So life continues to move along here. Spring has arrived and in a span of about two weeks I went from wearing jacket, hat, and gloves on my bike rides to and from work to wearing shorts and a t-shirt. Things change quickly here and soon it will be downright hot and humid. But with the heat and humidity comes the eye-candy in the form of short skirts and sandals. Can't complain about that.
The North Korean rhetoric has decreased a few notches, although they did launch a few missiles into the sea a little over a week ago. I have no idea what that was about, but perhaps they just had some leftover firearms and decided "What the hell? Let's fire these things off." Sorta like a young teenage boy will do when he finds a pack of bottle-rockets in the garage he put there before the 4th of July and then promptly forgot about.
And speaking of North Korea, if you haven't heard the story of about the guy who was born in a prison camp and then escaped from both it and the entire country, you might want to read the book. It's called Escape from Camp 14. It's an easy read and a really interesting story. In fact, it's one of those stories that if Hollywood had written, you wouldn't believe.
In other news, if you haven't heard about MOOCs, you are about to. MOOC stands for Massive Open Online Courses and there are a few different websites that run these things. The one I like is Coursea, which has dozens of classes in different fields. They are free and run similarly to the way a college class runs--lectures, readings, homework, tests. My favorite part, as was the case when I was attending real college, is the lectures. Usually they are broken up into about 10-15 minute segments (the professors break them up by the topic) and you watch and take notes. I take notes in a word document that I reduce to about 1/6 of the screen to so that I can keep one eye on the video lecture while I type.
The two I'm currently taking are "Sports and Society" and "The History of Rock". The former is run by an anthropology professor at Duke and the latter is done by a music professor out of the University of Rochester. Both are really interesting and while they do take some time and effort, neither requires nearly as much work as anything I took while getting the master's degree. Lectures probably take about two hours per week total and the S&S class has some readings to do. And then the homework and quizzes take very little time as they are in the form of true/false and multiple choice questions. The other aspect of the classes and the one that takes the place of classroom discussion is the forums. They are run just like any other online forum where someone starts a topic/thread and others respond. These can turn into quite interesting and fun discussion or not, but it's good to be able to see what other students have to say.
If you are looking for a real college experience, I wouldn't recommend MOOCs, but if you are looking for something to keep the mind active and are interested in the world around you in more than just a click-to-the-next-page sort of way, they are great. I've already signed up for more spanning everything from personal finance to evolution to the music of Beethoven.
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