weateallthepies.com » Education

Go Programming Language from Google

Jay — Wed, 11 Nov 2009 23:21:21 +0000

Do we need another one? Google seem to think so.

Sunday Express in Irresponsible Science Report Shocker!

Jay — Sun, 04 Oct 2009 09:51:37 +0000

According to our science minister Lord Drayson, British science reporting is the ‘best in the world’, which doesn’t quite explain how the Express could produce something so utterly irresponsible as their headline suggesting that..

The cervical cancer jab is ‘AS DEADLY AS THE CANCER’ it prevents against.

Well if anyone reading the story can actually find the quote from the headline ‘AS DEADLY AS THE CANCER’ apart from the bit in the headline where they made it up, please let me know.

Sadly I can see this whole thing panning out into a new MMR scare. It no longer matters what the truth is once the hysterical, conspiracy obsessed anti-vaccination twunts get hold of it.

Gresham College Lectures XBMC Plugin

Jay — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 23:01:50 +0000

Gresham College London has been providing free lectures to the public for over 400 years and continue to this day. For some time now they have been recording the lectures and making them available on the website in a number of formats for viewing or listening.

This is a quick and dirty plugin I wrote for xbox media center to scrape the content from the Gresham College website and provide links for streaming either the video or audio available. Sadly the navigation isn’t great as there isn’t really much to go on from the site, I am looking at adding a search and maybe splitting it by year to help. Also XBMC plays nicer with MP3/MP4 in terms of buffering so stick with those if they are available.

Just scratching an itch for myself but if you fancy watching a few free lectures on a whole load of subjects, grab this and install in your XBMC plugins folder.

On page 27 you’ll find an interesting symposium on Science Fiction as a literary genre with Neal Stephenson as a guest speaker.

Free Online University Course Material

Jay — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:58:04 +0000

Universities were a key part in the growth of the internet as we know it and it’s great to see that many of them continue to share their knowledge with what is now a huge worldwide audience.

You can find all sorts of course material, podcasts, video lectures, exams, and just about anything you would need to educate yourself to university level (apart from the will power) online for free.

Whilst you won’t receive any certification, it is amazing to think that this knowledge is there for the taking for anyone who is able to access it. The “internet as the new Gutenberg press” analogy is not a new one but becoming closer to the truth as our collective knowledge is shared so simply in so many different forms.

I am as you can probably tell, very interested in learning, often for the actual act of learning itself. The pursuit of knowledge used to be a goal in itself yet it is now so often just a means to get a better job and little else…but I waffle far too much…

MITOpenCourseWare is my latest stop on the internet for a bit of not-so-light reading. Started in 2002 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology now provide educational material from over 1800 courses taught to their graduates and undergraduates.

There is a ton of interesting stuff here, more than you could ever possibly digest so I’m sure you can find something to interest you and maybe even something useful..I know some games programmers are using these sorts of materials to help with the stupidly hard maths now needed for 3D games design.