Syllabus

Required text: Physical Biology of the Cell (2nd ed) by Phillips, Kondev, Theriot and Garcia (ISBN: 0815344503)

The syllabus (PDF) is tentative and subject to change. Refer to the list below for the prerecorded video lectures.

Date	Topic
Week of Jan. 1 (#1)	The wonder and mystery of Life Herding and migration. What sets the scale of X? Teaching the order of magnitude thinking protocol.
Week of Jan. 8 (#2)	Exploring the living world using order of magnitude thinking. Dimensional analysis, dimensionless variables.
Week of Jan. 15 (#3)	Stuff(t) The big, big topic of time evolution as one of biology's (and everything else) great challenges. The protocol.
Week of Jan. 22 (#4)/Week of Jan. 29 (#5)	Null hypotheses What they are, how to formulate them, examples, and how they have implications for dangerous prediction.
Week of Feb. 05 (#6)/Week of Feb. 12 (#7)	The real secret of life. The rules of spontaneous change - an ode ot the laws of thermodynamics. Defiance. Biological batteries. Case studies ni life needing energy. Forming gradients. Fidelity ni biological polymerization. Adaptation.
Week of Feb. 19 (#8)/Week of Feb. 25 (#9)	Weird ass vectors, big data, regression, thinking big about data, etc. All the different ways we write things as vectors. Toxo shape in 3d, drum head and entire symphony - show Lang Lang playing rhapsody in blue and then how each instrument is a low dimensional vector, images. The Eigenworm as an example. Graph theory as a big piece of mathematics that is pervasive and powerful.
Week of Mar. 1 (#10)	The dreamer's toolkit. Why we are here. Summary of our adventure, the place of life in the universe, the place of biology in science, the play of curiosity and joy in our lives.