Posts Tagged ‘university’
“You can never be overdressed or overeducated”*…
So many choices…
Take online courses from the world’s top universities for free. Below, you will find 1,700 free online courses from universities like Yale, MIT, Harvard, Oxford and more. Our site also features collections of Online Certificate Programs and Online Degree & Mini-Degree Programs…
From Open Culture (@openculture), “1,700 Free Online Courses from Top Universities.”
A personal fave: MIT’s “Gödel, Escher, Bach: A Mental Space Odyssey.”
[image above: source]
* Oscar Wilde
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As we hit the e-books, we might recall that it was on this date in 1922 that the United States paid tribute to the man instrumental in the technology that enables on-line education, Alexander Graham Bell…
There were more than 14 million telephones in the United States by the time Alexander Graham Bell died. For one minute on August 4, 1922, they were all silent.
The reason: Bell’s funeral. The American inventor was the first to patent telephone technology in the United States and who founded the Bell Telephone System in 1877. Though Bell wasn’t the only person to invent “the transmission of speech by electrical wires,” writes Randy Alfred for Wired, achieving patent primacy in the United States allowed him to spend his life inventing. Even though the telephone changed the world, Bell didn’t stop there.
Bell died on August 2, 1922, just a few days after his 75th birthday. “As a mark of respect every telephone exchange in the United States and Canada closed for a minute when his funeral began around 6:30 p.m. Eastern Standard Time,” Alfred writes.
On the day of the funeral, The New York Times reported that Bell was also honored by advocates for deaf people. “Entirely apart from the monumental achievement of Professor Bell as the inventor of the telephone, his conspicuous work in [sic] behalf of the deaf of this country would alone entitle him to everlasting fame,” said Felix H. Levey, president of the Institution for the Improved Instruction of Deaf Mutes.
In fact, Bell spent much of his income from the telephone on helping deaf people. The same year he founded the Bell Telephone System, 1880, Bell founded the Volta Laboratory. The laboratory, originally called Volta Associates, capitalized on Bell’s work and the work of other sound pioneers. It made money by patenting new innovations for the gramophone and other recorded sound technologies. In 1887, Bell took his share of the money from the sale of gramophone patents and founded the Volta Bureau “as an instrument for the increase and diffusion of knowledge relating to the Deaf,’” writes the National Park Service. Bell and Volta continued to work for deaf rights throughout his life.
Volta Laboratory eventually became Bell Laboratories, which was home to many of the twentieth century’s communication innovations.
Smithsonian
“A helluva, helluva, helluva, helluva, hell of an engineer”*…
College fight songs are Saturday staples, memorized in freshman orientation and blasted by marching bands at every game. The best ones are shouted from the rooftops and during Heisman Trophy presentations; the worst barely register with alumni.
We gathered the fight songs of 65 schools — all those in the Power Five conferences (the ACC, Big Ten, Big 12, Pac-12 and SEC), plus Notre Dame — to see exactly how these teams are musically willed to victory. We counted which clichéd elements (like shouting “Rah!” or spelling something out) appear in each song’s lyrics and determined how fast the song is played and how long it lasts (for the version available on Spotify)…
Saturday’s anthems get the FiveThirtyEight treatment: “Our Guide To The Exuberant Nonsense Of College Fight Songs.”
* “(I’m a) Ramblin’ Wreck from Georgia Tech”
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As we pick up the tempo, we might recall that it was on this date in 1897 that The (New York) Sun ran an editorial entitled “Is There a Santa Claus?” Written by Francis Pharcellus Church in response to a letter from 8 year-old Virginia O’Hanlon, it is now remembered best by one of its lines: “Yes, Virginia, there is a Santa Claus.”
“Every form of government tends to perish by excess of its basic principle”*…
The town planning of the Harappan civilization has amazed archaeologists
Great civilisations are not murdered. Instead, they take their own lives.
So concluded the historian Arnold Toynbee in his 12-volume magnum opus A Study of History. It was an exploration of the rise and fall of 28 different civilisations.
He was right in some respects: civilisations are often responsible for their own decline. However, their self-destruction is usually assisted.
The Roman Empire, for example, was the victim of many ills including overexpansion, climatic change, environmental degradation and poor leadership. But it was also brought to its knees when Rome was sacked by the Visigoths in 410 and the Vandals in 455.
Collapse is often quick and greatness provides no immunity. The Roman Empire covered 4.4 million sq km (1.9 million sq miles) in 390. Five years later, it had plummeted to 2 million sq km (770,000 sq miles). By 476, the empire’s reach was zero.
Our deep past is marked by recurring failure. As part of my research at the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, I am attempting to find out why collapse occurs through a historical autopsy. What can the rise and fall of historic civilisations tell us about our own? What are the forces that precipitate or delay a collapse? And do we see similar patterns today?…
Studying the demise of historic civilizations can tell us how much risk we face today. Worryingly, Luke Kemp, of the Centre for the Study of Existential Risk at the University of Cambridge, suggests that the signs are worsening: “Are We On the Road to Civilisation Collapse?”
* Will Durant
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As we reread “Ozymandias,” we might recall that it was on this date in 425 that the University of Constantinople was founded by Byzantine Emperor Theodosius II at the urging of his wife Aelia Eudocia. It opened with 31 chair (in law, philosophy, medicine, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music, rhetoric and other subjects– 15 taught in Latin, 16 in Greek, and survived until the 15th century.
“And so the Universe ended”*…
Conceptual illustration of the Higgs Field that physicists believe permeates the Universe, and that could theoretically bring about its end.
Every once in a while, physicists come up with a new way to destroy the Universe. There’s the Big Rip (a rending of spacetime), the Heat Death (expansion to a cold and empty Universe), and the Big Crunch (the reversal of cosmic expansion). My favourite, though, has always been vacuum decay. It’s a quick, clean and efficient way of wiping out the Universe…
Learn more about a possibility that really sucks: “Vacuum decay: the ultimate catastrophe.”
The Restaurant at the End of the Universe
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As we we abhor a vacuum even more than nature does, we might send closely-observed birthday greetings to Jesse Leonard Greenstein; he was born on this date in 1909. An astronomer who ran Cal Tech’s storied program for decades, he co-discovered (with Maarten Schmidt) the quasar. While other astronomers had previously observed the bright bodies, Greenstein and Schmidt were the first to to interpret the red shift of quasars and correctly identify them as compact, very distant– and thus very old– objects. Later, working with Louis Henyey, Greenstein designed and built a new spectrograph and wide-view camera to improve astronomical observations,
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