I’ve blagged before about physics videos available on the Web. I just heard about SciTalks, a site for gathering and organizing links to videos on scientific and technical topics. This was something I recall Eric and I wishing for just a few weeks ago, so I’m glad to see somebody trying to make it happen! Hopefully, people will pick up this idea and run with it, so that science-themed videos will actually be easy to find. It’ll be, like, totally sweet: with freely available “multimedia” resources, we’ll finally live up to the hopes we had in, I dunno, 1995 or thereabouts.

Jonathan Shock provides a list of websites to mine for entries into the SciTalks database, of which Serkan Cabi’s massive list looks like a particularly good starting point.

In other news, Terence Tao writes about “ultrafilters, nonstandard analysis, and epsilon management,” making me feel that I was not the only one to gripe and grouse during the epsilon-delta part of undergraduate analysis. Tao also mentions the idea of a “highly rational number,” that is, a rational number p / q where p and q are both limited in magnitude (for some slightly technical definition of “limited”). This nomenclature opens all sorts of possibilities: for example, I’m curious if one could restrict the whole numbers to a new group, the “wholesome numbers,” which have large family values.

I wouldn’t bring up the topic in this context if I didn’t have a video to show. Ladies and gentlemen, Tom Lehrer: