Mike Berrow

Retired, British, Doomer, Barefoot hiking club founder. Naturist, Wild swimmer. Currently reading Physics, Cosmology, Geopolitics, Philosophy and much more.

[Massimo @Rainmaker1973]

Gilbert Strang, an MIT professor, taught the same linear algebra course for 62 years. When he delivered his final lecture in May 2023, students from around the world tuned in online to watch.

The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra. Millions of machine learning engineers, data scientists, quants, and self-taught programmers learned the essential math behind AI from his clear, free video lectures, even though most never stepped foot on the MIT campus.

Strang joined the MIT faculty in 1962 and retired in 2023. When MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2001–2002, he was one of the first to embrace it fully. While many professors hesitated, Strang saw it as an opportunity to share mathematics with everyone. He filmed his lectures and made them freely available.

He completely changed how linear algebra is taught. Instead of starting with abstract vector spaces and proofs, Strang began with something simple and visual: matrix multiplication. He built intuition first using concrete examples, then introduced more advanced ideas like eigenvectors and singular value decomposition. He insisted that students should be able to explain every concept with a small, tangible matrix before moving to theory.

Beyond the content, his teaching style stood out. He spoke to students with genuine respect, patience, and kindness, never using words like “obviously” or “trivially.” He regularly paused to check if anyone was lost and treated beginners as thoughtfully as he would his colleagues.

As a result, Strang became the default linear algebra teacher for much of the planet. Universities in many countries began recommending his lectures to their own students. Some even replaced their in-person courses with his videos because they could not match their clarity.

His final lecture ended with a long standing ovation. Strang seemed surprised by the applause, smiled humbly, and simply thanked everyone.

In his short comment under the YouTube video, he expressed gratitude for a wonderful life of teaching and hoped others would continue teaching the subject well. No self-promotion, no grand farewell—just quiet sincerity.

When you add up every version, every upload, help sessions, and all the different recordings MIT has shared over the years, the total has surpassed 20 million views.

Today, the full course, including all lectures, problem sets, and solutions, remains freely available on MIT OpenCourseWare. One of the most important mathematical foundations of modern AI is still just one click away.

[Mike Berrow @berrow]

@CuriosityonX The risk of encountering a hostile advanced civilization with these is practically zero. They will pass within 1.7 light years of another star in about 40,000 years. Then Sirius at more than 4 light years in 296k years. Not near enough to be noticed.

[Mike Berrow @berrow]

UK Visit After 10 Years: Barefoot Paradise!
Back in Britain (South Wales roots), I went barefoot everywhere for 3 weeks — trains (Edinburgh to mid-Wales), pubs, cafés, Wetherspoons, grocery stores. Zero issues, just a few puzzled glances.

[Mike Berrow @berrow]

@libertyjunk420 @Rainmaker1973 Those were his *entry* photos. He arrived in that state. Likely from the beleaguered Polish ghetto.
He died 5 days later. No photos of what that looked like.

[Mike Berrow @berrow]

@El_Nina1993 @Rainmaker1973 Those were his entry photos. He arrived in that state. Likely from the beleaguered Polish ghetto.
He died 5 days later. No photos of what that looked like.

[Mike Berrow @berrow]

@Atlantic_Sprt @naturisminart Feet 👣 on backwards? 🤔

[Mike Berrow @berrow]

@clashreport

[Mike Berrow @berrow]

@peakaustria But it looks really ugly. Leave it as soil and do not apply water to it. Let nature take its course so that rewilding can provide a habit for insects and worms. We should get out of the mindset that everything has to look pristinely ‘managed’ by humans.

[Mike Berrow @berrow]

@akramcodez I went to college at 19 in the UK to study computer technology. That was 1974.
So 52 years.

[Mike Berrow @berrow]

I see them on the Dark Side of the Moon

[NASA @NASA]

A new milestone for humankind: The crew of Artemis II are now the farthest any human has ever travelled, reaching a maximum distance of 252,752 miles from Earth.

This surpasses the previous record set by Apollo 13 in 1970 by about 4,102 miles.

[Mike Berrow @berrow]

@MattJarvisCAFC @NASA @NASAArtemis They have to work out for a period each day to combat zero-G bone loss and muscular atrophy. There are no showers, only wet-wipes. They have no privacy. That’s just life. Try getting one!

[Mike Berrow @berrow]

Are friends electric?

[Rusty ⚡️: Solar Powered ☀️ @ze_rusty]

Your Tesla has a 60 GHz RADAR pointed at your face.

Not for driving or autopilot.

For "cabin monitoring"

Texas Instruments IWR6843AOP chip.

60-64 GHz millimeter wave. mounted above the rearview mirror. beaming down into the cabin.

Detecting your breathing, your heart rate, whether a child is in the back seat.

Sounds helpful until you understand what 60 GHz millimeter waves actually do to biology.

60 GHz penetrates roughly 0.4 mm into skin.

shallow enough for the industry to call "safe"

But your skin is the largest organ in your body. packed with Nerve endings, Merkel cells, melanocytes.

Soviet-era research documented non-thermal biological effects of mmWaves at low power densities.. effects the FCC has never evaluated.

and nobody has studied what happens when this signal runs continuously for 10-hour drives, week after week, year after year.

This cabin RADAR was installed in late 2021 but never activated.

Left dormant for over 3 years.

February 2025, software update 2025.2.6 quietly turned it on.

no opt-out or announcement.

just switched on.

and it doesn't turn off.

it runs while you drive. while you're parked. while you're charging. while your kids sit in the back seat on a 10-hour road trip. continuous millimeter wave exposure at close range.. 0.4 to 2 meters from your body.

That's not a cell tower 200 meters away. that's a RADAR transmitter inside a sealed metal box with you.

a Faraday cage works both ways. the metal body of the car that blocks outside signals also TRAPS the ones generated inside. every RF source in that cabin bounces off the roof, the doors, the floor.. back into you.

and the cabin RADAR is just one layer.

a Tesla Model S Plaid has 46 antennas.

— LTE cellular: 700-2600 MHz, 2x2 MIMO, always on
— WiFi: 2.4 + 5 GHz, dual band
— Bluetooth: 2.4 GHz, always scanning for your phone key
— UWB ultra-wideband: 6-8 GHz, phone-as-key
— GPS: 1.2-1.6 GHz
— Satellite radio: 2.3 GHz
— Cabin RADAR: 60-64 GHz

LTE, Bluetooth and cabin RADAR are essentially ALWAYS transmitting.

A 2025 study on the Tesla Model Y took 952 EMF measurements across SuperCharging, standard charging, high-speed driving, urban and idle states.

They found:

1/ Peak ELF emissions during SuperCharging, especially near center console and rear seats

2/RF hotspots from LTE, WiFi, Bluetooth in the sub-6 GHz range

3/ Body voltage INCREASED during SuperCharging and high-speed driving

4/ EMF varied dramatically depending on where you sit in the cabin

FCC safety limits are from 1996.

Based on animal studies measuring only THERMAL effects for less than 1 hour. no non-thermal biological effects considered. no study has EVER examined chronic simultaneous exposure to ELF + LTE + WiFi + Bluetooth + 60 GHz mmWave + UWB in a sealed metal cabin.

NOT ONCE.

In 2021, a U.S. Court of Appeals ruled the FCC's refusal to update these limits was "arbitrary and capricious." they still haven't changed them.

Martin Pall's model calculates that VGCCs amplify EMF forces by 7.2 million times at the cellular level. that calcium flooding triggers peroxynitrite formation, PARP activation, NAD+ depletion.. your repair machinery eating itself.

You're sitting in a metal box with 40+ antennas, a millimeter-wave RADAR pointed at your chest and AC magnetic fields from a battery pack under your seat pulling hundreds of kilowatts during charging.

and the safety standard says it's fine because your skin didn't get warm.

Diabolical.

[Mike Berrow @berrow]

@ze_rusty Are friends electric?

[Mike Berrow @berrow]

@earthcurated The 2026 photo was made of the night side of the earth with high aperture and longer exposure. That’s a totally different starting point. It’s not surprising that they look different in clarity 🧐

[Prof. Steve Keen @ProfSteveKeen]

https://t.co/OzStKLy3kK

[Mike Berrow @berrow]

@OaklakeTrails @aanr_nudism Anywhere that there is no risk of arrest.

[Michael Strong @flowidealism]

John Taylor Gatto was named New York State Teacher of the Year. Upon receiving the award, he quit and spent the rest of his life writing devastating critiques of the educational system he had mastered.

Gatto argued that regardless of the official curriculum, schools actually teach seven hidden lessons. The first is confusion. Students learn disconnected facts across dozens of subjects with no integration or meaning. The second is class position. Students learn their place in the social hierarchy. The third is indifference. Students learn that nothing is worth finishing because the bell always rings. The fourth is emotional dependency. Students learn to surrender their will to a chain of command. The fifth is intellectual dependency. Students learn to wait for experts to tell them what to think. The sixth is provisional self-esteem. Students learn that their worth depends on expert evaluation. The seventh is that they are always being watched and have no privacy.

These lessons, Gatto argued, are the actual function of schooling. The explicit curriculum of reading, writing, and arithmetic is almost incidental. The real purpose is to produce passive, dependent, compliant citizens who wait for authorities to tell them what to do and think.

Trad schooling amounts to thirteen years of training in being passive and dependent.

I have seen this play out with hundreds of students. When I created Montessori middle schools in the San Francisco Bay Area, about half the students came up through Montessori elementary and about half came from public schools. When we opened, the Montessori kids immediately began doing their work, taking initiative, choosing what to tackle first. The public school students were lost. They would stare at their desks until we walked over and helped them plan their morning. It took at least a semester, sometimes a full year, before they could function in an environment that asked them to direct their own learning.

These were not less intelligent children. They had simply been trained differently. For years, someone else had made all the decisions about what they would do, when they would do it, and how they would do it. When that structure was removed, they did not know how to operate.

Agency is natural to children unless we train it out of them.

When I coach parents on evaluating their children's education, I tell them to ignore grades entirely. The question is whether their children are taking initiative, being responsible, and becoming empowered moral beings. If a child is getting straight A's but has no initiative and no sense of personal responsibility, that child is being damaged by their education regardless of how it looks on paper.

[Gandalv @Microinteracti1]

William Shatner turned 95 yesterday. He celebrated by sitting on a beach in the dark, smoking a cigar, and posting about it to 5.1 million people.
This is, when you think about it, the most William Shatner thing William Shatner has ever done.

The man has been captain of a starship, has wrestled with Klingons and network executives (often indistinguishable), has rocketed into actual space at the age of 90 aboard a Blue Origin capsule and come back down weeping about the fragility of life.

Now he is 95, on a beach somewhere warm, with a cigar, and he wants you to know two things:

1. Never waste a good cigar.
2. Never trust anyone who tells you to act your age.

There is a whole philosophy packed into those two sentences. Not a complicated philosophy, not the kind that requires footnotes or a reading list, but a philosophy nonetheless. It belongs to a particular tradition, the tradition of people who have simply refused to be told what the appropriate next step is. Churchill had it. Keith Richards has it. Your grandmother who still drives at 87 and won’t discuss it has it.

The photograph posted alongside the tweet shows him looking pleased with himself in a way that is entirely justified. The big gold “95” floats between the two images like a trophy he has just picked up for the event of still being here. He earned it. And the cigar.

Now. You are probably not 95. You have almost certainly not been to space.

But here is the thing about his two rules. They do not actually require any of that. They just require a decision. A decision to stop treating your remaining time as something to be managed carefully and apologized for. To stop shrinking yourself to fit other people’s idea of what sensible looks like at your particular age.

The cigar is optional. The attitude is not.

Gandalv / @Microinteracti1

[Mike Berrow @berrow]

@I_arm_chelle @earthcurated Both vertebrates and invertebrates are in the animal kingdom so, yes, an animal,

[Mike Berrow @berrow]

@treesinneed @earthcurated Sorry, they are in the animal kingdom. There are plants, animals, archea and viruses.