de minimis ago curat blog

One of the many DVDs I have watched since starting leave was 21 — the film about Kevin Spacey’s team of card-counting brainiacs from MIT who bring down the houses of Vegas at the blackjack tables.  I was lucky enough to be taken to Vegas for my 21st and when I got carded (I always got carded) and they realised it was my actual birthday that very day, people gave me chips.  I promptly lost them to the dealer.

But I’m sure if I had the ability to count cards (or, like, anything numerically higher than 10 fingers), I’m sure I’d have won.  It’s such a shame that I suck at maths and can’t play blackjack and can’t study at MIT.

Or so I thought.  I got sent the awesomest link ever today, and discovered that the Massachusetts Institute of Technology publishes pretty much all of its undergraduate and graduate course materials online, for free, via their OpenCourseWare (OCW) program.

I cannot start to explain how geekishly cool this is.  There are like thousands (guesstimation; I didn’t count, because I’d run out of fingers) of courses available in fields such as architecture, chemistry, politics and nuclear engineering, and you can download readers and lectures that are available (and I repeat: for free) under a Creative Commons license.

Now, they make it very clear that this does not lead to graduation with an MIT degree, but, like, for mega-nerds like myself, the idea of just having this stuff available is tinglifying.

And I am rather tempted to set myself up to study 21W.730-1 Expository Writing: Exploring Social and Ethical Issues through Film and Print and 21W.747-3 Classical Rhetoric and Modern Politics.

I know I totally won’t. But it’s so cool to think I could if I could be bothered ;)