What I Learned Last Week

1. F is for Fiber: The Audacity of Google Fiber (recode)

Rick Usher has a favorite parlor trick. He recently showed it off over dinner with a friend’s family, who doesn’t have Google Fiber. Their teenage daughter was thumbing her iPhone, and Usher asked her to pull up her favorite YouTube clip. He told her to drag the cursor to the clip’s middle. "She literally jumped out of the chair, ‘Oh my God, it didn’t lag!’" he recalled.

2. Video Series of Differential Equations and Linear Algebra (mathworks)

Gil Strang has produced a MOOC-style video course on Differential Equations and Linear Algebra. I have added some videos about the MATLAB ODE suite. The series is available from the MathWorks Web site, MIT OpenCourseWare and several other popular sources.

3.  Our Glorious Broken Health Care System (malvasia bianca)

I didn’t have to pay a thousand dollars myself: my insurance has negotiated rates that are lower than the billed rates, and my insurance paid for a fair amount of what was left, so my bill was only about three hundred dollars. But there is no way that I would have paid three hundred dollars for a known-inaccurate test if I’d been aware of the price in advance; [...]