Ohio State U - Astronomy 141, Life in the Universe - Richard Pogge

This course is ongoing but I'm going to review it now even though we haven't got to the best part yet and (I'm broke down in Chicago).

I sometimes question the way universities slice and dice content into new sexy courses. However this one makes sense. Just twenty years ago we didn't have evidence of another planet outside our solar system. Now we know of around 300 and we can safely project that there are tens, hundreds of millions in our galaxy alone. Now the question of 'life in the universe', which we have addressed mainly with novels, movies and TV, must be addressed by science. How do we do that? This course is built around that question. As Pogge says it's not just a question of are there microbes somewhere, what we really want to know is, "is there somebody to talk to".

Pogge is famous for his Astronomy 161 and 162, the solar system and the universe. These are two in depth courses, beautifully organized into self contained lectures. Two gigs of 'the greatest story ever told'. See my January review.

After an introduction, Pogge begins with five revolutions in Science including geological, chemical and biological. Next is a long section about earth and a lot on topics outside astronomy. When you get to know Pogge you know this guy does his homework. So the interdisciplinary lectures are really fresh. Geology is excellent, the story of oxygen is amazing. How did life get started, the magic jump from molecules to a single cell are topics addressed in some depth. Life goes back 3.5 billion years and evolution took forever. We almost didn't make it. Key terms and timelines will become meaningful. With 'extinctions' we're moving into the solar system, halfway through the course.

After years of false starts I'd nearly given up on Plato until I discovered Steven B Smith at Yale. If science has left you a little cold perhaps you just haven't found the right teacher. Meet Richard Pogge. Go to itunesU. Search "life in the universe".

Walker Walker and Johari

When I started this project in January business was down 30% and I had plenty of time between loads to write. Now, thankfully, for the past three months I've been busier than ever with barely time to go online. More time to listen but no time to write. Nevertheless, I will try to at least document the courses I listen to and add whatever commentary I can.

Here are three short reviews.

Brian Walker, UCLA Political Science 114b (US Political Thinking from 1865)

This is what I love about academia. Walker takes on the "right" and the "left" in a passionate and yet completely objective analysis. His students are required in their papers to argue both sides of a given topic and then give their own opinion. The first several lectures are the best coverage you'll ever hear of the American conservative movement. It's not negative it's not positive it's just what is. The last lecture is on the 60's and 70's, Walker's specialty, and it's not at all what you might expect.

Walker is an excellent lecturer; he tackles tough topics and is always interesting always objective.


Richard Walker, Berkeley Geog 110 (Economic Geography of the Industrial World)

This is a course from Fall 2007. Geography is by definition interdisciplinary. This course leans towards economics. Walker maintains that economics without geography is not good economics. He may have something there. Another contentious claim and one that comes from quite a few professors, regards Mexican immigration. Walker says "tear down that wall" and the sky will not fall. Indeed our economy needs every immigrant. I recall another economist putting a number on the value of every illegal Mexican immigrant. It was around $500,000 net gain to our economy.

Richard Walker occasionally goes on a political tirade which serves no purpose except to embarrass himself. "Obama hasn't got a prayer of a chance". He also seems to abuse his students with far too many slides. If the concept is off-shore banking, the slide shows crystal clear water and some beautiful beaches of the Cayman Islands. Unfortunately the slide reinforces just about everything but off-shore banking. The slides wag the lectures.

Berkeley has another Geography professor I actually prefer but have never reviewed, Nathan Sayre. Any course by Sayre gets my highest rating.


Ramesh Johari, Stanford, The Future of the Internet

This is excellent. It's a continuing education course, four long lectures and one short one. It needs to be four times longer. Johari is young but a great teacher, he never lost me. The course concentrates on the big issues and although it's two years old it's not seriously dated.

He maintains that the 'net neutrality' issue is not as simple as most parties want it to be. "There's problems on both sides". I listened to this course twice and when it's offered again I'll be there.

As pertinent as this is to all our lives and as amazing as the story is, I don't know why there are not many more courses like this. The internet needs the sunshine of academic analysis and we need the insights of Ramesh Johari. The internet works remarkably well. How not to screw it up is the challenge.

Heidegger, All Too Heidegger

Heidegger is an acquired taste. A very expensive taste. If you have lots and lots of time and don't mind getting little back on your investment and are willing to exercise your neurons till they hurt, then help yourself. Repeating these lectures over and over is required before they make sense, and you will never arrive at a complete understanding of Heidegger. So why are there students standing in the hallway trying to get into Hubert Dreyfus's course on Heidegger? Why does Amazon's Kindle ereader already have 60 books available when you search Heidegger? Why was Heidegger's impossibly obtuse, "Being and Time" so influential? Because what he said was revolutionary and simply very interesting.

There's two courses. Berkeley's Phil.185 with Dreyfus and now a course at Hampshire College with John Drabinski. Search 'jdrabinski.com' and find the "Between Husserl and Heidegger" podcast. But the place to start is a new youtube post. It's a five part BBC interview with a red headed Hubert Dreyfus made perhaps 25 years ago. Bryan Magee is the host. Fifty minutes total, it's an excellent introduction.

Heidegger's brilliant innovation was to get out of the Cartesian confines of 'subject-object'. Heidegger says, "we are that in which we operate", and "we are always already in the world". Existence is to be one and the same with our environment. From this basic premise he builds a complex language and philosophy. Following is my take on a little bit of evidence that tends to support this concept.

Artists develop a style uniquely their own. They also sense that their tools and their art are really integral extensions of who they "are". We go to a museum and we look at a Vermeer painting and we say that "is" Vermeer. Heidegger works! (although I'm stirring in some psychology). The motorcycle rider does not ride on the bike, the bike and the rider are inseparable and one with the road, mountains, sky and sometimes rain.

When John Drabinski was six years old he asked his parents how could he be sure he was not the last human on earth and everyone else was a robot. His father said that he was not a robot and of course little John replied "but that's just what a robot would say". We were all philosophers at six. (Truck drivers are all philosophers but really bad ones.)

Dreyfus and Drabinski are kindly patient teachers. Dreyfus gets down to incredible details. You'll learn some German and realize how arbitrary translators can be. Drabinsky paints with a broader brush. At first I skipped Drabinski's Husserl lectures but went back for them because he's part of the picture.

These lectures have another side effect. Everything else seems so uncomplicated.

Dan Carlin - Hardcore History - Ghosts of the Ostfront

Anne is supposed to be vacationing but he can't help himself. He just scooped me on this but great minds..... I'm a big fan of Dan Carlin; he's always fired up, well researched and always interesting, but I think his current episodes on the Eastern Front of WWll "Ghosts of the Ostfront" are his most compelling, most important podcasts ever. There's three parts posted and one or more to come.

This story is important because it's not a part of western consciousness. Our history books, our movies and especially Ken Burns documentary hardly give lip service to the Eastern Front. And if you don't understand what happened on the Eastern Front you don't know beans about WWll.

Six months in Stalingrad from Aug. 1942 to Feb. 1943 was the pivotal point in the 20th century! Everything prior led up to it. Everything after followed from that event. Stalin was a monster and that's a fact. That Stalin (with American jeeps and boots and rations) whipped the Germans 17 months before D-Day and by D-Day had them cowed has never been acknowledged. Why? Because Stalin was a monster. We cannot hold these two concepts in our heads. They're like rubbing two pieces of sandpaper together. Perhaps two years ago in an article in the Atlantic on this topic, a brave academic said, "Stalin saved the world for democracy". And whereas this outcome seems heroic, the way Stalin did it was by being his old ruthless self; shooting in the back anyone who retreated. A Russian soldier was captured by the Germans and then escaped back to his company. He was so badly abused when he returned, he went back to the Germans.

I also recently listened to Carlin's three part series, "Punic Nightmares". I had just finished Stanford's short course on Hannibal which seemed to be missing the final reel. Carlin's three episodes are just as good as Stanford's unless you really really have to know which route Hannibal took over the Alps. And Carlin gives the devastating ending.

Berkeley - Scientific Approaches to Conciousness - John F Kihlstom

This course is as good as podcasting gets. Two years ago I listened to Kihlstrom's Intro. Psych. course and enjoyed Kihlstrom but got restless with the content halfway through. But this is a graduate course rich in detail, rich in controversy and Kihlstrom brings 40 years of hard work to these lectures. It's hard to imagine anyone better qualified to teach this course. His specialties include memory, hypnosis, social cognition, unconscious mental processes and many related areas. He's taught at Penn. Harvard, Stanford, Wisconsin, Arizona, Yale and since 1996 at Berkeley. His lecture style is relaxed but he stays on point. He covers all academic viewpoints including his own with both candor and conviction. And he has at least three cats.

The problem with consciousness is that we don't know precisely what it is or how it happens. Berkeley's philosophy prof. John Searle, says it's what happens between the time we wake up in the morning and go to sleep at night. So the first 6 lectures are on philosophy, from Descartes and James down to Pat and Paul Churchlands at UCSD. Basically the Churchlands have lost their minds. They believe it's neurons 'all the way down', that there is no mind, nothing we can't see and touch. At the other end are small groups who tend to think consciousness is not only a property of humans but of computers and coke cans; some include pet rocks and the universe.

Kihlstrom is dismissive of both extremes. He believes we have a consciousness and it's pretty cool. That psychology has a lot to say about how the body and mind play together. He explains where the Churchlands went wrong. Psychology has to tell the neurocognitive researchers and neurophilosophers what to look for or they wouldn't know what they've found. Without psychology there is no neuroscience. And to rub it in, psychology got along quite well without high tech scanners (thank you very much). Neurocognitive science has much to contribute but it can't stand on it's own.

Both Kihlstrom and Gopnik (see previous post) cite the same experiments measuring awareness of self in children and animals with mirrors and a spot on the forehead. Children respond predictably at around 18 month (5% at 12 months). Most chimps and orangutans pass but no gorillas except Coco responded and there was some reaction from dolphins and from one out of three elephants in the Brooklyn Zoo. Now there's a cottage industry of these experiments but Darwin started it at the London Zoo with a mirror in the orangutan exhibit.

The rest of the course goes through what we know about the following: Attention and Automaticity, The Explicit and the Implicit, Anesthesia and Coma, Sleep and Dreams, Hysteria and Hypnosis, Daydreaming Absorption and Meditation, Consciousness and the Self, The Origins of Consciousness and Conclusion. Twenty-six fifty minute lectures, all excellent.

Berkeley - Psych 140, Developmental Psych - Alison Gopnik

I've been browsing for a good Dev. Psy. course and I found it. This covers everything from birth through early school years. Professor Gopnik combines academic theory with thorough coverage of past and present research and adds her first hand accounts into a terrific course. The focus is always on the infant or child and on what's happening at each stage of development. These lectures are vital, always interesting and often very funny. You will meet Gopnik's three sons, her brother Adam Gopnik who writes for the New Yorker and his daughter Olivia and her imaginary friend Charlie Ravioli.

The technical term for the terrible twos is "The Terrible Twos". Gopnik legitimizes and goes into some detail about this period. Then Dr. Gopnik backs up and gives us a first person account of giving birth and her novel innovation, 'gravity assist' combined with "shaking like a bottle of ketchup" when the baby got stuck. And once delivered, Gopnik refused to hand the newborn over to do whatever they do to newborns. Almost a whole lecture is given to breast feeding; it's cheap, always handy, sterile, never too hot, never cold and really really nutritious.

When Gopnik was born about 50 years ago, the doctor told her mother, newborns couldn't see. But the doctors were holding the eye chart 8 feet away. At 12 inches newborns can recite the charts quite well, if they could read and speak. This is really the theme of this course - the development of Developmental Psy. Psychologist are getting smarter, they're learning from infants.

In conclusion she gives the results of 50 years of research on 'early learning intervention'. "The data are as clear as anything in psychology". It works. And it works when the child, the parents, the teachers, the environment (learning, medical, nutritional) all work together.

The lecture on 'emotions' given by an assistant has some errors. Newborns are said to have 'rudimentary' smiles. They're really just muscle contractions that look like rudimentary smiles. And the 'social' or 'responsive' smile does not begin as stated at 4 to 6 weeks but rather 6 to 8 weeks. I have 43 years of my own observations and none other than Charles Darwin's observations of his 10 kids to back me up.

Gopnik has a brand new book, "The Philosophical Baby" published Aug. 4 2009. She began her academic career in philosophy and it's influence seems to have had a wonderfully gounding effect. She's brilliant and makes perfect sense.

Columbia University - Masterpieces of Western Art

If you think flying buttresses are cool you need to see this. This is a series of videos, eight on the Amiens Cathedral, two on Raphael, one on Michelangelo and one on on Frank Lloyd Wright (which is totally out of place). Available from Columbia's 'itunes u' site under the 'Permanent Course Archives' tab. They are short, all together around 90 minutes.

'Part ll Revelation' on the Amiens Cathedral has impressive 3D computer graphics showing the origins of it's design and it's construction. Watch it going up, see the weak points and the added solution.This is very impressive and suitable for all ages.

Raphael's 'School of Athens' is also exceptional with close ups and wonderful narration.

Another Columbia video can be found under the tab for Courses 2008-2009, "Medieval Architecture". I believe Stephen Murray who is the tour guide here is also involved in the 3D graphics mentioned above.

Also of interest is a course I haven't yet sampled. This is the Intro. to Science courses C1000 and C1100. It looks like both have 'enhanced podcasts', the in-class power point visuals, which really do enhance the experience.

Columbia's offerings are pretty slim but also, as you might expect, very good.