CMU Professor Randy Pausch's 'Last Lecture'

This is a bit of an unusual story for Slashdot- it's the "Last Lecture" of a professor at CMU who is terminally ill. His early research in VR has benefited everyone and even if you have never heard of Randy Pausch I think this is worth your time. It's a 2 hour long wmv filled with insight, laughs and wisdom from a man who has really done some amazing work. I've been watching it all morning and I think it would really be worth your time if you can spare it to listen to what he has to say. From virtual reality to education to stuffed animals and childhood dreams, there's a lot here worth your time. Thanks drew for the link. Update: 09/21 15:44 GMT by Z : The link is already a little shakey, so you might want to turn to this cut up YouTube version of the talk instead.

Moving..

I havent seen the lecture, but the story in some Pittsburgh newspaper (sorry, dont have the link - it appeared on reddit yesterday) is really moving. Amazing, so 'close' to death but still in such good spirits. Sad that i came to know of such a great spirit when i know i wont be hearing more from/about him. Sad indeed.

Re:Moving..

Here is the good article describing the lecture, for those who cannot download the lecture itself.
http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/07262/818671-85.stm [post-gazette.com]

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It's too bad we put ridiculous priorities on things. Imagine what we could cure, probably including his terminal illness, if we only had a trillion dollars to spare on research.

Gee, if only there were some place we could find a trillion dollars in the last

Re:Moving..

To be honest you're probably not going to find a cure for Pancreatic cancer any time soon, even with a trillion dollars thrown at it. The problems with this form of cancer are:

1) It's in the endocrine system, meaning it has easy access to a lot of other vital organs that the cancer can spread to,
2) The pancreas is vital to survival (it produces insulin, as well as a host of pancreatic enzymes that the body needs to be able to process food and regulate metabolism) so you can't just chop the whole thing out if it becomes cancerous
3) It's nestled in the middle of a complex set of nerves, arteries and veins meaning that it's extremely difficult, and often impossible, to perform surgical or radiation treatments,
4) Screening programs often don't work, as the cancer is completely capable of developing without showing up in any blood tests,
5) This is the real kicker - the early symptoms of PC are identical to a host of other minor illnesses such as gallstones, back ache, indigestion or acid reflux. By the time the symptoms have become serious enough for the patient to go to the doctor with them, and by the time the doctor has ruled out all the simpler ailments the symptoms point to, it's almost always too late. That's why this disease has a 5 year mortality rate of 98% and a 1 year mortality rate of over 75%, along with being the U.S.'s most fatal cancer.

Even if we could implement an accurate and early-detection screening programme, the cancer is so aggressive that we really need a paradigm shift away from current radiation and chemotherapy treatments. It's not so much that we're lacking money in researching into new forms of treatment as it is we're lacking the knowledge necessary to advance in these areas right now. There are plenty of well funded people working to solve the problems of cancer - right now we're waiting for one of them to have the 'eureka!' moment.

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The problem is that cancer is not *a* disease. All cancers are different, have different causes, and are even sometime heterogeneous within one single patient, meaning some cancer cells will respond well to a kind of treatment, but not others. It only tak

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Seeing his lecture (the live link was spread around among CMU graduates), it seems to me that, even before his diagnosis, Pausch lived every day as if it could be his last.

I think that's perhaps the main reason why, despite his situation, he's in as good

Do NOT mod up GP!

GP video is the stupid Rick Rolled video.

Worth it?

I'm just not sure that it's worth my time.

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It would clearly interfere with your valuable ./ commenting time.

What do you think life and death is all about?

It's what you do with what you got, and that's what he's about.

He made an impact on my life.

He was the man who introduced me to Doom.

Re:He made an impact on my life.

Haha, me too (I was one of Randy's students back when he was at UVa). I didn't get too into Doom, but when the Quake test code came out, many of us spent pretty much every waking hour playing, for several months. In the meantime, we were supposed to be working on an Alice deliverable for SIGGRAPH. I think the turning point for my entire life was a few months before SIGGRAPH, when Randy called a couple of us out for being too much play and not enough work. I went cold turkey, and didn't pick up another video game for 10 years. I firmly believe if he hadn't done that, I'd have accomplished very little professionally, and would be holding down a crappy 9-5 mid-level programming job while thinking forward to what I was going to play on my XBox 360 on any given night. To this day, I can't really get much enjoyment out of a video game, but I think that's a good thing! Randy definitely taught me to pick a prize and keep my eye on it. He used to like to tell me, "John, you're a strong rocket with no fins," that I would never get to the moon and would come crashing back to earth if I didn't focus. I didn't like it at the time, but I needed to hear it. I think about that advice all the time, and it is just as relevant to me today. Randy has always attracted amazing talent and amazing people. The people in that lab were the greatest group of people I ever worked with in many respects. I'm proud they're my friends, and I'm thankful to Randy for providing the environment and putting us together.

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Randy has had a similar effect for me in the almost-15 years since I first enrolled in one of his classes at UVa. Some of the lessons didn't sink in at first (my fault, not his!), but over time I realized how rare Randy was and how fortunate I was to hav

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Would that all of us could live to read something so moving about ourselves, to know we made a difference.

Slashdot stories

This is actually the type of story I love to see on Slashdot. A nice break from yet another "YRO" stuff.

Sad that youtube forces this stuff to be cut up

because they are worried that anything over 10 minutes is probably a copyright violation....they should at least create some mechanism whereby material that provably doesn't violate copyrights could have more than 10 minutes alloted to it....how you would prove it is another issue entirely, but I would imagine they could implement some type of peer review system.

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What about storage costs? Those data centers ain't cheap ...

Re:Sad that youtube forces this stuff to be cut up

You can find the full version on Google Video [google.com].

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they should at least create some mechanism whereby material that provably doesn't violate copyrights could have more than 10 minutes alloted to it....

YouTube evidently is able to serve up videos past the 10-minute limit. The official Google channel [youtube.com] and th

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Sorry, but you're incorrect (if a single counter-example proves such).

My favorite channel on youtube has plenty of videos over 10 minutes. (http://www.youtube.com/viperkeeper) This is not meant as any sort of plug, I have no relationship with the dire

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I guess what I really wanted to point out in my original post is that I think it's a storage limit, rather than a time limit to avoid something so abstract as violating copyright...

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I guess what I really wanted to point out in my original post is that I think it's a storage limit, rather than a time limit to avoid something so abstract as violating copyright...

But a per-video limit doesn't make much difference to storage space if the

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I appreciate the research. The director I referenced had approximately 50 videos with thousands of views before any of them crossed 10 minutes. The pieces fit!

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This is not necessarily true. I have a video series for Magic the Gathering (youtube.com/mrorangeguy) and I am not a "big player" in the least. I began like everyone else, in the 10min limit. Then I begged and pleaded and bugged the hell out of them until

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I miss the days of a avi mpg or mov YOU COULD DOWNLOAD and play instead of horrid bad codec rendered streamed dreck cut to heck. Oh yes I cna get usilt which allow me to download the dreck but WHY? I will wait till someome finally archives the real thi

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It could be on other video hosting site like Google Video (no limit I think). YouTube does offer no time length limit if you're a subscriber.

Amazing Lecture - Dare to Dream

It was an amazing lecture. If you dare to dream and dare to follow through, then he's the man to emulate.

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Agreed.

Time management talk

It's kind of off-topic, but I read some inspirational lecture slides by Randy Pausch about time management [alice.org] a little while ago. In light of his illness, I guess there's two ways to take it: Perhaps time management isn't that important in the end, or perhaps the limited amount of time each of us may have makes it even more important.

(Or, I suppose, the stress related to worrying about time management may affect your health...)

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How ironic, procrastinating from doing something else by reading a Time Management seminar.

Time management is (probably) for the birds

Perhaps time management isn't that important in the end, or perhaps the limited amount of time each of us may have makes it even more important.

Yeah, that's the question I had when I read through his PowerPoint slides [cmu.edu] yesterday morning, after the WSJ video

Re:Time management is (probably) for the birds

I finally managed to refute Pausch's dictums by imagining myself trying to persuade a Zen Buddhist practitioner to follow them.

Actually Zen Buddhist monks live very strict, regimented, structured lives. Espcially those in Japan. They would consider anybody with a tendency to daydream or procrastinate as failing to live "in the moment". One great quote I remember hearing goes, "Don't do nothing. Do nothing." One monk from the non-fiction book "Ambivalent Zen" would pay any bills he received as soon as he received them so that he could better keep his mind clear.

That said, I'd have a hard hard time changing my own daydreaming, procrastinating ways.

The kind of news you don't want to hear...

This sucks.

He was one of my classmates when I was going to graduate school in the CMU CS department (back then, it was "just" a department, not a school). He was a nice guy (and a bit of a clown).

I hadn't kept in touch, so this is the first I've heard abo

What can one say...

This was the most valuable lecture I've ever attended. And it's the kind of lecture I can talk about with my girlfriend, with my friends, and with anyone I care about. It's the stuff of life.

This man has lived an amazing life, and no doubt, this gives him the courage and the peace of mind to leave in such a graceful way, in an ultimate act of generosity. "Take a piece of me" he said somewhere at the beginning, when inviting people in the audience to take away his stuffed animals. And I feel I received a piece of him, even though I am thousands of kilometers away from this great person.

If you want your children to persevere in their lives and reach their dreams, show them this lecture (I saw the videos on YouTube), and talk about it with them.

Met when @ UVA

I had the pleasure of taking Randy's first course on "User Interfaces" back in 92 or 93. How many courses have you heard of where the professor begins the first class by assailing the poor UIs of clock radios and VCRs only to immediately smash them Gallag

watch it, learn from it

I was in the 10th row, or so. The talk was given in the biggest auditorium on campus, with overflow locations in other big rooms watching it onscreen. I have to say that this really was one of the most moving, intense moments I've ever experienced. This was compounded by the sense that it was being shared with thousands of other people laughing, thinking, and occasionally crying together. At the close of his talk he received a standing ovation that did not even begin to wane after what seemed like ten minutes, until Randy Bryant (in my opinion somewhat rudely) brought it to an end. For that hour, all of CMU was on the same page. In the days since then I've had conversations with several people who were there, and my sense is that people will remember the talk and Randy Pausch's message for the rest of their lives. I know I will. Especially since he's a nerdy smartass just like me.

this is a lot more relevant than...

I think this is a very pertinent slashdot topic. The fellow in question is a Computer Science prof. If he were a humanities prof, I'd feel less so. Sure, the story is a tear-jerker and contemplating the imminent demise of someone who's a nice guy is a down

He's in the Guinness World Records

He is... under the label biggest dick and largest ego.

His ego is, I swear to God, bigger than that of Steve Jobs, really, no joke. When I was in school at CMU he required an Interview (uppercase I) to get into his class. What kind of professor tells und

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"What kind of professor tells undergrads that they don't deserve to have "an educational experience" in 3d, VR, game technology, etc?"

In my opinion he's right on the mark, I think he wanted to filter out weak students wouldn't survive in industry. Plus if

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Required classes are BS, trust me I should know as I easily met requirements despite not having what it takes (lazy and very intelligent). Just because you KNOW something doesn't mean you have the passion to take up to another level (so to say). For some c

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What kind of professor tells undergrads that they don't deserve to have "an educational experience" in 3d, VR, game technology, etc?

The type who actually wants to provide a good experience to those who do get in. If it's a heavily team based class than a single fuck up can ruin it for half the class.

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There is more to life than passing some test and your intelligence doesn't matter as much as you think it does. In every single field who you know matters a whole lot more than anything else. Getting to know those people and knowing how to use them is a sk

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heh, and while you're at it, JL, you might try a bit of the same egocentric and bizarre mathematics:

Hmm... who has done more for (in decreasing order: the universe, all life, humanity, my family, my country, my region, my town, my neighborhood)? javalizar

best teacher I ever had

I had Randy Pausch for an undergrad CS class at UVA in either 88 or 89.... so that was either his first or second year teaching there. Without a doubt, he was the best teacher I had in all four years. I can only imagine that he got even better after almo

This guy is amazing. Reminds me of. . .

I just watched the video via youtube, and was happily impressed. Randy carries his light and encourages others to do so, and thus makes ripples which go on to affect the world in very positive ways. He reminds me of Joseph Campbell ("Follow your Bliss") and Ray Bradbury ("Live on the edge of your hysteria") in this regard.

Those two gents made a huge impact upon me when I was growing through high school, and all I had access to were a few recordings and videos of them speaking, but the philosophies they broadcast were powerful enough to change me forever.

Teachers of this caliber are golden.

The very best thing you can do for the world is to Live Your Light. --Just doing so and encouraging others to do so changes the world in ways which are not immediately obvious, but it is enough to win the war against the dark side.

-FL

I am in awe of this man

I've only had a chance to read his "cancer update page" but I am in awe. His spirits are amazingly high and he's living life to the fullest as long. I couldn't read it at work as I read the following and nearly lost it (my wife & I have a 9 month old)

A

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The word "more" in your post wasn't necessary.

Re:Great Professor

Ah, yes, who could forget Randy taking out his frustrations with a VCR by smashing it with a sledge hammer on the first day of class? I definitely credit Randy and that class for getting me to prioritize the end users above almost everybody else.

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http://www.mininova.org/tor/900739 [mininova.org]

Try that. I hope it's ok, I didn't have a chance to preview the wmv, no graphics on that machine.

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I may have mangled the .wmv a bit. It's in an avi container but the data is wmv. mplayer should be able to play it.