#the great courses

[weepingveil]

me 🤝🏻 the great courses lectures

[cheshirelibrary]

Do love learning? Do you dream of taking college classes, but the cost and the time is too much? Are you taking a high school or college class and struggling to understand the material?  Did you cut your cable, and can’t find anything decent to watch anymore?

Fear not! The Great Courses are here!

Cheshire Public Library has always had a handful of these delightful media, but through a generous donation, we’ve been able to greatly expand our holdings to more than 70 titles.

What are the Great Courses?  Professional college-level lectures on audiobook or DVD on a variety of topics, given by actual college professors and experts (like Neil DeGrasse Tyson!), that will give you the equivalent of an entire college class in the comfort of your car or living room. Some come with study guides and questions to think about, but you will never have a test or a grade at the end!

...

Read more on The Cheshire Library Blog.

[mychaotic-academia]

Over here treating Audible’s The Great Courses lectures series like actual college lectures by taking notes to make a powerpoint to educate my wife

[chin-chillax]

This hits on the profound melancholy I felt when I was at a beautiful museum looking at wonderful artifacts and realized I was just looking at dead rich people’s things.

For those interested in this topic The Great Courses’ The Other Side of History is extremely good.

every so often im struck by the memory of one of my college professors getting very angry with our class (art history of pompeii 250) because when she excitedly detailed the ingenious roman invention of heated floors in bathhouses via hearths in small crawlspaces, we asked who was tending the fires. she said "oh, slaves i suppose. but that isnt the point". and we said that it actually very much was the point. she had just told us that in roman society there were dozens of people, maybe hundreds, who spent every day of their enslaved lives crawling in cramped, hot, smoky tunnels to light fires to warm pools of water (which they were not allowed to swim in). how could that not be the point?

she wanted us to focus on the art, on the innovation of heated plumbing, on the tiles and decorations of the bathhouses, and all we wanted to do was learn more about the people under the floors. and she didn't know anything more about that. in fact, she said she thought we were focusing too much on superfluous details.

it feels almost hokey to put too fine a point on the idea im getting at here but i will anyway: There are a lot of people who are still under the floors. all these beautiful, convenient, brilliant innovations of modern society (think fast fashion, chatgpt, uber, doordash) are still powered by people working in inhumane, untenable conditions.

the people who run these systems want you to focus on the good - who doesnt love warm water? - but if anything is going to improve or change in our lifetimes, you need to examine these things with an attentive, critical, and empathetic eye. and for fucks sake stop ordering from amazon

[weedandtgc]

Redefining Reality: The Intellectual Implications of Modern Science (Professor Steven Gimbel)

What a joy this series was!

The professor tells the history of human understanding like a narrative story, and it's one that's worth listening to.

The basic thesis is fairly simple—that we've gone from thinking of things as "things" to thinking of things as "systems"—and in the process of explaining that point, he gives a brief history of the sciences, starting with physics. But he doesn't just say "people believed x until someone discovered y," he explains what x and y mean and why people believed them.

This lecture series got me interested in physics and in the history of science, which have been two great love affairs in my life.

10/10

[blueskittlesart]

Dear Big Brother

kind of a sequel to this comic

[parisoonic]

You’ll get what you're given.

[hotcinnamonsunset]

proof that you CAN use math in every day life😌✌🏼

[bigfatbreak]

Birds of a Feather previous / next

[zebratimw]

"All those empty rooms

We could have been anywhere, anywhere else

Instead, I made a bed with apathy

My heart knew the weight

Ten years worth of dust and neglect

We made our peace with weariness and let it be..."

(Song: The Moon will Sing by the Crane Wives)

[gale-force-storm]

Thinking about the fact that, to pull Gale from the stone and get him in the game at all, you have to decide to try to touch an extremely dangerous looking swirling mass of unstable magic. Something that is, objectively, a terrible idea

Like, the options it gives you are to either touch the sigil or leave, and if you leave you just... don't get Gale in the party

You have to take the risk. You have to let your curiosity override your common sense. You have to look at this unstable, possibly dangerous malfunctioning magic sigil and go "...Ok, but what if I poke it?"

In short, to get Gale in your party, you have to do exactly what he would in that situation, and indulge in a moment of reckless curiosity. And I just think that's delightful

[ratbastarddotfuck]

if you're a white person taking pleasure in the idea that Trump voters of colour are experiencing racist violence from white trumpers because "they got what's coming to them" I don't think you're anti-racist at all, I think you were just waiting for an acceptable target, and you're also fucking weird.

Bad Person Deserves Punishment For Their Sins give me a fucking break and get yourself out of the fucking catholic church. you're all prison abolitionists until you see someone you don't like.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

This wine tastes like pigs blood!

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[pearlore]

david attenborough voice. The L D Shadowlady

[patolemus]

It’s very humbling when you’re reading a book —part of a trilogy, very acclaimed— and the only thing you can think of is ‘the fanfic I read the other day was better’

[egophiliac]

like mother, like son, but less wholesome this time?

(I couldn't decide whether or not to put them together, so have them in all the different ways!)