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 »

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

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.

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.

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.

Mark Bittman goes over the history of how we eat and explains what is wrong with the way we eat today. He advocates eating more plants and less animals — both for our own health as well as help prevent global warming. Oh, you didn’t know that raising cattle contribute to global warming? Mark Bittman says “livestock is the second highest contributing factor to atmosphere-altering gases. Nearly one-fifth of all greenhouse gases is generated by livestock production — more than transportation.”

Brain scientist Jill Bolte Taylor gave this talk at TED where she showed us a real brain and how it consists of two separate halves. The right half thinks in parallel and knows the concept of “we”. The left half thinks in serial and knows that concept of “I”. One day she had a stroke on the left hemisphere and she is able to describe to us today what happened on that day as her brain functions started to shut down. She described how she lost the normal brain chatter that are always in our head, how she gained a perspective as an outsider looking at herself, and how she experienced nirvana.

Professor Dr. Marti Hearst lectures at University of California at Berkeley. This is the first lecture of the course “Search Engines: Technology, Society, and Business” from School of Information Management and Systems (SIMS 141).

This video is about two hours. If you want to bypass the portion of the video that goes over the course logistic and skip directly to the part of the lecture on how the web works, skip to 30 minutes into the video. If you want to skip to how search engines work, skip to 76 minutes into the video.
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Matthieu Ricard, a Buddhist monk, gives an enlightening lecture at Google about our inner state that affects our happiness. He is the author of the book, See Happiness: A Guide to Life’s Most Important Skill.

Seth Godin gives the following talk at Google titled “All Marketers are Liars” which is also the title of his book.

Here is an entertaining and enlightening talk by Hans Rosling, professor of international health at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute. Lots of good data and animated graphs to give you a more accurate look at the world.

In this one hour video, Professor Barry Schwartz explains why too much choice is not always good. This is a paradoxical concept since western belief is that more choice means more freedom and happiness.

At about 45 minutes into this video, Schwartz comments on the effect of money on happiness. He says that …”What is true is that once you cross subsistence, whatever subsistence is in your society, additional increases in wealth have virtually no effect on well-being. There is a hugh steep curve going from zero to subsistence. But once you cross that line of subsistence, the curve flattens out. It is worth knowing, in case you have a choice between choosing x and making more money, almost certainly choosing x is what you should choose.”

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Computer scientist Jeff Hawkins (who also pioneered PDA’s) tells us the theory of brains and how the brain work. The talk is not technical but covers the theory. There are a few chuckles here and there as well.

Very fascinating. Deborah Gordon, who studies ants, explains how ant colonies work. In particular, the idea of task allocation explains how each ant know what to despite having no central control from the queen..