

Gates buys Feynman's "Messenger" lectures (to make available to the public) - dantheman
http://www.symmetrymagazine.org/breaking/2009/06/22/gates-buys-feynmans-messenger-lectures/

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Bjoern
Some videos from Feynman which make a great impression on me were these..

"Take the world from another point of view"

1.) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PsgBtOVzHKI>

2.) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xnzB_IHGyjg>

3.) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uNOghidK2TY>

4.) <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mvqwm6RbxcQ>

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akamaka
Fantastic, thanks so much for posting!

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michael_dorfman
Gates is not only a big Feynman fan, he's also a big fan of video lectures.
Here's a quote:

 _"The thing I asked for Christmas last year, those Teach12.com DVDs, the sad
fact is that in their science area I now have all of their lectures. These
things are brilliant. If you weren’t here to hear me enthused about that,
these are not-- they’re kind of pricy, but these are brilliant science
lectures. If you want to learn about-- if you want to understand how
semiconductors work, get the lecture called 'Physics in your Everyday Life'
and watch it. He will explain to you, better than I’ve ever seen explained,
because I’ve always tried to explain to people how semiconductors work. If you
want to know about geology, just get the geology course. If you want to know
biology, you want to know string theory, you want to know anything, they’ve
gone and found the very best lecturers in the world and they’re fantastic.

The problem is I’ve seen them all now. I’m going to go back and re-watch maybe
about half of them, because they’re that fun and interesting.

Some of them-- my daughter is 11, my son is 8 -- some of them, like I got all
their high school ones. Some of those are good enough I’ll get to watch with
my kids and go through and see if they’re ready for them. So, I might have to
think of something new. I’ve told them they should go get more lectures. There
are some areas that they don’t cover very well. They don’t cover chemistry as
well as they should. There’s actually nothing that’s really good on chemistry
out there."_

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sp332
It's true, the audio and video lectures from The Teaching Company are
consistently (95%) excellent, no matter the subject.

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ZeroGravitas
It's sad that the BBC had sufficient rights that they could sell the tapes
outright but didn't feel any compulsion to simply make the films available
themselves. How many other such gems are rotting in thier archives?

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dkarl
It's also strange that Gates had to buy the tapes at all. I would have assumed
that the BBC had an ongoing digitization program to make material languishing
in their archives freely available, and that anyone who wanted to speed a
particular video through the process could simply donate the costs plus a
little extra. That would have been a lot simpler for Bill Gates than buying
the rights and handling everything himself, so I guess there is no such
program.

Or, on the other hand, maybe there was no practical reason for buying the
rights. Maybe Bill Gates bought the rights as an IP art collector, like
someone who buys a Picasso just for the pride of owning it.

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chaosmachine
You just reminded me of some other great Feynman videos I had bookmarked:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=677323>

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kragen
Now, Microsoft has been spending money to open-source books for a while; they
funded a lot of the Internet Archive's book-scanning program. This is the
first I've heard of Gates doing it. I wonder if he really will?

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WalterGR
> I wonder if he really will?

Really will what?

"Bill Gates recently _bought_ the rights to a series of lectures by legendary
Caltech physicist Richard Feynman."

Do you mean spend money to open source books?

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Confusion
So far it has only been shown that he spent the money. Personally, there is
not a doubt on my mind that he will open source the books and I really don't
understand why kragen doubt's it, but logically, he is right that Gates might
still decide not to 'open source' (a strange term for books?) them.

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kragen
Philosophically he doesn't seem to be down with the free-culture ideals. So it
wouldn't surprise me if he made them "available" to the public — but only,
say, that segment of the public that was running Windows 7, with technical and
contractual prohibitions on copying or excerpting.

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DannoHung
From what I understand of Mr Gates, when it comes to his business he's as mean
a motherfucker as you can get in a room with.

When it comes to everything else, he's a decent fellow.

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dimitar
Would they be available under a CC-licence? ;)

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zacharypinter
Will you need Windows 7 to view them?

