(Roughly) Daily

source

Mark Twain’s quip has found an altogether modern kind of expression on the web, where entrepreneurs and enthusiasts have expanded from the how-to space (c.f. Instructables, …for Dummies, et al.) to arenas that were until recently the undisputed province of the traditional educational establishment. Two of your correspondent’s favorites:

Khan Academy is–literally– the brainchild of Salmon Khan, a 33 year-old who has no PhD and has never taught.  Khan quit his job as a financial analyst and began to produce short simple videos on the sorts of topics covered in advanced high school and college classes.  As The Chronicle of Higher Education reports, Khan has posted over 1400 videos on YouTube, covering everything from basic arithmetic and algebra to differential equations, physics, chemistry, biology and finance.

Squashed Philosophy is the work of Glyn Hughes:  “The books which defined the way we think now.
Their own ideas, in their own words, neatly honed into little half-hour or so reads”…  and so they marvelously are.

(TotH to reader PR for the CHE reference.)

As we resolve to improve ourselves, we might recall that today is the birthday of scholar and critic Adrien Baillet; he was born on this date in 1649.  While Baillet was on the faculty at the college of Beauvais, served as librarian to François-Chrétien de Lamoignon,  and was advocate-general to the Parlement de Paris, he is best remembered as the biographer of René Descartes.

Adrien Baillet