Wondrium

Wondrium.com is the rebranded The Great Courses ™ streaming website, with added content. For those of you tired of dumbed-down or of shallow coverage, or who have exhausted PBS.org, here’s one solution.

I used to say popular science books were out of date if they were 10 years old, 5 years for biology. I later thought I’d change that for 5 years for most sciences, 2 years for biology/evolution, but I suspect the line for Bio now is closer to 2 months, and the other maybe 2 years. Even history, which one would think would hold still, is not immune to rapid change. Anyway.

Wondrium recs, recent or classic:

Synthetic Biology Just dropped this month. Brain-bending. My predictions in biology, genetics, and medicine in my science fiction from the 80s and 90s were WAY too conservative (although, in my defense, I did have to make then-current audiences swallow them.) Printing genes, not in the future, but right now. Chloroplasts using quantum effects, really? DNA computing. And on and on.

And if you need the basics of quantum, a course of great clarity is Understanding the Quantum World. Changed the way I look at chemistry, among other things.

Understanding Greek and Roman Technology All the courses by this presenter, Stephen Ressler, are great value. I have in general found that sorting through for “other courses by” to be very useful for finding good stuff.

Board Games of the Ancient World Recent and just plain fun, as it should be.

Fall and Rise of China was very well-presented, superior lecture style, but stops at 2009. Also harrowing, as it mostly covers the 20th Century.

Other especially good presenters on the history side are Kenneth Harl, Mark J. Ravina (excellent on Japan), and Steven L. Tuck.

Wondrium warehouses a range of courses going back decades. The viewer can track the evolution from the sets, from early courses that had a lecturer stuck behind a podium to geek out, old square-screen format, still trying to be to college intro courses and mostly aimed at audio presentations, through increasing sophistication and better use of visuals, to more recent use of illuminating animations.

But really, just go to the website and click on “Browse”.

Commenters, what are your faves and why? (From other nonfiction television/streaming sites, too – I’ve been pretty buried by this one, but I’m dimly aware there are others.)

Ta, L.

Later: another recent rec, tho' not a recent course, for my fellow word fans out there: The Secret Life of Words: English Words and Their Origins