messenger lectures

The first of Richard Feynman's 1964 Messenger Lectures at Cornell, 'The Character of Physical Law', covering the law of gravitation. Feynman traces the history from Kepler and Newton to the universality of the inverse-square law. The recording is an older one with weak audio.

The six Norton Lectures Jorge Luis Borges gave in 1967-68, titled This Craft of Verse, on topics including the riddle of poetry, metaphor, storytelling, translation and a poet's creed. The recording runs over four hours.

Part 2 of Richard Feynman's Messenger Lectures at Cornell, The Character of Physical Law, on the relation of mathematics to physics. He explains why understanding nature requires mathematics.

The first of Richard Feynman's 1964 Cornell Messenger Lectures, The Character of Physical Law, focusing on the law of gravitation. Feynman builds up from planetary motion to the nature of physical laws.

Harvard physicist Eric Mazur explains how he realized his students were memorizing rather than understanding, and how he changed his teaching. He presents peer instruction and data showing improved student performance.

Leonard Bernstein's 1973 Norton Lectures at Harvard, starting with Musical Phonology. He draws analogies between music and linguistics, including references to Chomsky.

The first lecture in an 18-part series on digital photography from Marc Levoy's Stanford CS 178 course, recorded at Google in 2016. The series covers how digital cameras work and computational photography, with slides and assignments available on the course site.

Bill Hammack of engineerguy introduces his series on Michael Faraday's lectures on The Chemical History of a Candle. He describes the free companion book and the commentary and caption features that help modern viewers.

Lichess founder Thibault Duplessis talks at Big Techday 10 in Munich about how Lichess works and how he built it. He covers the project's origins and technical challenges including cheating detection.

Salman Khan explains why he created Khan Academy, a structured library of video lessons with interactive exercises. He calls on teachers to flip the classroom, with lectures watched at home and homework done in class with teacher help.

Matt Parker's LMS popular lecture on how seemingly incredible results can be meaningless random patterns. He ranges from ancient Woolworths civilisations to shoelaces and DNA.

The first lecture of N J Wildberger's History of Mathematics course, starting with Pythagoras' theorem and following Stillwell's text. It emphasizes the flow of ideas over proofs.

The first episode of Caltech's The Mechanical Universe, a 52-part introductory university physics series. David Goodstein introduces ideas from Copernicus to Newton, linking the physics of the heavens and the earth with computer animation.

Richard Hamming's 1995 recording of his talk 'You and Your Research', drawn from his graduate engineering course. He discusses how great scientists pick important problems and build careers, drawing on his years at Bell Labs.

Dr. Roger Seheult of MedCram reviews the benefits of sunlight beyond vitamin D, covering the solar spectrum, circadian rhythm, melatonin and infrared light. The lecture runs nearly two hours with timestamps.

The introductory lecture of Richard Hamming's capstone course, The Art of Doing Science and Engineering: Learning to Learn. It focuses on style of thinking and on educating rather than training, using technical material only as illustration.

Richard Hamming's 1995 lecture on n-dimensional space, showing how geometric intuition about spheres and cubes breaks down in high dimensions. It is part of his course on learning to learn.

An MIT colloquium by Dennis Whyte on power exhaust and first-wall cooling in fusion reactors, including recent innovations and the SPARC and ARC designs.

MedCram's Dr. Roger Seheult summarizes a discussion with Dr. Michael Mina on cheap, paper-based at-home COVID-19 antigen tests. It explains why lower sensitivity can still work well for screening infectious people.

A pulmonologist and critical care physician explains how COVID-19 can lead to pneumonia and acute respiratory distress syndrome. He covers evidence-based ARDS treatments such as low tidal volume ventilation.

A two-minute 1981 interview clip in which Richard Feynman answers an artist friend who claims science takes the beauty out of a flower. Feynman argues that understanding adds to beauty and mystery.

Cognitive scientist George Lakoff lectures on how political debates are framed through language and metaphors tied to values, and on the moral worldviews behind progressive and conservative politics. It was given in 2005 at UC San Diego.

Stanford professor Robert Sapolsky lectures on depression as a real biological disease. He covers its biological and psychological causes, how it differs from ordinary sadness, and ideas such as learned helplessness. He ties these together into one account.

Robert Lustig of UCSF lectures on the biochemistry of sugar, arguing that fructose and lack of fiber drive the obesity epidemic via insulin. It is the widely viewed 90-minute talk that popularized the anti-sugar case.

The first lecture of MIT's 6.001 (SICP) with Abelson and Sussman, giving an overview of the course and an introduction to Lisp. It argues that computer science is about managing complexity and abstraction, not computers.

The first clip from Russell Barkley's 30 Essential Ideas about ADHD series, introducing ADHD as a chronic developmental disability. It is part of a lecture series on the disorder by a leading ADHD researcher.

Russian-American journalist Vladimir Pozner lectures at Yale on how US foreign policy toward Russia after the Soviet collapse shaped Putin, then takes audience questions on election interference, the Skripal poisoning and media independence.

Cardiologist Dr. Pradip Jamnadas lectures on the rationale for dietary restriction and fasting, covering insulin resistance, glucose intolerance, and low-carb eating over about 81 minutes.

Jean-Marc Jancovici lectures at ENS Paris on whether energy use, jobs and growth can all be preserved. He argues for a physical approach to economics, since resource depletion and climate limits make perpetual GDP growth unrealistic.

Irving Finkel of the British Museum lectures at the Royal Institution on the invention and decipherment of cuneiform writing in Mesopotamia, and why it is so hard to translate.

The first lecture of Caltech's CS 156 Machine Learning course by Yaser Abu-Mostafa, introducing the learning problem and supervised, unsupervised and reinforcement learning. It is one of 18 lectures in the Learning from Data course.

The first video in a 55-part series by Michel van Biezen that introduces the Kalman filter and builds from the rationale through algebraic examples to the full matrix treatment. The videos are short, blackboard-style lectures.

Joseph Tainter lectures at a 2010 sustainability conference on why complex societies such as Rome collapse. His thesis is that rising complexity brings diminishing returns until societies cannot afford to maintain it.

Michael Sugrue's lecture on Marcus Aurelius' Meditations and the Stoic ideal, covering the text and its philosophy. It is one of his humanities lectures known for their clarity.

Archaeologist Eric Cline lectures on the Late Bronze Age collapse around 1177 BC, when interconnected Mediterranean empires fell in rapid succession. He discusses the Sea Peoples and the combined causes of the collapse.

The first lecture of Francis Su's Harvey Mudd real analysis course, covering the construction of the rational numbers. It begins a full lecture series that follows a standard analysis text.

John Ousterhout lectures on the Raft consensus algorithm, made for the Raft user study comparing how students learn Raft and Paxos. It covers leader election and log repair.

Leonard Susskind lectures at Stanford on how gravity and quantum information theory have merged into a new way of thinking about physics. He covers entanglement and complexity, with applications from black holes to strange metals and the foundations of quantum mechanics.

Salman Khan's TED 2011 talk on Khan Academy. He shows that it goes beyond video lectures to self-paced practice and analytics for teachers, and argues for filling gaps in understanding.

Stanford biologist Robert Sapolsky lectures on the evolution of behavior, including the Prisoner's Dilemma and tit-for-tat strategies in animals. It is part of his Human Behavioral Biology course.