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Tuesday, November 19, 2013

The Big History Project

So this is a thing you may want to bookmark. It's called the Big History Project. The aim of creators Bill Gates and David Christian is to provide an interdisciplinary course on the history of the world, Big Bang until now.

And you are going to want to make it a bookmark, because this is intended for a high-school curriculum, which means this is like 6-8 hours of stuff, text, videos, slideshows, plus assignments and quizzes. This is not a passive 'watch and learn' thing; you will need to participate. Some of it, obviously, you already know, but skimming the material, there's definitely something you can pick up along the way even if you do. For instance, the Big Bang segment begins with a radio antenna experiment in New Jersey in 1964 you might not be aware of, in which the scientists noticed some hissing from the antenna and thought it was either due to pigeon poop or the pigeons themselves. Poop cleaned. Pigeons killed. Still hissing. They eventually found it to be microwave radiation that, as it turned out, was residual from the Big Bang.

So.... go. Go learn something.

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