I am planning a course for MIT's IAP period next year. The course will be about patterns that keep coming up over and over again in the physical sciences.
The ideas that I have come up with so far will be on a page of the same name on this blog.
Update: Have given up on the course, think that a website would be a better use of time.
I have long felt this to be true. Definitely is for me, I am a completely different person speaking English than in Mandarin. In fact, even the two dialects I use in English have different personalities associated with them.
I attended a meeting with a local Taiwanese discussion group the other day. We watched a documentary on the life of three rice farmers in Tainan, Taiwan. This was followed with a discussion on the economic factors leading to the extinction of the occupation in Taiwan. These came up - ideas of economic comparative advantage, realities of sociopolitical structure, and philosophies behind robust personal happiness. It was a good discussion.
People are evidently willing to get together to talk about important issues. In fact, a few hours of dedicated time is easier to get than trying to get people to write to a forum with their ideas. Talking is easier than writing.
The transient nature of the discussion is regrettable though. I'm working on a format for generating web-publishable content from these very meaningful discussions.