science

Khan Academy – a MUST KNOW!

I’ve heard about KhanAcademy.org a few times since about 2009-2010. But I haven’t really explored it or learned much about it. It was just one of those “good things” on the Internet, which was about education and which was a not-for-profit. And now I can’t believe I’ve been missing out on it. Wikipedia page describes the project in a rather dry language:

The Khan Academy is a not-for-profit educational organization, created in 2006 by Indian American educator Salman Khan, a graduate of MIT. With the stated mission of “providing a high quality education to anyone, anywhere”, the website supplies a free online collection of more than 2,800 micro lectures via video tutorials stored on YouTube teaching mathematics, history, healthcare and medicine, finance, physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, economics, cosmology, organic chemistry, american civics, art history, microeconomics and computer science.

There you go. A cheese slogan, a single guy, a bunch of videos on YouTube – what’s all the big fuss about, right? Wrong! Here is a better way to get introduced to the project – a TED talk by Salman Khan.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gM95HHI4gLk]

Continue reading Khan Academy – a MUST KNOW!

Apple

Looking at this ugly apple, I remembered a joke someone told me recently about the three famous apples in the history of humanity – the one Eve gave to Adam, the one that fell on Isaac Newton, and the one on the logo of the Apple Computers Inc. Actually, I don’t even remember the joke. I just remember the apples.

Thinking about them, they all must have been quite ugly. After all, Eve had to promise to Adam that he will get laid if he bytes the fruit. The other one that fell on the head of a genius must have been ugly by definition. It also made Isaac think a lot. If it was a nice looking apple, he would have just eaten it without much thought. And the last apple sparked the creativity of Steve Jobs. He must have seen an ugly apple and thought of it as a creative challenge. A lot of people can take something ugly and make it better. But how can you take something ugly and make it even uglier? Steve Jobs took a byte of it. Simple, easy, yet genius as well.

The apple I have in front of me is ugly. I’m blogging this for historical reasons. After all there is a small chance that this apple will become the fourth famous apple in the history of the world…

And if that wasn’t enough, I had one more revelation. If you look at this image in a certain way – with your side vision, and you’ll cover the top part of it – then this apple looks a lot like watermelon. So there you go. My ugly apple story ends here.

Stages of sleep

Fake Science is not so fake sometimes. For example, my day today matches with the below stages of sleep almost perfectly.

Fake science is fun

Here is yet another funny blog to add to your RSS reader – Fake Science (RSS feed).

The known universe

I’ve shared and favorite’d this video before, but it’s worth another time. Every time you get depressed or pissed off about something, every time someone gets to you, or you think something horrible happened, just watch this video.

[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=17jymDn0W6U]

That’s the known universe for you. And if you think about how small we are compared to our planet, and how small our planet compared to some other, and how small our galaxy compared to the other ones, and so on and so forth, and then think about your problem again – doesn’t it look tiny and beyond microscopic now?