Anyone like doing free online courses for fun?

[SteveGrabowski]

I never had time to take all the physics courses I wanted in college, so MIT OCW and edx are freaking awesome for it. I have been studying the intro quantum mechanics course from OCW, and the professor is great. This course was the first time I had ever heard a somewhat reasonable rebuttal to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics; e.g., quantum decoherence, which seems must more reasonable than the many worlds interpretation, which is the other interpretation of quantum physics I had heard before studying this course. Of course intuition is dangerous in QM though.

Anyways, a fun course with lots of interesting problems on the homework assignments too. Can't wait to take part 2 next year from edx.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAvNxMZuBBY

 

[Ruptga]

I'm not nearly awake enough to look at that course material, but I already read that kind of thing for fun, so why not?

 

[William Gaatjes]

I wish i had the time and only had to work for 3 or 4 days with the same salary as i have now for 5 days of work.
Without enough rest first, my brain refuses to take up that much knowledge in detail. The imagining of what is going on to be able to understand it draws so much energy that i do not have energy for other things.
I find physics and all very interesting but i had to give it up.
When i look up my old posts here at AT-HT, i can hardly imagine that that was me. No wonder i got so tired and stayed tired after a while. And still being tired all the time.
I also want to continue advanced C programming but after work i am too tired.

 

[alkemyst]

I am completing the final week in Coursera's Python training class tonight.

 

[KillerBee]

I am completing the final week in Coursera's Python training class tonight.

I took this one last year - it was pretty fun
learned basic python and made your own Asteroids game :thumbsup:
https://www.coursera.org/course/interactivepython


Hopefully my plan to Master Quantum Mechanics in just a few short weeks of online training will work just as well 🙂

 

[KillerBee]

I never had time to take all the physics courses I wanted in college, so MIT OCW and edx are freaking awesome for it. I have been studying the intro quantum mechanics course from OCW, and the professor is great. This course was the first time I had ever heard a somewhat reasonable rebuttal to the Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics; e.g., quantum decoherence, which seems must more reasonable than the many worlds interpretation, which is the other interpretation of quantum physics I had heard before studying this course. Of course intuition is dangerous in QM though.

Anyways, a fun course with lots of interesting problems on the homework assignments too. Can't wait to take part 2 next year from edx.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EAvNxMZuBBY

Just wondering how much prior Math and Physics training have you been through before taking the intro course?

 

[John Connor]

Have been watching the computer science classes at Harvard. http://www.extension.harvard.edu/open-learning-initiative/intensive-introduction-computer-science

Didn't care for the professor's intro and seemly interjecting progressive crap with John Stewart and Ted Stevens saying the Internet was a series of pipes. Who gives a fat fuck! He's an old ass politician! Damn Liberal institutions. **shakes fist**

 

[SteveGrabowski]

Just wondering how much prior Math and Physics training have you been through before taking the intro course?

It helps to know some E&M and classical wave theory, as well as some linear algebra.

 

[Albatross]

That Intro to Linux on Edx.

 

[SteveGrabowski]

I am completing the final week in Coursera's Python training class tonight.

Have you taken Sedgewick's two course algorithms sequence? That's the most fun CS MOOC I have taken. The assignments are great. One of them you implement a program to do seam carving for image resizing, and another you implement Burrows-Wheeler for file compression, like in bzip2. When I took it there was a really competitive (in a fun way) atmosphere where people would try to fine-tune their implementations for the best runtimes and lowest memory usage. It was always fun taking the crown for the best performing implementation, but then 5 hours later there would be 2 or 3 people who did a better job, then 5 hours later someone else would beat them, and so on.

Seam carving has to be one of the coolest algorithms I have ever seen, and with the program you write for it you can make really good looking resizings of images while keeping all the most important parts without any stretching, squishing, pixellation, etc. It just cuts out the parts of the image that aren't that important.

 

[alkemyst]

I took this one last year - it was pretty fun
learned basic python and made your own Asteroids game :thumbsup:
https://www.coursera.org/course/interactivepython


Hopefully my plan to Master Quantum Mechanics in just a few short weeks of online training will work just as well 🙂

Same class that I finished last night.

It was pretty fun.

 

[alkemyst]

Have you taken Sedgewick's two course algorithms sequence? That's the most fun CS MOOC I have taken. The assignments are great. One of them you implement a program to do seam carving for image resizing, and another you implement Burrows-Wheeler for file compression, like in bzip2. When I took it there was a really competitive (in a fun way) atmosphere where people would try to fine-tune their implementations for the best runtimes and lowest memory usage. It was always fun taking the crown for the best performing implementation, but then 5 hours later there would be 2 or 3 people who did a better job, then 5 hours later someone else would beat them, and so on.

Seam carving has to be one of the coolest algorithms I have ever seen, and with the program you write for it you can make really good looking resizings of images while keeping all the most important parts without any stretching, squishing, pixellation, etc. It just cuts out the parts of the image that aren't that important.

I will look into it.