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It's shopping week at Harvard. Study cards aren't due until next week, so students have a week free to test-drive classes, skip class entirely, or just mess around.

Wednesday, I was just messing around. Finding myself with no afternoon classes to shop, I instead dropped into the first lecture of Computer Science 50.

CS50 is...well, it's difficult to explain. Any year now, it's going to pass Economics 10 as the largest class at Harvard. It's almost singlehandedly responsible for a tripling in the size of the CS department in the last five years. It's what happens when you give one of the best lecturers in the world a multi-million dollar operating budget and the mission to teach a class, not just for Harvard students, but for anyone in the world who wants to learn. CS50 is an experience. CS50 is what the future of what internet-age education will (or at least should) look like.

The course comes with its own dance-beat-fueled teaser-trailer:

and all of last year's lectures are online for free, if that's a thing you think is cool.

Speaking of legendary lecturers and things online for free, I hadn't realized that The Feynman Lectures on Physics were offered free-to-read online. Speaking as someone who once studied the subject, but gave up when I found more interesting things to do, I still think that figuring out how everything works is really, jaw-droppingly cool, and Dick Feynman is, by all accounts, a wonderful teacher.

Certainly, from what of his I've read, I've found he