Continuing with OU freebies

I've watched another couple of OU video "serieses" and it's becoming apparent that a lot of these aren't serieses at all, but rather a 25 minute video broken up into arbitrary little chunks.   You've got to watch all the chunks in order, as they don't make any sense individually.  So why did the OU break them up like this?  Presumably it matches the way the individual segments are referred to in the course materials.  So they've set most of them up as playlists, meaning you can watch all the way through.  But that still means putting up with the odd silly little jingle and idents at the end (which are usually significantly louder than the main video content, making them uncomfortable to watch with headphones on).

But weirder still, while they have various serieses available as "combined" videos, some of these are genuine serieses of individual videos, and many of the single documentaries seem to be only available as fragments....
I think I'm going to get rather bored with these videos anyway, as most are merely a slice of the information given in a full course, and not really enough to actually learn the material.

But there's plenty available on the OU's YouTube channel, anyhow....

It's time to learn... everything.

I've always liked learning, but recently I've started noticing just how much stuff I have previously learnt, but subsequently forgotten.  Someone will start talking about eigenvectors and eigenvalues, and even though I can still spell the words, I have no idea what they mean.  My retired Dad starts talking about the basic equations of Higher Physics and while they look familiar, it's all lost in the mists of time.

Thankfully, access to information is easier today than it has ever been.  My wee brother pointed my Dad at the MIT OpenCourseWare Physics lectures, and he's become so engrossed in them that he's just ordered an old edition of the set text online.

So in 2012 I'll be scouring the net for information in order to better understand the world around me, to relearn things I once knew and to find out things that I never knew about before.

I'm starting off by revisiting a series of short videos produced by the Open University on some physics fundamentals and the philosophy of science by one of the best guys I've ever seen talk on the topic, Professor Russell Stannard.  Stannard's an unusual guy -- an award-winning teacher and science writer, a children's author and a keen sculptor.

Here's the first video in the series of 10 -- you can follow on from that video to the rest of the series on YouTube.  Enjoy!