In all likelihood, even if I had the roughly $36,000 for the full year’s tuition, I’d never be accepted to enroll at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT).  In operation for over 140 years, MIT ranks among the nation’s best and caters to some of the brightest, accepting only about thirteen percent of applicants.  The institute has been home to thirty-one winners of the National Medal of Science and sixty-two Nobel prize recipients, seven of which are members of the current faculty.  The faculty and staff also include six Fulbright Scholars, eighty Guggenheim Fellows, twenty MacArthur Fellows, and four winners of the Kyoto prize.  To say that the MIT faculty excel in science and technology is a bit of an understatement.  So, when I read that MIT has been offering its course materials for free, I took notice.

MIT Open Courseware is an ambitious project which aims to “provide free, searchable access to MIT’s course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.” Currently, the site offers over 1,550 different courses in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, Literature, History, Foreign Languages, Computer Sciences, Electrical Engineering, Mechanical Engineering, Aeronautics, Architecture, and the rest of MIT’s thirty-four departments.  The list is as extensive as it is impressive.  Each course offers syllabi, lectures, readings, assignments, discussions, exams, and miscellaneous other materials available online or for download in a single ZIP file.  The project started in 1999 and is expected to be completed, but continually updated, by next year.  When MIT says in their mission statement that they want to “best serve the nation and the world in the 21st century,” they mean it, and are well on their way.

http://ocw.mit.edu/index.html

There’s no doubt that today’s games have the ability to be far better than those we grew up with.  The graphics are smoother, the sound is clearer, the budgets are higher, and the greatly expanded computer processing power gives them the ability to render it all on a scale that could never have been imagined before.  However, often beneath that slick surface are game concepts we’ve seen so many times before.  For example, no matter how great Gears of War may be, it’s still just a simple run-and-gun game.  Since the games of yesteryear couldn’t rely on their outward appearances to sell games, they had to strive to invent something new almost every time.  The games had to be simple to understand but difficult to master.  And they had to have replayability often bordering on addiction.  Neave.com host several of these addictive games of the past in shockwave flash format.  You don’t need a special arcade translator to play them; just click and play.

http://www.neave.com/games/

The Internet Movie Database (IMDB) is one of my favorite resource sites.  I keep a link to it in the Reference or Library bookmarks section on every computer I use because I use it so much.  I also use dictionaries, thesauri, and encyclopediae (how’s that for pluralization?) often enough, but it’s usually when I can’t think of a celebrity’s name or the name of a movie or TV show that I scramble to the computer and check IMDB.  Forgetting those kinds of things drives me crazy whereas I can usually get on with my day if I’m stumped for a suitable synonymn for a particular word.  When I was a kid, my mother used to keep a large paperback book of movies, actors, brief biographies, and associated information in the bookcase with the other reference books.  It had interesting tidbits like a list of where you could find Alfred Hitchcock (or at least his photo) in each of his films.  The book was a great resource, but it quickly became dated and could only hold so much.  My mother would have marveled at the power of IMDB.

Last night I watched a recent Letterman episode where he interviewed Jonah Hill who is in the new movie, Knocked Up.  He seemed like a nice guy and there wasn’t anything particularly remarkable about the interview, but somehow I was reminded of it while showering for work this morning.  I don’t remember what train of thought had me thinking about EBay and then about the scene in The 40 Year Old Virgin where Catherine Keener (Trish) had the We Sell Your Stuff on EBay store, but something clicked and I had a eureka moment.  “Hey!  I think that kid from Letterman was the one who tried to buy the platform shoes with the goldfish in the bottoms,” I suddenly realized.  “That makes sense, because Seth Rogen, the lead in Knocked Up was also in The 40 Year Old Virgin,” I reasoned.  There was a time when I’d either have to be satisfied with that reasoning and continue to refer to Seth Rogen as “that guy from Freaks and Geeks”, or do a lot of legwork just to prove out an insignificant factoid and their actual names, but with IMDB, I was able to bring it all together with very little effort.  FYI - I also found that Jonah Hill is in the upcoming Evan Almighty starring the lead from The 40 Year Old Virgin, Steve Carell.

Confirming things like that is a great reason to use IMDB, but the best reason is when you have no clue in the first place.  Because of the power of hyperlinking, you can lookup things in IMDB even when you have little information to go on.  For example, sometimes I’ll find myself trying to remember the name of a movie, but I can’t even remember who was in it.  However, if I can remember anything that any of the actors starred in, or anybody who starred with them, no matter how many degrees of separation, I can trace backwards and discover the name of the movie I was seeking.  "Let’s see… it was that 70’s movie about suburban teens who rebel against authority after they close down the teen rec center. I think that actor who’s still around who always played some kind of a punk when he was a kid was in it.  He was in that 80’s beach movie where he’s the cabana boy.  I think his father in that movie was the guy who played the coach in that college football team movie where they had to start from scratch and take walk-on players.  The quarterback was that actor who played the scientist on Quantum Leap.” Knowing nothing but the name of the TV show, Quantum Leap, I could eventually find my way from it to Scott Bakula, to Necessary Roughness, to Hector Elizondo, to The Flamingo Kid, to Matt Dillon, to the 1979 film, Over the Edge.  IMDB can be very helpful.

A lot of people may not realize some of the other features that IMDB has available.  The site has a whole raft of search engines.  For example, if you want to see in which films specific actors have worked together, IMDB has the People Working Together Search.  With it, you can see on what projects have Clint Eastwood and Morgan Freeman collaborated (two feature films, several awards shows, and a number of documentaries).  IMDB also has a lot of charts available and updated regularly.  They list the top box office grossing movies of all time, the current box office top 10, the rental top 50, the top rated films by genre or decade (e.g. horror), the most searched for movies by genre or decade (e.g. 1970-1979, and even the 100 worst rated films of all time.  Other sections include a listings of award winners for all major movie awards and film festivals and an on this day section for any date that includes births, deaths, marriages, movie shoots, wraps, releases, and grosses.

"You think you know who you are? You have no idea.”
Matt Damon as Officer Ryan in Crash