A tweet on Twitter can only be 140 characters, including spaces. So you have to be brief. My tweet the other day about Great Courses crammed two endorsements and mention of two apps:
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Mark Muesse's "Practicing Mindfulness" (the most accessible and complete survey of the ideas I have found)
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Neil deGrasse Tyson's "The Inexplicable Universe"
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The Great Courses app for iPad( 3 stars) and its partner in Android (about 1.8 stars)
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The iPad app makes video courses immediately ready as opposed to the need to get a container, extract the right disc, turn on the DVD player, insert the disc properly and play it.
Tyson is an astrophysicist and a very good presenter and speaker. His course "My Favorite Universe" is a good one but "The Inexplicable Universe" is a stunner. Only 6 half hour lectures but by the end, you will be a changed person. The only point of the course is to explain the mysteries that are still not understood by scientists in the fields of astronomy, biology, cosmology and physics. With Tyson, your mind can be twisted into knots in a short, enjoyable time instead of several years of being a grind in grad school.
What I remember most from the course is his final lecture, where for the first time, I felt a small glimmer of understanding of the notion of multiple universes. But don't make me take a test just yet.
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Bill
Main blog: Fear, Fun and Filoz
Main web site: Kirbyvariety
