This is one of the major problems with our education system. We base going to the next level on age rather than the firm foundation of the present level.
On age AND on the even sillier "how hard the number-crunching is," completely ignoring that a qualitative understanding might help the quantitative later (and that math exists to serve the problem-solving, not the other way around).
They're not all winners, but two spots I check daily to get exposure to things I wouldn't ordinarily see, by the way:
http://www.ted.comThe TED Conferences gather the "big thinkers" in just about every field (including comic books, in fact) to give each other talks, basically, and then they post video of the presentations online. They're not all winners, but just recently they posted a guy who built a visible object that shows quantum displacement effects.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/in-our-time/As you might guess from the URL, "In Our Time" is a BBC Radio show, where Melvyn Bragg drags in a panel to explain the interesting bits of their fields to the listening public. These are even more hit-or-miss, I think, but they have the virtue of never using visuals, so I can listen while making breakfast.
And obviously, both have their propagandist pieces. Bragg's panels are invariably going to play up British contributions where possible, and Al Gore's involvement with TED means a lot of emotionally-alarmist Global Warming talks. But it's hardly the worst way to kill ten minutes to an hour, here and there.
(And then I've been watching "Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends" on Hulu at night, so don't think I've gone all academic...)
