertising campaign for Silverlight. Note that research.microsoft.com otherwise never had to follow the commercial limitations of the rest of Microsoft, regularly publishing PDFs (duh, research) or using other non-Microsoft technologies at the time they were "verboten" on other Microsoft sites. Apparently, they "enhanced" the lectures with comments. These comments are also to be forever lost, remaining locked in in the limiting technology instead of being published in any common format like HTML or PDF. 1) Microsoft's news release from 2009: https://news.microsoft.com/2009/07/14/microsoft-research-and-bill-gates-bring-historic-physics-lectures-to-web/ https://news.microsoft.com/2009/07/14/microsoft-research-and... "Microsoft Research, in collaboration with Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, today launched a Web site that makes an acclaimed lecture series by the iconic physicist Richard Feynman freely available to the general public for the first time. The lectures, which Feynman originally delivered at Cornell University in 1964, have been hugely influential for many people, including Gates. Gates privately purchased the rights to the seven lectures in the series, called “The Character of Physical Law,” to make them widely available to the public for free with the hope that they will help get kids excited about physics and science."
harry8 11y ago
If you don't have silverlight, another place that may or may not work for you but has the Messenger lectures in a different format is: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF96D8FFDDE4B9087 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF96D8FFDDE4B9087
kabisote 11y ago
Ask HN: If you were building an online school, how do you find great teachers and how do you convince them to create and offer their lessons online?
- ASpring 11y ago
  You pay them handsomely rather than the pittance they receive from most schools. Great teachers are worth it.
  - j2kun 11y ago
    This. And give them autonomy, and extra time for training/curriculum development/introspection when they want it.
    - geomark 11y ago
      How do you do that? Isn't it true that with the way teachers are organized you pay everyone the same based on some blanket criteria like seniority? So you can't pay the good ones handsomely without also paying the bad ones well, which breaks the bank. If you try you get some combination of union/legal/government action that ties you up.
      - j2kun 11y ago
        In principle the solution is trivial. You raise the bar for becoming a teacher (supply will grow as well if salaries are much higher and there are these benefits like respect and autonomy). And then if some bad teachers do get in, the institution uses personalized oversight (in the form of "good" teachers observing and critiquing "bad" ones), and any problem teachers are given a smaller load with additional training. In other words, you invest to make all the teachers good. The question is whether public schools have the funding to do this, and that's a more political question.
        nitrogen 11y ago
        So far "raising the bar" has just meant more hoops to jump through and make-work/rubber stamp masters programs just for teachers.
fernly 11y ago
All the lectures as transcripts, not videos: http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ Playlist of Feynman lectures on video at Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLzGzdSNup63lMYeOpU9Hax6MBsTjdDas https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLzGzdSNup63lMYeOpU9H...
- zodiac 11y ago
  I think the messenger lectures are different from the Feynman lectures on physics
  - kkylin 11y ago
    The Messenger lectures are the basis for Feynman's book the Character of Physical Law, which I would highly recommend.
alanmoraes 11y ago
You can find the Messenger Lectures with subtitles here http://www.cornell.edu/video/playlist/richard-feynman-messenger-lectures http://www.cornell.edu/video/playlist/richard-feynman-messen...
- mathgenius 11y ago
  Thanks! I just can't get over how much like a Brooklyn gangster he sounds. I think I much prefer reading his lectures, where I can mentally substitute a proper cambridge accent. The knowledge seems to be absorbed better that way. Also, he walks around too much: this tends to dissipate the focus. But, I do like the antics with his hands/body and facial expressions!
cushychicken 11y ago
The grandfather of my best friend from high school had the privilege of having Feynman as one of his seminar instructors whilst at Cornell. In fact, he remembered the famous lecture described in "Surely You're Joking" where Feynman showed up to teach after getting a black eye in a bar fight the preceding weekend. According to his account, Feynman walked into the lecture hall, turned to face the crowd (at which point, his black eye was noticeable), and asked "So... any questions?"
- gregpilling 11y ago
  were there any questions?
  - cushychicken 11y ago
    To the best of my recollection: no, there weren't. :)
- tajen 11y ago
  In the very first chemistry class of a very reputated college in France, where every student discovered the new, extremely fast pace of the teaching, with an authoritarian teacher, on a lesson I already knew from high school, I, alone in the lecture, raised my hand to answer a question. And just made a very appropriate, contextual pun on paar with the answer. Teacher smiled. Asked someone else. That gave me quite a reputation for the next 5 years. The guy who makes a pun to a stern teacher. I love lecture hall situations, where you mix respect, intrigue, the stress of succeeding, and you get to meet the real humans.
  - cushychicken 11y ago
    I miss lectures as well. A great lecture is my favorite way to learn - it's way more informative than a great textbook. I had a great teacher for my first circuits class in college. I wish I'd made the time to take some of his upper level classes in advanced analog design; he was able to make the material really engaging in the first class since microwave design was his specialty.
NhanH 11y ago
At the time of Feynman's death, there were two quotes on his blackboard (along with a to-learn list, and several formulas). The first one is "What I cannot create, I do not understand", followed by "Know how to solve every problem that has been solved". Since the years I've known those quotes, I have those as my personal motto for software development. Also give me a cute excuse to boo-boo Java-land and framework heavy ecosystem ;)
- voltagex_ 11y ago
  Thanks for those. Here's a fantastic elaboration: https://www.quora.com/What-did-Richard-Feynman-mean-when-he-said-What-I-cannot-create-I-do-not-understand https://www.quora.com/What-did-Richard-Feynman-mean-when-he-...
- gohrt 11y ago
  Seems you took the wrong lesson, rejecting solutions instead of trying to understand them.
- agumonkey 11y ago
  The creation quote always justifies my NIH strikes.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
such_a_casual 11y ago
Richard Feynman has by far the best explanations I have ever seen from anyone in my life. His explanations are fascinating and deceptively simple. His explanation of electricity in this video has fundamentally changed the way that I see the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS25vitrZ6g&feature=youtu.be&t=8m17s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS25vitrZ6g&feature=youtu.be...
pjmorris 11y ago
In 1984, I misread the syllabus for my Physics class, and, as a consequence, bought 'The Feynman Lectures in Physics'. It turned out to be a brilliant mistake, as Feynman was much wiser and funnier than the required textbook. One of the best intellectual moments of my early college life was to read his perspective [0] on how physics fit in with the other sciences, echoed nicely later by Randall Munroe [1]. [0] http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_03.html http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_03.html [1] https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/
- jonsen 11y ago
  [1] Stephen Wolfram is missing. But I guess he is too far out.
  - pjmorris 11y ago
    I guess he'd need A New Kind of Comic.
  - GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
    > Stephen Wolfram is missing Don't believe the hype.
Dowwie 11y ago
Unreal. Watching him speak about computers, while wearing his logo'd t-shirt, makes me imagine him giving this talk at a recent meetup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA
fierycatnet 11y ago
A lot of well deserved praise for Feynman but this video stuck with me for some reason and I always pictured the guy as a bit arrogant and snobbish. youtube.com/watch?v=3D2RaDVkylY
- sensevirtual 11y ago
  I liked that video. Learnt something.
- code0 11y ago
  I just watched the same video and it was one of the most insightful things that I have seen recently. Feynman is simply acknowledging that there are a few things in physics which are very difficult reduce to layman concepts. The other bit, about "why questions", is also quite interesting. I have come to believe that a lot of questions which sound very interesting, like "why do I exist?", don't really have good answers, and probably will never have. e.g. if it did turn out that we are living in a matrix, the question will simply reduce to "why does the matrix exist?" and soon. Thats what Feynman is trying to point out that "Why something happens?" is not a complete question unless we agree to some understanding beforehand. Otherwise you just go deep into the rabbit hole.
- acqq 11y ago
  Listen carefully for the questions of the interviewer. He first asked "what is it, the feeling, between the two magnets," Feynman asks "what do you mean the feeling, what do you want to know," "I want to know what's going on," Feynman answered "well they repel each other," then the interviewer really asked "what does that mean, or why are doing that, or how are they doing that." So Feynman tried to answer the "why" question. The shortest answer would really be "they just do it." There's no "purpose" it's just one manifestation of the electromagnetic force which is behind almost everything we see or feel. It's true, he didn't answer the "how" and that's why some viewers feel "injustice." Fascinatingly, it's hard to answer "how" without knowing what he who questions already knows. Because the same electromagnetic force is behind almost everything we "see or feel," not just magnets. If I'd guess the background of average person asking that question, the person would know that the electromagnetic force exists, as "I've heard the name," but not more than that. And he would be intrigued that he "feels" the repulsion between the two objects even if there are "no batteries," he'd actually want to know how it can be that the magnets "work" all the time and "at the distance." But even that isn't true, they don't "work," looking as a physicist, we do the work while pushing the magnets against each other to feel their repulsion, the force exists all the time. So what would be the satisfying answer? I guess something like "the force you feel is everywhere, but you don't see that particular behavior. In these static magnets the tiny particles in the material can be easily nicely lined up that when you press them to each other you can feel the force differently than with the other materials, where the lining up normally doesn't happen or can't happen." The interviewer also asked "how when we turn them then they stick to each other." That needs much more talk I'm afraid, unless you just say "they have poles" where you don't really explain the mechanism behind. I've watched Feynman's videos where he explained some aspects of electromagnetism in a popular way ("that's how we don't fall through the floor" is the catchiest sentence in the talk), he was surely able to "explain the magnets" similarly (although not all the details in the short answer, he actually did a year long lectures for non-physicist students), but here he elaborated the problems in "why" questions. Once a person already has decent knowledge, he can really enjoy the explanations like this: https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/EfmdR6VWvRM https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/EfmdR6VWvRM
thewarrior 11y ago
Who is the Feynman of programming / CS education ?
- didsomeonesay 11y ago
  Well, there's "Feynman lectures on Computation"...
sidcool 11y ago
Richard Feynman is my all time favorite person.
deleted 11y ago
[deleted]
- germanier 11y ago
  I don't see anywhere that they charge for anything. It's looks more like they are collecting email addresses to send their content.
brianstorms 11y ago
Pretty sure "the friend" was Ann Winblad, who he was seeing at the time, and that this was a trip they took to the Outer Banks of NC. It's all been written about in more detail in past books and magazine articles. For more see this ancient WIRED piece: http://www.wired.com/1996/09/winblad/ http://www.wired.com/1996/09/winblad/

413 points by frostmatthew 11y ago

>Years later I bought the rights to those lectures and worked with Microsoft to get them posted online for free. This just floored me. I hope that some day I will acquire the generosity and perspective to use a small part of my assets for something like this.

yarou 11y ago
Make sure you're a ruthless monopolist first.
- ljk 11y ago
  compared to other "great" businessman like Jobs, Gates is least evil of the bunch imo
sanoli 11y ago
Not to take anything away from what Gates did (and I admire his post-Microsoft goals), it's probably mush easier to do this with your assets when they are as large as his.
- hkmurakami 11y ago
  Absolutely. But imo most of us (including myself) find it difficult to spend a token amount of our earning or net worth for a public good.
  - gohrt 11y ago
    It wasn't a public good, it was a Microsoft marketing campaign to push people onto the Silverlight platform. MS never made the Feynman Lectures free for all to read.
    - adventured 11y ago
      It was a public good and it required silverlight. Try going to a public library and checking out books without a library card (which almost always cost money). Therefore under your premise public libraries are not for the common good because they have numerous use stipulations that go with them and they inherently restrict usage via fees.
  - jkaunisv1 11y ago
    Really? I thought giving to charity was a fairly common and widespread practice around the world. If you're looking for ideas on where your money could make a difference, think about open source projects you use regularly, local food banks, EFF, Amnesty International, or check out the Awesome Foundation! And if you need help rationalizing it to yourself, consider that you could make a concrete, tear-inducing (positive) difference in somebody's life for the cost of a dinner at a decent restaurant or an Xbox game.
- noonespecial 11y ago
  The opposite, I think. People with that much money mostly fold in on themselves and spend all of their time managing the money for their own benefit (or even as a compulsion for its own sake). The money was irrelevant, just as you think, but Bill spent his precious attention to give us Feynman instead of the nearly limitless other opportunities that money gave him. That rocks. I didn't like his business practices. I very much like his philanthropy. One doesn't "cancel out" the other or any of that nonsense. They plot on different axis.
  - edanm 11y ago
    "People with that much money mostly fold in on themselves and spend all of their time managing the money for their own benefit (or even as a compulsion for its own sake)." Do you have any source for that? That doesn't fit a lot of very famous billionaires, at least.
    - sdoering 11y ago
      Well isn`t this some sort of selection bias going on here? To draw your conclusion, I would think you are talking about the louder, more visible types of billionaires. Not necessarily a randomly selected subset of billionaires.
      - edanm 11y ago
        That's a good point. And yet, I'd still like to see some kind of reason to think that that's how the other billionaires behave.
- tempestn 11y ago
  I don't necessarily agree with you, but I don't feel like this comment is unproductive or otherwise violates HN rules. The downvotes seem unwarranted.
rpgmaker 11y ago
Well, I rather pay than having to install Silverlight in order to watch it.
- acqq 11y ago
  For those who need an explanation for the above comment. The site in question: http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/#data=2%7C%7C%7C0 http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/#data=2%7C%7C%... Silverlight is needed to see the "free" videos of Feyman's lectures. That's how Gates did it. Did Silverlight ever work on iOS or Android? Doesn't look so. The site was monopolistic even as it was made if it's only 5 (edit: 6) years old. http://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/get-started/install/default.aspx http://www.microsoft.com/getsilverlight/get-started/install/...
  - rpgmaker 11y ago
    I thought they killed it 3 to 4 years ago. I never know with Microsoft.
    - jdminhbg 11y ago
      They did: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microsoft_Silverlight
  - voltagex_ 11y ago
    Helping fix https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/8118 https://github.com/rg3/youtube-dl/issues/8118 may get you access to these.
    - acqq 11y ago
      Or, even more probably, won't help, if the DRM is also used. Then you need to reverse engineer the DRM too. DRM was the main reason for the Silverlight use. Which can even better explain why nobody is interested in making the downloader or muxer, especially after Microsoft stopped developing Silverlight in 2013(!)
Outdoorsman 11y ago
Agreed...a worthwhile goal... Gates was heavily influenced by Feynman, and for good reason... One of my favorite Feynman quotes: "The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter and human compassion." As we practice acquiring true compassion, the more difficult of the two to master, we can easily try for everyday laughter....life ought to be fun...
- agumonkey 11y ago
  It often feels that to learn anything you have to let go of you in subtle way to be able to align with the world and take a deep accepting look at it. Only then you're enlightened. And yeah it feels a lot like compassion or love.
- darkr 11y ago
  > The highest forms of understanding we can achieve are laughter You can see this influence in Windows ME
  - popmystack 11y ago
    I laughed.
pmtarantino 11y ago
He did the same with the Da Vinci notes if I recall correctly.
joe563323 11y ago
TLDR: View the videos on youtube and not on microsoft website For a moment i too thought the same, but it got spoiled soon. To view the videos you need to have sliver light and it takes a long time for just the page to download. Why cant it be just a downloadble file.
- static_noise 11y ago
  The gifts Bill Gates gives always come with a little string attached. In recent years his propaganda became strong enough that most people don't see that anymore.
  - sleepychu 11y ago
    To be fair, until recently Netflix/Amazon etc used Silverlight, Microsoft could hardly elect to use some other video technology while they were pushing SL.
    - acqq 11y ago
      No, it's not fair. The purpose of Netflix is to earn money from the viewers. Silverlight was used only for DRM. The claimed purpose of Gates' project was "to make the material freely available" for all learners as a gift (1). He didn't have to use DRM for that if he really bought the rights. As it was executed (Silverlight was never popular, only Netflix users had to install it) it appeared as just an advertising campaign for Silverlight. Note that research.microsoft.com otherwise never had to follow the commercial limitations of the rest of Microsoft, regularly publishing PDFs (duh, research) or using other non-Microsoft technologies at the time they were "verboten" on other Microsoft sites. Apparently, they "enhanced" the lectures with comments. These comments are also to be forever lost, remaining locked in in the limiting technology instead of being published in any common format like HTML or PDF. 1) Microsoft's news release from 2009: https://news.microsoft.com/2009/07/14/microsoft-research-and-bill-gates-bring-historic-physics-lectures-to-web/ https://news.microsoft.com/2009/07/14/microsoft-research-and... "Microsoft Research, in collaboration with Microsoft Corp. Chairman Bill Gates, today launched a Web site that makes an acclaimed lecture series by the iconic physicist Richard Feynman freely available to the general public for the first time. The lectures, which Feynman originally delivered at Cornell University in 1964, have been hugely influential for many people, including Gates. Gates privately purchased the rights to the seven lectures in the series, called “The Character of Physical Law,” to make them widely available to the public for free with the hope that they will help get kids excited about physics and science."

harry8 11y ago

If you don't have silverlight, another place that may or may not work for you but has the Messenger lectures in a different format is: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF96D8FFDDE4B9087 https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLF96D8FFDDE4B9087

kabisote 11y ago

Ask HN: If you were building an online school, how do you find great teachers and how do you convince them to create and offer their lessons online?

ASpring 11y ago
You pay them handsomely rather than the pittance they receive from most schools. Great teachers are worth it.
- j2kun 11y ago
  This. And give them autonomy, and extra time for training/curriculum development/introspection when they want it.
  - geomark 11y ago
    How do you do that? Isn't it true that with the way teachers are organized you pay everyone the same based on some blanket criteria like seniority? So you can't pay the good ones handsomely without also paying the bad ones well, which breaks the bank. If you try you get some combination of union/legal/government action that ties you up.
    - j2kun 11y ago
      In principle the solution is trivial. You raise the bar for becoming a teacher (supply will grow as well if salaries are much higher and there are these benefits like respect and autonomy). And then if some bad teachers do get in, the institution uses personalized oversight (in the form of "good" teachers observing and critiquing "bad" ones), and any problem teachers are given a smaller load with additional training. In other words, you invest to make all the teachers good. The question is whether public schools have the funding to do this, and that's a more political question.
      - nitrogen 11y ago
        So far "raising the bar" has just meant more hoops to jump through and make-work/rubber stamp masters programs just for teachers.

fernly 11y ago

All the lectures as transcripts, not videos: http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/ Playlist of Feynman lectures on video at Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLzGzdSNup63lMYeOpU9Hax6MBsTjdDas https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLLzGzdSNup63lMYeOpU9H...

zodiac 11y ago
I think the messenger lectures are different from the Feynman lectures on physics
- kkylin 11y ago
  The Messenger lectures are the basis for Feynman's book the Character of Physical Law, which I would highly recommend.

alanmoraes 11y ago

You can find the Messenger Lectures with subtitles here http://www.cornell.edu/video/playlist/richard-feynman-messenger-lectures http://www.cornell.edu/video/playlist/richard-feynman-messen...

mathgenius 11y ago
Thanks! I just can't get over how much like a Brooklyn gangster he sounds. I think I much prefer reading his lectures, where I can mentally substitute a proper cambridge accent. The knowledge seems to be absorbed better that way. Also, he walks around too much: this tends to dissipate the focus. But, I do like the antics with his hands/body and facial expressions!

cushychicken 11y ago

The grandfather of my best friend from high school had the privilege of having Feynman as one of his seminar instructors whilst at Cornell. In fact, he remembered the famous lecture described in "Surely You're Joking" where Feynman showed up to teach after getting a black eye in a bar fight the preceding weekend. According to his account, Feynman walked into the lecture hall, turned to face the crowd (at which point, his black eye was noticeable), and asked "So... any questions?"

gregpilling 11y ago
were there any questions?
- cushychicken 11y ago
  To the best of my recollection: no, there weren't. :)
tajen 11y ago
In the very first chemistry class of a very reputated college in France, where every student discovered the new, extremely fast pace of the teaching, with an authoritarian teacher, on a lesson I already knew from high school, I, alone in the lecture, raised my hand to answer a question. And just made a very appropriate, contextual pun on paar with the answer. Teacher smiled. Asked someone else. That gave me quite a reputation for the next 5 years. The guy who makes a pun to a stern teacher. I love lecture hall situations, where you mix respect, intrigue, the stress of succeeding, and you get to meet the real humans.
- cushychicken 11y ago
  I miss lectures as well. A great lecture is my favorite way to learn - it's way more informative than a great textbook. I had a great teacher for my first circuits class in college. I wish I'd made the time to take some of his upper level classes in advanced analog design; he was able to make the material really engaging in the first class since microwave design was his specialty.

NhanH 11y ago

At the time of Feynman's death, there were two quotes on his blackboard (along with a to-learn list, and several formulas). The first one is "What I cannot create, I do not understand", followed by "Know how to solve every problem that has been solved". Since the years I've known those quotes, I have those as my personal motto for software development. Also give me a cute excuse to boo-boo Java-land and framework heavy ecosystem ;)

voltagex_ 11y ago
Thanks for those. Here's a fantastic elaboration: https://www.quora.com/What-did-Richard-Feynman-mean-when-he-said-What-I-cannot-create-I-do-not-understand https://www.quora.com/What-did-Richard-Feynman-mean-when-he-...
gohrt 11y ago
Seems you took the wrong lesson, rejecting solutions instead of trying to understand them.
agumonkey 11y ago
The creation quote always justifies my NIH strikes.
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such_a_casual 11y ago

Richard Feynman has by far the best explanations I have ever seen from anyone in my life. His explanations are fascinating and deceptively simple. His explanation of electricity in this video has fundamentally changed the way that I see the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS25vitrZ6g&feature=youtu.be&t=8m17s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kS25vitrZ6g&feature=youtu.be...

pjmorris 11y ago

In 1984, I misread the syllabus for my Physics class, and, as a consequence, bought 'The Feynman Lectures in Physics'. It turned out to be a brilliant mistake, as Feynman was much wiser and funnier than the required textbook. One of the best intellectual moments of my early college life was to read his perspective [0] on how physics fit in with the other sciences, echoed nicely later by Randall Munroe [1]. [0] http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_03.html http://www.feynmanlectures.caltech.edu/I_03.html [1] https://xkcd.com/435/ https://xkcd.com/435/

jonsen 11y ago
[1] Stephen Wolfram is missing. But I guess he is too far out.
- pjmorris 11y ago
  I guess he'd need A New Kind of Comic.
- GFK_of_xmaspast 11y ago
  > Stephen Wolfram is missing Don't believe the hype.

Dowwie 11y ago

Unreal. Watching him speak about computers, while wearing his logo'd t-shirt, makes me imagine him giving this talk at a recent meetup. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EKWGGDXe5MA

fierycatnet 11y ago

A lot of well deserved praise for Feynman but this video stuck with me for some reason and I always pictured the guy as a bit arrogant and snobbish. youtube.com/watch?v=3D2RaDVkylY

sensevirtual 11y ago
I liked that video. Learnt something.
code0 11y ago
I just watched the same video and it was one of the most insightful things that I have seen recently. Feynman is simply acknowledging that there are a few things in physics which are very difficult reduce to layman concepts. The other bit, about "why questions", is also quite interesting. I have come to believe that a lot of questions which sound very interesting, like "why do I exist?", don't really have good answers, and probably will never have. e.g. if it did turn out that we are living in a matrix, the question will simply reduce to "why does the matrix exist?" and soon. Thats what Feynman is trying to point out that "Why something happens?" is not a complete question unless we agree to some understanding beforehand. Otherwise you just go deep into the rabbit hole.
acqq 11y ago
Listen carefully for the questions of the interviewer. He first asked "what is it, the feeling, between the two magnets," Feynman asks "what do you mean the feeling, what do you want to know," "I want to know what's going on," Feynman answered "well they repel each other," then the interviewer really asked "what does that mean, or why are doing that, or how are they doing that." So Feynman tried to answer the "why" question. The shortest answer would really be "they just do it." There's no "purpose" it's just one manifestation of the electromagnetic force which is behind almost everything we see or feel. It's true, he didn't answer the "how" and that's why some viewers feel "injustice." Fascinatingly, it's hard to answer "how" without knowing what he who questions already knows. Because the same electromagnetic force is behind almost everything we "see or feel," not just magnets. If I'd guess the background of average person asking that question, the person would know that the electromagnetic force exists, as "I've heard the name," but not more than that. And he would be intrigued that he "feels" the repulsion between the two objects even if there are "no batteries," he'd actually want to know how it can be that the magnets "work" all the time and "at the distance." But even that isn't true, they don't "work," looking as a physicist, we do the work while pushing the magnets against each other to feel their repulsion, the force exists all the time. So what would be the satisfying answer? I guess something like "the force you feel is everywhere, but you don't see that particular behavior. In these static magnets the tiny particles in the material can be easily nicely lined up that when you press them to each other you can feel the force differently than with the other materials, where the lining up normally doesn't happen or can't happen." The interviewer also asked "how when we turn them then they stick to each other." That needs much more talk I'm afraid, unless you just say "they have poles" where you don't really explain the mechanism behind. I've watched Feynman's videos where he explained some aspects of electromagnetism in a popular way ("that's how we don't fall through the floor" is the catchiest sentence in the talk), he was surely able to "explain the magnets" similarly (although not all the details in the short answer, he actually did a year long lectures for non-physicist students), but here he elaborated the problems in "why" questions. Once a person already has decent knowledge, he can really enjoy the explanations like this: https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/EfmdR6VWvRM https://plus.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/EfmdR6VWvRM

thewarrior 11y ago

Who is the Feynman of programming / CS education ?

didsomeonesay 11y ago
Well, there's "Feynman lectures on Computation"...

sidcool 11y ago

Richard Feynman is my all time favorite person.

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germanier 11y ago
I don't see anywhere that they charge for anything. It's looks more like they are collecting email addresses to send their content.

brianstorms 11y ago

Pretty sure "the friend" was Ann Winblad, who he was seeing at the time, and that this was a trip they took to the Outer Banks of NC. It's all been written about in more detail in past books and magazine articles. For more see this ancient WIRED piece: http://www.wired.com/1996/09/winblad/ http://www.wired.com/1996/09/winblad/