Walter Lewin is an entertaining physics lecturer at MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) that makes learning fun.

Here are some of his notable lectures…
How to Make Teaching Come Alive
Polarization: Light Waves, Rainbows, and Cheap Sunglasses
The Birth and Death of Stars
The Sounds of Music
The Mystery of Light

Here are his regular curriculum physics courses.
Physics I Course
Physics II Course — Electricity and Magnetism
Physics III Course — Vibration and Waves

A very informative lecture by Dr. Robert Weinberg for explaning to general audiences on how cancer begins and what causes it. This lecture is presented by MITWorld and you can see the full hour-long lecture from their site.

WATCH VIDEO on MitWorld »

There is an hour long Nova documentary program called “The Great Robot Race”. It is divided in seven chapters which are completed online for your free viewing at pbs.org.

WATCH VIDEO on pbs.org »

Teams modified vehicles with hardware sensors and software code so that the vehicles can navigate an 132 miles course in the Mohave desert without any driver or remote control. And the course must be completed within 10 hours. This race is known as the Grand Challenge with a 2 million dollar prize to the winner. This may sound easy, but it is a tough problem that takes a large amount of work and effort by many people to solve.

Are we living in a Ceaseless Society? This is the term that used in the title of this 2006 talk at MIT titled “The Ceaseless Society: What Happens to Our Mind, Body, and Spirit When we Just Never Stop?”

Does it seem like we are always trying to get somewhere or accomplish something? If we are not doing “this”, then we are doing “that”. It seems like we are always “doing” and not just “being”. Sometimes it is just good to not be doing anything and just “being”. We are after all called “human beings”.

WATCH VIDEO of the talk »

There are a few preliminary before Jon actually goes on stage to talk. If you want to jump directly to Jon’s talk, skip to 18 minutes into the video.

One of the speaker is Dr. Jon Kabat-Zinn who had received a Ph.D. in molecular biology from MIT in 1971. Kabat-Zinn specializes in mind-body medicine and mindfulness living.

Kabat Zinn is Founding Director of Stress Reduction Clinic at University of Massachusetts Medical Center and wrote many books, two of which are Full Catastrophe Living and Wherever You Go, There You Are: Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life.

Kabat-Zinn talks about how due to our business of our lives we sometimes lose sight of the present. We are so constantly striving to get “someplace” we forget where we are. He also discusses how mindfullness mediation and being in the moment can help us.

To boil it down, Kabat-Zinn says mindfulness meditation is basically… “Paying attention, on-purpose, in the present moment, non-judgmentally”.

Near the end of his talk, he recommended two reading material:

(1) Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse

(2) Four Quartets by T.S. Eliot

This video explains how sometimes unlikely coincidences do happen. And some coincidences may not be as unlikely as you think.

This video titled the “State of the Internet” was created by Jess3 for a lecture in Feb 2010. It was found on vimeo ….

JESS3 / The State of The Internet from JESS3 on Vimeo.

Karl Fisch “Did You Know / Shift Happens” YouTube Video version 2.0 was announced on his blog back in June 2007 and which you can see here…

It puts into perspective how big the world is and how fast it is changing. Some of the statistics is amazing.

Since then, many other have re-mixed the presentation.

Here is another version …

with closing credits that says “Research and original design by Karl Fisch, Scott Mclood, Jeff Brenman”

With content based on Karl Fisch presentation, Jeff Brenman has a slide version of the presentation at uploaded to SideShare around 2006 which you can view here called ShiftHappens.

Now there is a “Did You Know 4.0″…

The people credited for this one are Scott McLeod, Karl Fisch, and Laura Bestler.

This one is nice in that is has credit and sources at the end and has a creativecommon license.

Economist Laurence Kotlokoff paints a gloomy picture of United States economic future in the below talk at MIT and in his book The Coming Generational Storm: What You Need to Know about America’s Economic Future.

The aging United States demographics means that there will be more older people collecting Social Security and Medicare/Medicaid than there are young people generating enough money for these programs. This financial gap will get larger and larger the more time we wait. Kotlokoff says we need to do something immediately otherwise the fiscal system is headed for a meltdown. He has his own ideas as to what we should do. But will the politicians listen is a different story.

The talk was given on April 28, 2004 as part of the authors at MIT series.

The below video is a parody of Disney created by Professor Eric Faden of Bucknell University. It explains the U.S. copyright laws and the types of work that it protects such as music, film, dance, etc. It says that ideas can not be copyrighted. Only the form in which that idea is express is copyrighted. It talks about the duration of copyright and when a work goes into public domain when copyright expires. And finally it explains the copyright fair use doctrine.

Puzzle-master Will Shortz of NPR radio will introduce us on the rules of KenKen puzzles and how to solve them.

The above video was showing a KenKen that only uses the add operation of the digits. However, general KenKen puzzles have add, minus, multiply, and divisor operators indicated next the results number within their cages. The below video shows how to work out these more difficult forms of the puzzles.

You can give the game a try by playing KenKen online here. There you will find the rules for the game as well.

Gary King explains why “Real Winner Never Cheat”…

Why are people so consumed about winning that have to give up integrity and character by cheating? Not to mention the negative effects of cheating on health. Because cheating cause guilt on every level and certainly that is not good for health. Watch this other video about the negative effects of lying on health.

This video, Gary King explains why lying negatively affects your health…

And many people believe that lying can cause cancer. MRI machines can detect differences in brain activity when people are lying and when they are not. This implies that lying can change brain functions. It would make sense that lying has negative consequences on health since lying causes stress and stress decreases the immune system.

Dr. Dean Ornish talks about cardiovascular disease and obesity at the TED conference. He says that diet and lifestyle and prevent and sometimes reverse this epidemic.

He also talks about how genes are not our fate. Diet and lifestyle and change how your gene expression…

Paul Ehrlich, Stanford University professor and author of The Dominant Animal: Human Evolution and the Environment, talks in about the state of the world at the Long Now Foundation seminar.

The North Pacific Gyre is a section of the Pacific Ocean between Hawaii and California that is accumulating trash due to the nature of its water currents. This garbage patch in the ocean consists of trash debris and non-biodegradable plastic that just breaks up into more tiny pieces.

This video on YouTube sumarizes it best…

saying that there is 7 million tons of floating waste spanning an area twice the size of Texas. Birds and wildlife die when they mistaken these plastic bits as food. A lot of these garbage get washed up on beaches.

The latimes.com also has some video pieces on the North Pacific Gyre here.

And this video is a more detailed explanation of trash in our oceans…

The reason why there is not a lot of good photos of the North Pacific Gyre is that most of the garbage is just underwater and is somewhat spread out as explained in theoystersgarter.com.