Berkeley Science Lectures Now on YouTube
Author: admin
Remember the famous bar scene from Good Will Hunting where a Harvard grad school snob tries to embarrass Will’s best friend, who was posing as a student to pick up a girl?
CLARK: There’s no problem. I was just hoping you could give me some insight into the evolution of the market economy in the early colonies. My contention is that prior to the Revolutionary War the economic modalities especially of the southern colonies could most aptly be characterized as agrarian pre- capitalist and…
Will, who at this point has migrated to Chuckie’s side and is completely fed-up, includes himself in the conversation.
WILL: Of course that’s your contention. You’re a first year grad student. You just finished some Marxian historian, Pete Garrison prob’ly, and so naturally that’s what you believe until next month when you get to James Lemon and get convinced that Virginia and Pennsylvania were strongly entrepreneurial and capitalist back in 1740. That’ll last until sometime in your second year, then you’ll be in here regurgitating Gordon Wood about the Pre-revolutionary utopia and the capital-forming effects of military mobilization.
CLARK: (taken aback) Well, as a matter of fact, I won’t, because Wood drastically underestimates the impact of–
WILL: –”Wood drastically underestimates the impact of social distinctions predicated upon wealth, especially inherited wealth…” You got that from “Work in Essex County,” Page 421, right? Do you have any thoughts of your own on the subject or were you just gonna plagiarize the whole book for me?
Clark is stunned.
WILL: (cont’d) Look, don’t try to pass yourself off as some kind of an intellect at the expense of my friend just to impress these girls.
Clark is lost now, searching for a graceful exit, any exit.
WILL: (cont’d) The sad thing is, in about 50 years you might start doin’ some thinkin’ on your own and by then you’ll realize there are only two certainties in life.
CLARK: Yeah? What’re those?
WILL: One, don’t do that. Two– you dropped a hundred and fifty grand on an education you coulda’ picked up for a dollar fifty in late charges at the Public Library.
Well, you don’t even need to worry about that $1.50 in late charges. The University of California at Berkeley has its own YouTube channel, with over 300 hours of video already available. Currently dominating the content are biology and physics (above clip is the first lecture of “Physics for Future Presidents.)
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