This year’s month-long Theoretical Advanced Study Institute -TASI- looks especially good, from my point of view, with a great combination of topics and lecturers. As usual, it is held in Boulder, Colorado. It’s all about current ideas and experiments and observations in particle physics and cosmology. Three USC students are there and I’ve heard from them that things have been great so far.
Well, the great news is that the TASI people are making the lectures available online a fairly short time after their delivery. The link is here. So even though not there, you can schedule some time to take these lecture courses if you like. I glanced for a while at Raphael Bousso’s first lecture in the series “Cosmology and the Landscape”, and it was clear and very well presented. (This is not entirely surprising – Raph is always an excellent lecturer.)
This is great! I’m going to make some time to work through some of this wonderful material over the next month. Anyone else?
-cvj
(Thanks Ken, Nikolai, Ram, and Tameem!)
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“Noticeable also, is too much `attitude’, of the chip-on-the-shoulder variety…”
Glad to hear that I am not the only one to experience this. Try disagreeing with him about anything. *Not* cool.
Hi. Giving a techniclal lecture on your subject is not the same as public speaking. It sounds like you’re using the wrong measures of what makes a good physics lecture course. Polish, such as the number of ums and ahs, is a completely secondary issue to how well you organize the material, explain the content and structure of a computation, and so forth. I only saw the first lecture, and recall no admonition of the sort you mention, but I recall from elsewhere that Raphael generally answers questions carefully and with good humour.
Cheers,
-cvj
Altho a top notch theorist, Bousso is in BAD need of a public speaking course ! I cannot recall ever hearing more “UHHHHH’s” interspersing words in a talk EVER. Possibly excusable if a speaker is outside his topic, and a bit sleepy or nervous, but this is clearly not the case here….
Noticeable also, is too much `attitude’, of the chip-on-the-shoulder variety…Hey, RB, lighten up…they’re grad students, and are there to learn, not to be admonished.
Thanks Michael!
(It was probably all my fault for letting the world know about the site… ironically…)
-cvj
I asked above if anyone knew where to get the video, and the answer is in fact quite obvious, perhaps it’ll be of use to someone else. If you “view source”, the only link to .wmv is to an address of the form
/TASI/bousso_01/SupportingFiles/video/video.wmv
which you can then download directly! Part of the problem last night was that their server couldn’t keep up with all the requests, today it seems to be in better health.
Now back to physics…
Well, that sounds like a pretty good success rate, to be honest.
Anyway, for other means of getting the video, I’m sure there’s contact information somewhere on the site. It is nothing to do with me at all, so I cannot help.
Good Luck!
-cvj
and then it plays seamlessly.
I think streaming any video this long is a little problematic, though. I watched one seamlessly, and another got 20 minutes in and froze and wouldn’t resume at the same point. It would be nice to be able to download them and avoid streaming problems.
Works fine on my mac. I don’t know how to get the raw video…
I think you need to have windows media player (ugh! I know) installed as a plugin, and then it plays seamlessly.
Cheers,
-cvj
These look great!
The only problem is that they’re presented inside some hideous piece software… even after much messing about (instructions here) it still only sort-of works on my mac.
Does anyone know how to find the actual video files, so we can just watch those?
One of the great things about the internet is that you can follow seminars and lectures from anywhere in the world. Doubt if I can follow everything but hopefully I can pick up a few things.
Hi!
You only need to start a discussion and if they have the time, those interested and thus inclined will join in, I’m sure.
Cheers,
-cvj
Thanks for the link. Some of the lectures look really exciting, also for nonspecialists.
Do you think there would be the possibility to have here
discussions of some of the material covered there? That would be great.
Cheers, Fynn
Ooh,nice.
Looking forward to this.