Accredited self-study

In the UK we have the Open University which provides means for those later in life, in actual jobs, etc., to do distance learning and earn respectable degrees. When I was young I enjoyed watching the lectures that they would televise, early at the weekends if I recall correctly. There was a good range of courses and the material tended to be interesting and well-delivered. I thought it a great public service to have such available.

Then, things changed; the televised lectures disappeared. I assumed that they were still made and available, just only to paying students, but some recent conversation suggests that not to be the case: the teaching approach has changed more fundamentally. The Open University do collaborate with the BBC on making documentaries but that's really not the same, it's more an interesting taste than actual teaching. Of course, these days various instructional presentations can be found on YouTube and its ilk: perhaps the televised lectures of my childhood now have adequate equivalents conveniently to hand.

(An aside: I was surprised that the recently repeated Order and Disorder (2012) got so far toward articulating some relationship between thermodynamic entropy and Shannon entropy but then stopped short.)

This got me to thinking. The Open University's become rather expensive these days: perhaps more due to less government support than more moneygrubbing but, either way, it has. But, surely the teaching is more expensive than the examining? Who offers accredited examination-based degrees without also wanting to provide the associated teaching, i.e., at a good price?

I don't know the answer. In investigating, I did discover the University of London International Programmes who, for instance, offer a distance-learning Graduate Diploma in Mathematics for £1,556, which would probably do me good. That includes study materials of some kind at least. I wonder who the alternatives are.

"Natural" laws of the paranormal in fantasy

As a teenager I read some books where there was some kind of quantitative science of magic such that for a powerful spell one might calculate the number of mages or whatever one would need; I don't recall titles or author.

Anyhow, very commonly in fiction there is some kind of conservation of life or other kind of balance: sacrifice one to resurrect another, that kind of thing. This is somewhat true in science fiction as well as fantasy: I'm reminded of Mawdryn Undead. Whereas, in real life, longevity isn't at all conserved: at least on average we get to live for longer simply through a more healthful lifestyle. I might donate bone marrow, an unnatural procedure indeed, but I get to fully recover afterward.

I suppose that such laws of balance are a useful plot device: they create some conflict, tension and pathos and prevent one's powers from being used wantonly to achieve goals too easily. I guess there's another popular device: from not spending too long inside one's direwolf to not too habitually wearing the One Ring, there is significant cost to overly employing these abilities. Even a powerful hero should have to struggle and decide.

Still, given the lack of conservation-of-life in real life, I couldn't help but be struck by its ubiquity in fiction.