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I was the project lead on this, which involved converting the Feynman Lectures from LaTeX to HTML. I'd be happy to answer any questions. Update : Most of the questions center on cost. I've answered in more detail below, but the short version is simple: no off-the-shelf converter was remotely sufficient for our needs, so we had to write lots of custom software, and writing custom software is hard.
Also... Microsoft Research announced on Wednesday that Mr. Gates, who purchased the rights to the videos privately from the Feynman estate, BBC and from Cornell University, in cooperation with Curtis Wong, a Microsoft researcher, has created a Web site that is intended to enhance the videos by annotating them with related digital content. Project Tuva http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html
By far my favorite piece of writing from Feynman is QED: http://www.amazon.com/QED-Strange-Princeton-Science-Library/... Out of all his writings, this is the one that has always stuck with me. Feynman long held that one does not understand something if one cannot explain it to someone who is not deeply steeped in the subject already. I regard this lecture as probably the culmination of that philosophy for Feynman. An…
Original email from this morning to give some color: Dear Feynman Lectures Forum Members, Have you ever wished there was a high-quality up-to-date version of The Feynman Lectures on Physics available online? One that could be read with a browser so you could study FLP on your smartphone, tablet, notebook or desktop computer, whenever you felt like it? For free? Well, now there is, and you are among the first to hear…
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Be careful. Using wget can get you hacking conviction...
Seriously. Ask Bradley Manning...
Go forth and use wget on your own machines!
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I am very grateful for your work, and I hate to pick on details, but surely you reused much of what's already available for LaTeX? I hope you didn't spend much of your time reinventing the wheel. I freely admit that I am probably vastly underestimating the amount of work that went into this, reuse or no.
We did make use of as many existing resources as possible. If you take a look at the [ Ruby on Rails Tutorial book]( http://railstutorial.org/ ) and [ The Tau Manifesto ]( http://tauday.com/tau-manifesto ), both of which are converted to HTML from LaTeX, you'll see that I have deep experience in such conversions. Combined with my previous role as Caltech's editor for the Definitive and Extended Edition of the Feynman…
Really really appreciate this effort.
I've sent this to some of my deaf friends who are studying or trying to get into Physics and they are over the moon about this.
Also... Microsoft Research announced on Wednesday that Mr. Gates, who purchased the rights to the videos privately from the Feynman estate, BBC and from Cornell University, in cooperation with Curtis Wong, a Microsoft researcher, has created a Web site that is intended to enhance the videos by annotating them with related digital content. Project Tuva http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/index.html
Thanks for the link. I'm really glad he's made this available on line. And at the risk of looking a gift horse in the mouth, I wish it didn't require silverlight.
I'm in the middle of reading "Surely you're joking, Mr. Fenyman!", and so far, it is a FANTASTIC read. He has so many interesting stories about fiddling with stuff as a kid, working on the manhattan project, picking locks, interactions with Oppenheimer, Einstein, etc. Even if you aren't at all interested in physics, math, or anything science related, I would still recommend this book. That said, I now have a lot more…
I have been trying to get this book online,but apparently only Microsoft's Project Tuva had a right to them.So one had to watch them on a Windows platform requiring software that cant seem to run on my machine