Jason Hammond

Yet another Xing librarian.

[Led By Donkeys @ByDonkeys]

Immigration makes Britain brilliant.

[Jason Hammond @headtale]

@CreesOnCBC Great job!

#FutureNationalAnchor

[Aleana Young @AleanaYoung]

Poor guy is really going through it.

#skpoli #cdnpoli

[Jason Hammond @headtale]

@BleedOilBlue @bob_chin50 On CalgaryPuck (not the most unbiased of sources), they're calling McDavid the "GLOAT - Greatest Loser of All-Time."

Going back to junior, Olympics, Cup finals x2, etc. etc. has never been able to put his teams over the top let alone team accolades like division champ, etc.

[Craig Baird - Canadian History Ehx @CraigBaird]

Many great hockey teams have called Saskatchewan home, but the province has never had an NHL team.
That almost changed in the 1980s when the St. Louis Blues nearly moved to Saskatoon before the NHL put a stop to it.
This is the story.

📸 CTV

🧵 1/8

[604RAW @604RAW]

Average Saturday night in Kelowna as 2 teens put a couch on two Lime scooters and get pulled over by police 😂

What’s the wildest thing you’ve seen on a Saturday night in Kelowna? 🤔💭

[Harrison Ford @HarrisonFordLA]

May the fourth be with you

[Jason Hammond @headtale]

How come comments are turned off?

[Visit Montana @visitmontana]

The days are long enough to make one more stop. To take the long way. To decide as you go.

[Captain Jack 🏴‍☠️ @OilersJack]

Darnell Nurse has 7 regular season goals this year and 0 playoff goals.

He has also scored 5 own goals during the regular season and 2 own goal in playoffs.

He now has just as many goals on his OWN net as he has on the opponents net this year.

Insane.

[Jason Hammond @headtale]

@AllAbIntroverts I don't know - I'm an extrovert and this looks pretty damn good to me!

[Abakcus @abakcus]

If you divide 1 by 998,001 you get all three-digit numbers from 000 to 999 in order, except for 998.

[Joe Ryle @JoeRRyle]

100 years of the five-day week is enough.

Technology has moved on and it’s time the working week did too.

The @4Day_Week isn’t radical anymore. It’s long overdue.

[Curiosity @CuriosityonX]

People don't realize how absurd this view actually is.

A camera. On a robot. On Mars.

Built by humans on a planet 140 million miles away, launched on a rocket, landed using a sky crane, and now driving across an alien desert taking pictures so detailed you can count the rocks.

100 years ago, your great-grandparents thought airplanes were a miracle.

You are scrolling past Mars on your phone.

[Jason Hammond @headtale]

@WhiteHouse Pretty sure I recognize the “King” on the right…

[Jason Hammond @headtale]

@Franky_82 No one would admit this. But I suspect the respective reactions of the Ducks and Oilers players on the ice may have played a role in the call by the refs.

[Jason Hammond @headtale]

@sarobertsonca They're not laughing with you, they're laughing around you.

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

An MIT professor taught the same math course for 62 years, and the day he retired, students from every country on earth showed up online to watch him give his final lecture.

I opened the playlist at 2am and ended up watching three of them back to back.

His name is Gilbert Strang. The course is MIT 18.06 Linear Algebra.

Every machine learning engineer, every data scientist, every quant, every self-taught programmer who actually understands how AI works learned the math from this one man. Most of them never set foot on MIT's campus. They just opened a free playlist on YouTube and let him teach.

Here's the story almost nobody tells you.

Strang joined the MIT math faculty in 1962. He retired in 2023. That is 61 years of standing at the same chalkboard teaching the same subject to 18-year-olds.

The interesting part is what he did when MIT launched OpenCourseWare in 2002. Most professors were skeptical. They worried that putting their lectures online would make their classrooms irrelevant. Strang did not hesitate. He said his life's mission was to open mathematics to students everywhere. He filmed every lecture and gave it away.

The decision quietly changed how the world learns math.

For decades linear algebra was taught the wrong way. Professors started with abstract vector spaces and proofs about field axioms. Students drowned in the abstraction. Most never recovered. They walked out believing they were bad at math when they had simply been taught in an order that nobody's brain is built to absorb.

Strang inverted the entire curriculum.

He started with matrix multiplication. Something you can write down on paper. Something you can compute by hand. Something you can see. Then he showed his students that everything else in linear algebra eigenvectors, singular value decomposition, orthogonality, the four fundamental subspaces was just a different lens for understanding what the matrix was actually doing under the hood.

His rule was strict. If a student could not explain a concept using a concrete 3 by 3 example, that student did not actually understand the concept yet. The abstraction was supposed to come last, not first. The intuition was the foundation. The proofs were just confirmation that the intuition was correct.

The second thing Strang changed was the classroom itself. He said please and thank you to his students. Every single lecture. He paused mid-derivation to ask "am I OK?" to check if anyone was lost. He never used the word "obviously" or "trivially" because he knew exactly what those words do to a student who is one step behind. He treated 19-year-olds learning math for the first time the way he treated his own colleagues. With patience. With respect. With the assumption that they belonged in the room.

For 62 years.

The result is something that has never happened in the history of education. A single math professor became the default teacher of his subject for the entire planet.

Universities in India, China, Brazil, Nigeria, every country with a computer science department, started telling their own students to just watch Strang's lectures. The University of Illinois revised its linear algebra course to do almost no in-person lecturing. The reason was honest. The professor said they could not compete with the videos.

His final lecture was in May 2023.

The auditorium was packed with students who had never met him before. He walked to the chalkboard, taught for an hour, and at the end the entire room stood and applauded. He looked confused for a moment, like he genuinely did not understand why they were cheering. Then he smiled and waved them off and walked out.

His written comment under the YouTube video of that final lecture was four sentences long. He said teaching had been a wonderful life. He said he was grateful to everyone who saw the importance of linear algebra. He said the movement of teaching it well would continue because it was right.

That was it. No book promotion. No farewell speech. No legacy management.

The man whose teaching is the foundation of modern AI just thanked the audience and went home.

20 million views. Zero ego. The entire engine of the AI revolution sits on top of math that millions of people learned for free from one quiet professor in Cambridge.

The course is still on MIT OpenCourseWare. Every lecture, every problem set, every exam, every solution. Free.

The most important math course of the 21st century is sitting one click away from you. Most people will never open it.

[Jason Hammond @headtale]

So wild that you have to clarify this Google search...

[Ihtesham Ali @ihtesham2005]

A Carnegie Mellon professor walked onto a stage in 2007 and gave an hour-long lecture to 400 people about achieving your childhood dreams. He did not tell the room that the entire talk was actually written for his three kids, who would grow up without him.

His name was Randy Pausch. The date was September 18, 2007. The video has since passed 20 million views, and the book that followed spent more than a hundred weeks on the New York Times bestseller list.

Pausch was 46 years old, had been diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer a month earlier, and had been told he had three to six months of good health left.

He did not walk onto that stage to talk about dying. He walked onto it to teach a single lesson hidden inside another one.

Here is what I missed the first time I watched it.

Pausch opened by doing push-ups on stage. He told the audience he was in phenomenally good shape, in better shape than most of them, and anyone who wanted to cry or pity him was welcome to get down and match him. The room laughed. Then he said the line that sets up the entire hour to come. We cannot change the cards we are dealt. Just how we play the hand.

That was the frame. Everything after it was a demonstration.

The lecture was officially titled Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams, and Pausch did spend the first 40 minutes working through his actual childhood list. Zero gravity. Playing in the NFL. Writing an entry in the World Book Encyclopedia. Being Captain Kirk. Becoming a Disney Imagineer.

He walked the audience through which ones he got, which ones he didn't, and what the gap between wanting and getting had actually taught him.

The framework inside those 40 minutes is the part most people remember, and it is the one Pausch delivered with the most force.

He called it the brick wall. He said the brick walls in your life are there for a reason. They are not there to keep you out. They are there to give you a chance to show how badly you want something. They are there to stop the people who do not want it badly enough. They are there to stop the other people.

Read that again slowly. He is not saying brick walls are a test you have to pass. He is saying brick walls are a filter nature uses to separate the people who actually want a thing from the people who only like the idea of wanting it. That is a completely different claim. Most people treat obstacles as unfair. Pausch argued obstacles are the mechanism by which desire gets proven, and without that mechanism the whole concept of wanting something would be meaningless. Every dream he achieved, he achieved by treating the wall as a signal that he was close, not a signal that he should stop.

The second framework he taught the audience is the one almost nobody teaches in any classroom. He called it the head fake. He pulled it from football. Coaches teach young kids to tackle by having them run drills that look like they are about tackling, but the real lesson being embedded is teamwork, grit, how to take a hit and get back up. The kid thinks they are learning football.

They are actually learning something much larger, and they will not realize it until years later. Pausch said the best teaching in the world is head fake teaching. You get people to learn the thing they need by dressing it up as the thing they already want.

This is the technique behind Alice, the programming software he built at Carnegie Mellon. Kids thought they were making animated movies and games. They were actually learning to code. Pausch said one of his proudest claims to fame was that he had taught programming to a generation of students who had no idea they were being taught programming at all.

And then, with about three minutes left in the lecture, he ran a head fake on the room.

He asked the audience if they had figured out the first head fake of the talk itself. The room went quiet. He said the lecture was never actually about how to achieve your childhood dreams. It was about how to lead your life. If you lead your life the right way, the karma takes care of itself and the dreams come to you anyway.

Then he asked if they had figured out the second head fake. Even quieter.

He said the talk was not for the four hundred people in the room.

It was for his three kids.

Dylan was six. Logan was three. Chloe was eighteen months. They would grow up without their father, and he knew it. Pausch had spent an hour on stage pretending to give career advice to strangers because he needed to record something his children could watch when they were old enough to understand who their dad had been.

The entire architecture of the lecture was a message in a bottle disguised as a keynote. The filtered brick-wall philosophy, the football stories, the dreams he chased and the ones he missed, the line about playing the hand you are dealt, all of it was something a father wanted three small children to internalize after he was no longer there to say it in person.

That is the moment the video stops being a lecture and starts being something else entirely.

Pausch died on July 25, 2008, ten months after giving it. His final sentence on stage was that he had given the talk tonight, and then he walked off. The applause lasted nearly a minute before the camera cut.

Most professors spend their entire careers trying to say one true thing their students will remember for a week.

He said one true thing his children will remember for the rest of their lives, and the rest of the world is still watching the footage.