Amen.

The moment I truly understood this, I started working seriously on an applied math and mechanics education resource that tries to use interesting applications to motivate abstract theory.

If anyone is interested in helping out, I'd be delighted to hear from you.

Udacity has now expanded its courses to include a new introductory physics class. In this class, you get to travel around Europe virtually and learn the basics of physics on location by answering some of the discipline's major questions from over the last 2000 years.

It looks like a lot of fun, and do also check out the MIT Tech TV videos mentioned on the page I've linked above. They are a fun way to learn physics too.

This sort of requires that people have to work for a living. Performing on stage every time you want to earn a buck sounds like a lot of work. What happened to the good old days where you somehow belted out a catchy jingle, had a record company latch on and promote it everywhere, and watch the millions roll in for life? That's the sort of world in which I want to live. ;)

I personally feel that user-discoverable URLs are the biggest usability strengths of Apple's web site over Microsoft's. Say you want to learn about Safari. You go to apple.com/safari, as you'd expect. What if you wanted to learn about Internet Explorer? You need to go to microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/default.aspx. Who could have guessed that without a search engine? What about the page for, say, information on a Macbook Pro vs. Microsoft Office? One of these is easily guessable from a consistent URL scheme, the other is not. Easily being able to find content is just as important as good, clear content.

Huh?

While it's easy to pile on with the melodrama, the last stable release, Etch, was in the middle of '07. A year and a half is an entirely reasonable amount of time to wait for an operating system release.

I, for one, congratulate them on and thank them for their timely release!

... as Apple's new laptop without a keyboard! :)