January 15, 2010

what do you mean, it's only been 3 minutes?

As the sun slowly crept over the horizon, it'd start to peek through the window and land on my desk at the back of a thrilling 8 am freshman calculus class which met 5 days a week. Tilting my wrist, I'd place my watch which had a pyrimidal glass cover into the ray of light creating a kaleidoscope of colors on my desk. The dilemma was to avoid actually looking at the time on my watch, a present from my then girlfriend and now wife. I swear it had frozen still. Surely, it's been at least half an hour. Nope, 3 minutes. Med school nowadays is so much better. Magical even. I can watch the lecture from home, not having to fight rush hour traffic commuting down to the medical center. It gets better. With technology, there's no slowing down of time as the lecture drones on. In fact, I can speed them up! Ain't technology grand? I watch them at 1.5 times the regular speed. A 50-minute lecture now takes 33 minutes. (Some students watch it at 2x speed.) It's getting to the point that listening to a real time lecturer sounds like I'm listening to a turtle. The voices are pretty interesting, too. Some lecturers who speak slowly actually sound better at accelerated speeds. Those who have higher pitched voices or who speak rapidly present more of a challenge. Accents are hard, too. I'm inherently lazy so anything that can speed things up and make it easier are great in my book.

This is normal speed.

And this is at 1.5x speed. I've done some at 1.6 but I haven't gotten good enough to go at 2.0. It's too hard to take notes then because you miss the next 30 seconds in the time it takes to write something down.

2 comments:

navz29 said...

i cum frm a place where video lectures are still not common..always used to wonder wat streaming videos at 1.5 speed meant..well now i know..thanx
like ur posts bout med school..keep writing!

Isaac said...

It's life changing! It makes things so much more efficient. A lot of the professors hate it because no one attends class but if the school's goal is to make us drink from a fire hydrant, this is more efficient.