TIL that edX has entered into a partnership with Deepak Chopra, the accomplished quack. edX has been going downhill since it turned for-profit. But I didn't expect it to fall this far!

https://press.edx.org/dr.-deepak-chopra-world-renowned-author-and-pioneer-of-integrative-medicine-to-create-courses-on-edx 

 Recently finished Anathem by Neal Stephenson. As usual for the author, there are a bunch of interesting ideas. For example, I really liked the following quote:

"Thousands of years ago, the work that people did had been broken down into jobs that were the same every day, in organizations where people were interchangeable parts. All of the story had been bled out of their lives. That was how it had to be; it was how you got a productive economy. But it would be easy to see a will at work behind this: not exactly an evil will, but a selfish will. The people who’d made the system thus were jealous, not of money and not of power but of story. If their employees came home at day’s end with interesting stories to tell, it meant that something had gone wrong: a blackout, a strike, a spree killing. The Powers That Be would not suffer others to be in stories of their own unless they were fake stories that had been made up to motivate them... [They] had to look somewhere outside of work for a feeling that they were part of a story, which I guessed was why [people] were so concerned with sports, and with religion. How else could you see yourself as part of an adventure? Something with a beginning, middle, and end in which you played a significant part?"