The ultimate iPod

Before I say anything else, let me just mention that I've gotten linked to for the first time! (Or at least, this is the first one that I'm aware of.) Woo-hoo! Thanks, Jeff/Ernie.

I received an ad for the following item in my email today:


Now if you've been meaning to get yourself an iPod, and you're a big Harry Potter fan, and you have a nice wad of money burning a hole in your pocket, you might want to check out this item at the Apple Store. (BTW, since these links will undoubtedly break at some point in the future, if you're reading this in the archives months from now, this ad shows the Harry Potter Collector's iPod with the Complete Harry Potter audiobook collection. The iPod has the Hogwarts crest etched on the back.) This ad reminded me of how I'm slowly assembling the ultimate collector's iPod. Let me explain:

A number of years ago I was browsing at my local bookstore and came across Richard Feynman's Six Easy Pieces. After skimming through the book, I bought it, but for some reason I never got around to listening to the lectures and it languished on my bookshelf. Maybe a year later I stumbled across it again and finally put the first lecture in my stereo. I was instantly mesmerized. I thought it was just incredible – if I had heard this while I was still in college, I probably would have changed my major to physics.

For those of you not familiar with it, Six Easy Pieces contains the introductory lectures from the The Feynman Lectures on Physics. These were recorded and transcribed from a two-year beginning physics course that Feynman taught at CalTech from 1961 to 1963. In trying to describe this, it's hard to do justice to the combination of sheer joy and absolute clarity that Feynman brought to the lectures. If you've never heard it before, you owe it to yourself to get ahold of the audio version of Six Easy Pieces and listen to it.

So anyway, after I listened to the introductory lectures, I immediately ran out and bought the (print version) of The Feynman Lectures on Physics. However, I quickly discovered that reading the printed lectures just didn't convey the same emotional impact as listening to Feynman speak. So I looked into getting the audio versions of the lectures and realized that there were a couple of problems. First, it would be very expensive to collect all the audio cassettes for the 100+ lectures. Second, the publisher for whatever reason had bundled the cassettes into sets of 6 which did not follow the ordering of the original course. So to listen to the lectures in order, I would have to buy the whole collection and then shuffle the cassettes around to get them into their proper places.

Well, a couple of things have happened since then. First, the publisher has slowly been converting the analog recordings to digital CD format (for example, here is the first set). They're now bundled into sets of 12, making them (somewhat) more affordable. The other thing that happened was the iPod phenomenon. And this gave me the ideal solution to how to manage all of that audio: I've been dutifully aquiring the lectures as they're released and transfering them onto my iPod. As I do this, I relabel the lectures so that they will appear in their proper sequence. Once all of the lectures have been converted to digital, I will finally be able to listen to them the way that they were originally delivered by Feynman. And the whole package will fit into my shirt pocket!

Once I'm done with this project, I think I'll have the back of my iPod etched with some nice Feynman diagrams to create my own "collector's edition."