Comments by "" (@TheDavidlloydjones) on "MIT OpenCourseWare" channel.

This is amazing: this is the only guy on the entire Internet who says "let's get started" at the start. Most people don't say it until about ten minutes in.
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This is superb. Where are Lessons 1~5?
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I've looked through the replies, Richard. "All these haters" seem to exist only in your imagination. His being a "legit mathematician" quite clearly does not depend upon what you think; that would seem to be a somewhat shaky foundation, wouldn't it?
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Higher education over the Internet is the killer app of the 21st century. It therefore seems sorta dumb to be cluttering it up with all that stuff at the beginning about classrooms. Or is this yer avvidge normal corroborative detail intended to give some similitude of veracity to an otherwise bald and uninteresting narrative? (Tip o' the 'at...) -dlj.
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Pred, I worked at the MIT AI Lab in 1970~71 -- and AI was already about 40 years old by then. "Started AI in 1975" would only mean the time somebody started their own career in it.
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Why is MIT still using the Internet to broadcast people talking, rather than to illustrate ideas being taught? People talking is only useful where the person talking can also listen and adapt to what their audience is thinking about what they have said. In all other cases, broadcasting an old lecture is useless as a teaching modality. It may be of historical interest: we want to watch Hitler speaking not to understand what he is saying but to understand his speeches and their reception as a historically important phenomenon. It is of no historical interest that some guy spoke in a classroom at MIT. This has happened hundreds of thousands of times. There are teachers at MIT who have lot s of important knowledge and the occasional useful or interesting idea. OK. What are those things they know? Put them on the screen. There's a fast way of doing this. It's called print. You want us to hear the guy's voice? OK, let him tell us the ideas. But "Welcome back to class" is not a useful thing to teach. It is a waste of our time. There is no reason to put it on the Internet.
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I agree with both sides in this argument. The blackboard certainly seems like a ver-ree olde kludge, but the process of the guy walking through the development of any line of thought -- slowed to the speed at which he can write it -- is pretty good. Anything projected is going to be prepared beforehand, and some "slide" or screenshot that the guy spends hours on would or could flash by in an instant. All sense of development of the thought would be lost. Yes, there's got to be a better way. I have no idea what it might be.
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For people concerned about the lecture notes not matching up, there's a PDF Table of Correspondences on the MIT OCW page for this course. -dlj.
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I agree that he's a fine speaker -- and one of the things he has going for him is he, or perhaps his technician, has bothered to get the sound very close to right. This is unusual: a lot of educational tech folks still seem to think we're in their debt for their existing at all, and thinking they should actually do their jobs competently is far far more than we're entitled to. So well done, fella.
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shmaths2499 "And in finite case sum is either 0 or 1,and infinite case it's also 0 or 1." This is not sound. Infinity is not odd or even. To determine whether a number is odd or even we divide by two and look at the remainder. Infinity divided by two is infinity and doesn't have a remainder, perhaps because infinity is not a number, aka NaN. QED. Infinity? "It neither exists in nature nor provides a legitimate basis for rational thought …” David Hilbert.
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This guy is really first-rate, but I've got a slightly different question. What I want to know is, What does it cost us that we don't have an intellectual bridge over the very tiny but ver-ree deep chasm between the areas of industry where the quantum view is useful and the rest of real life where we live in billiard ball physics at voltages between about one and the latest in high-tension transmission lines?* As theories go, the Standard Model is pretty good. It gives us replicable numbers out to twenty significant digits or so, and it lets us mix the chemicals and what-not in ways that make an advanced industrial economy tick over nicely, thank you very much. So it has some problems? Like e.g. a total 100% inability to explain Bell's Inequality and a 99.44% likelihood of drifting off into mindless blither when anybody tries? So what? That's my question. Where is it costing us spondulix that we can't explain the two-slit-experiment? Where there's money on the line is where we'll find the intellectual band-aids to get us through the next generation of our view of physical reality. ________________ * There is a good fix for this supposed chasm, using the explanation that quantum reality is everywhere, it's everywhere, all the way up. I.I.Rabi famously calculated the likelihood of a normal masonry brick levitating a foot (a measure of length used in the United States, Liberia and Saudi Arabia) in the air in any given second. For an encore, he did the Heisenberg uncertainties relevant to trying to drive a ten-foot truck through a nine-foot gap. Both calculations come up with numbers like once in ten to the Q times the age of the universe, with Q being, uh, rather large numbers. The excellent Jim El-Khalili, who is well overdue to become Sir James, has some good lectures, e.g. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wwgQVZju1ZM&ab_channel=TheRoyalInstitution, on a parallel theme, that we see quantum effects at human scales in biology. (Google him: I think he might be in the running to be the Carl Sagan of the present generation of public science.) Neither of these life-rafts of sanity, however, comes with an answer to the intellectual challenge of Bell and those pesky interference patterns.
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The guy is good. It's a pity MIT doesn't use the wonders of audio-video technology and te possibilities of animated illustration available to him -- so he could spend out time taching us rather than watching him write on the nice quaint fifteenth-century blackboard.
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"What the mind's eye tells the mind's brain" is a tip o'the hat to Jerry Letvin's earlier "What The Frog's Eye Tells the Frog's Brain," which made the point that a good deal of the information processing is done outside the brain. The big take-away: a frog will starve to death in the presence of a feast of dead flies: its brain can't see them because they don't fly. -dlj.
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At the beginning he refers to better notes "in the cellar" it sounds like. Does anybody know what an where this is? I've got the OCW course materials, but he seemed to me to say there was something better on the net someplace... Thanks, -dlj.
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For those of us who download all the videos together, it would have been helpful if you started each label off "MIT 18.01 #1... 2, 3, 2rc...." so that they would sort themselves into order automagically. I find it very difficult to imagine what must have been going through the mind of the person who devised the labels without taking this obvious need into account. Lunch perhaps? Last night's booze? I see OCW is celebrating its 10th or 20th anniversary right about now. What in the hell have you people been doing for a generation now that you haven't got this stuff under control? This is not a mistake on OCW's part: it is a really, really contemptible failure of thought, execution, and responsibility.
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"Identify value and monetize it" about 14:45 is this guy's equivalent to the Red Baron's suggestion "Find the enemy and shoot them down." He's telling us what to do -- which is certainly the first few hundred steps toward winning; it still leaves a little bit to learn, i.e. how to do it. 👍😎 That's laughter, but neither wry not mocking: it is genuinely funny that most people are floundering because they don't know what they're doing, not because they don't know how to do it. For the record, note that the Red Baron eventually crashed and burned, probably, though this is not certain, shot by a rifleman on the ground.
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No fair: the guy wrote the question on the blackboard before the video started. This means he has a tendency to do ten minutes' work in just ten minutes, rather than the usual 43:17. You're supposed to write on the board while we watch you do it on the Intenet. Doing it beforehand is cheating. No fair. Also he forgot the Standard Behavior for YouTube instructors, blathering on for ten minutes and then saying "Now let's get started." What's the matter with this guy? Tell him to get with the program, OK? -dlj.
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Kayla, No amount of pausing the video will bring this guy back into compliance with the First Law of YouTube Pedagogy: 75% of all videos must show the back of the instructor's head. Even worse, this guy even talks about the content of the course. What happened to the library hours? Exams schedule? Department secretary's birthday? Sheesh!
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I shure am glad the Internet exists so I can watch the back of a guy's head as he writes on a chalk board with chalk. And audio, too, so I can hear the tap-tap-tap of the chalk on the board! Thank you, MIT. Thank you, thank you, thank you: It's wonderful that you are putting technology to work for us all.
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Nick, Dodeca and TwentyNine have it right and you're beating a really tired old drum. "X will be all gone in ten years" is pretty much in the same league with that olde "Everything has been invented, they might as well close down the patent office" that somebody may or may not have said back in the 1980's. 'Course it's news to me that programmer is now or ever was a profession. It's a widespread job and sometimes an art. It would be much more plausible, seems to me, to say "If machine intelligence keeps advancing as fast as it has in the last sixty years, programming will probably be reduced to a profession in another generation."
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OMG, we were young! (I was at the Lab for six months in 1971 and 1972, mainly hand-holding the politics of ARPA's disguise as DARPA, to comply with the Mansfield Amendment, but also having a lot of fun hacking, playing weird variations of chess and whatnot.) The closest thing I ever knew of as an "operating system" was DDT, Dynamic Debugging Technique, which is no doubt hiding in a closet somewhere deep within EMACS today. I learned LISP from a book, and by chatting with McCarthy at 55 Baud on teletype. A disk-pack the size of a birthday-cake was 180K and the first program I ever wrote was "PING," the text of which was "PONG." "PONG," of course went "PING," and when the screen gave me four of each I had answered my own curiosity: How deep is the stack on this thing? Cheers, to everybody: I'd love to hear from anybody way back then. -dlj. david DOT lloydjones AT gmail DOT com No hyphen in "lloydjones" for my address: I signed on to Google while they were all still at Stanford and their system didn't have a hyphen in it yet.🤣😂
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Free planet-wide higher education is the killer app of the Internet for the whole 21st century -- yet you fools are using the time of hundreds of your viewers to show that you can't take the trouble to edit out all the irrelevant classroom organization nonsense at the beginning. Which rather limits your appeal to the millions out there around the planet, doncha think? -dlj.
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C'mon, F=ma is a definition of terms, so no, you don't derive it, but you don't observe it either.
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Thanks: you're confirming my point that F=ma is a mere notion, a structure of thought, and not a Fact of the Universe. As you point out, it's a useful notion -- but only at fairly slow speeds. Cheers, -dlj.
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Naw，he was planning on it being watched on the network in hundreds of years in 1970, not 1986, at the latest.
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Ken Ya Ken, I was pretty impressed all around. I don't think it's so much tedious as tough, and this guy gives me some faith that I might be able to get through it this time. I thought that not fucking around with the "let's get started" being a meaningless formula, but actually meaning it, like he's getting started, ws a good sign, and he actually carries through pretty well, I thought. Your mileage may vary: my theory is that differential equations are ike languages. I wish I'd learned them a whole lot earlier. It's so much easier before about your seventh birthday! :-) -dlj.
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Ken Ya Ken, (Later) Looking around I see there a set of YouTubes for this same course, 18.03, in 2011, and another one that may be interesting, I don't know yet, 18.09, "Eigenvectors and Eigenvalues" in 2011. This last one is slugged as Linear Algebra in some places but on the first page of the course it talks a bit about differential equations. Anyway, over the long haul I need all of Linear, all of Eigen, and all of Differential, But you might want to check out the availables. Let me know what you think. -dlj.
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sebastianzx6r Sebastian, I imagine it's mostly nervousness. They're partly impressed by what a wonderful thing it is to be "on TV" and nervous about being exposed to people they can't tell to shut up or glare at. This guy just knows his stuff, and goes ahead and teaches it. Cheers, -dlj.
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Good work, Andrew. 谢谢！
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+Adarsh Pandey Isn't there a famous mini-theorem by Minsky and Papert to the effect that if you actually pull on any two ends you certainly break the long ones before you identify the longest? -dlj.
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That university and the teacher's salary are paid for out of our taxes. Hold your rather kissy-kissy emotions in check, maybe, anonymous "David."
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This is extremely non-standard: the video starts with Professor Strang having already written his material on the blackboard. We do not get to see the back of his head bobbing up and down as he spends half the video's time writing laboriously on the board. Who permitted this?
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Mayukh, Well said and good luck. My two step-sons just graduated from medical school in England and Scotland. They got there thanks to exactly what you're doing, studying on lap-tops in refugee camps in Kenya. In the absence of competently made educational software, pointing a camera at a teacher is better than nothing -- and sometimes you get really competent teachers like this guy. You're right that we should be grateful, and I am. On the other hand, we should not pretend that this is anything but the stone age of the Internet. MIT should be ashamed of themselves for not doing better than this: ARPAnet and its descendant the Internet has been live now since the middle of 1971. Military and commercial internets were around a bit before that. Isn't fifty years long enough for people to find a successor to this imitation of the lecturer in the Greek amipetheatre?
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Shayar-e-Barbaad, Quite. I usually do. This guy, on the other hand is really excellent, despite the crudeness of the technology he's condemned to use. We don't condemn Euclid for using sand in the market-place. We just wish he might have had a slate or chalk and a blackboard.
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Steve L, Are you trying to insult me, the autistic, or both? Pretty stupid post whichever it, don't you think, Steve?
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Herbie, Exactly. Um, modulo the fact that "personalised" doesn't have a hell of a lot of relevance to the Internet, does it? What do you have in mind? Webinars are an attempt at the idea, but I can't see that they work very well, and from what (little) I know of the science I don't think they eve can be relevant to groups larger than Miller's famous five-plus-or-minus-two.
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@martinzitter4551 That's a half-truth, Sillyperson. "How are you?" is a greeting, not a question, so "said" is perfectly reasonable. "How 'bout them Dodgers?" would be a perfectly reasonable reply, but it's not an answer to the question, nor is it a question itself.
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One of the first big pieces of "video" was radio-telescopy. (1962 to 1972, my time). A great deal of the information in this is apparently picked up interferometrically, with pairs of observing stations today being located in Earth orbit and out by Neptune or, if its not politically incorrect, maybe Pluto. In those days they had to settle for California and New Zealand, and a bunch of flyboys kindly schlepped the two-inch Ampex video-tape around for us -- by Phantom jet or some damn thing -- to get their credit hours in the cockpit. ARPAnet probably paid for itself in the avgas, the fuel for all those students' planes, it saved the taxpayers when they put this odd variety of SneakerNet out of business. Or at least they had to put their flying credits on somebody else's job sheet... SneakerNet was when the 180K seven-inch floppy had replaced the ten-incher, and people covered the gaps between, say, Universities of Michigan and Utah (Mormons were pioneering whole swaths of stuff like computer graphics) by carrying physical floppies from Point A to Point B. The Ampex video-tape jape was the Airforce Academy's kind of SneakerNet.
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Nobody at MIT OCW had the brains to name Lecture 6 correctly, so the hundreds of people who download the whole series to work through it will have to do it themselves. This is your optimization demo: it's not about mathematics, it's about stupidity made manifest in organizations.
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C'mon, fella, Matt only expected-paid 2/3rds of her meal. She owes them both.
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Gogargoat, You're right, of course. This stuff only applies to bourgeouis pens. For your pen, consult your Commissar of Pen Ownership. -dlj.
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Love to know where -- but I don't think front running needs an algorithm: what it needs is information about what your customer is about to do, e.g. by having their order on the screen in front of you. Similarly for Savvysymbiont, below, who dosn't come off too savvy. The disaster of 2008 was a matter of theft, lying, and lousy laws and regulations. The principles of finance were not an issue, any more than the law of gravity and its effects on Wall Street's elevators was. -dlj. -dlj.
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Ryan, You learn the stuff, the paper on your wall ain't all that relevant. But if you really, really want a diploma, you can buy one and fill in the blanks at Dollarama. -dlj.
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An update: this excellent course now available on EdX at https://www.edx.org/course/introduction-computational-thinking-data-mitx-6-00-2x-6 You can audit it free, or get it marked and get a diploma for something extremely low, USD$49 now, and likely to be under $149 if you're reading this in a couple of years. The EdX, Udemy, etc. effort is still pretty crude -- but it's a step up from just watching the videos. (The videos are available alongside, so it's sorta YouTube Greek Amphitheatre Plus Plus, or MIT OCW struggles into the 1980's. Gettin' there...)
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e is two-point-seven-Jackson-Jackson...
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