Johan Kiviniemi’s series of tubes

Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs

2007-02-13

The Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs video lectures by Hal Abelson and Gerald Jay Sussman, recorded in the 1980s, are absolutely fascinating.

If you’re a programmer, you may learn new ideas and ways to think from those lectures, and become better at what you do.

If you learned to program in the schools of today, you will learn new ideas and ways to think, and become better at what you do. ;-)

Alas, some of the files contain a very muffled audio track.

Using the command

mplayer -af equalizer=-12:-12:-12:0:0:0:12:12:-6:-12 Lecture-xx.avi

to play them seems to help a lot. (See the mplayer website.)

For other players with a graphic equalizer, this means

• canceling frequencies < 200 Hz (the overly emphasized bass frequencies)
• amplifying frequencies about 2 kHz – 4 kHz (including the consonants in speech)
• attenuating frequencies ≥ 8 kHz (the noise)