None of my relatives / wife are "junior" doctors so they won't be striking but they will be sympathising having seen what's being asked of them by the government. It is somewhat eyebrow raising (for me anyway) that things should have come to that with one of the traditional professions as I still have strong memories of the Red Robbo style of union muscle flexing strikes in the 1970's based around the threat of economic meltdown.

I worked in a research lab at that time and we saw ourselves as competent professional adults capable of working out for ourselves what our efforts were worth. The union reps that periodically came along to promote their "unity is strength" message and convince us to join were generally given a cool reception. The problem for the medical profession is that mostly they've only had one source of employment in the UK since the 1940's - the NHS. Little by little over the decades whatever independence they've had has been whittled away and now it's only through the court of public opinion that they have any bargaining ability. And that is a very two edged sword. It's been interesting to watch how the "debate" has played out in the media so far.

Re free courses, if you're talking about MOOCs, yes there's loads of them, and quite a few UK based ones via Open Learn (with somewhat galling irony a subsidiary of the OU). I've been doing about half a dozen a year for the last few years and the first of this year's, complete with around 1500 students, starts next week. Mostly they're self help and pitched at about the level of adult evening classes (most of which have now shut down in my area) but they lead nowhere so in some respects there's little point - other than giving doctoral students some experience as mediators.

You do three or four weeks and that's it. It's an evening activity for me when there's nothing on tv and it's too cold to work on any of my wrecks in the garage, but in my more cynical moments they seem more like bread and circuses for the semi literate, the thinking man's Facebook. In the absence of a UK HUBB meeting in 2016 maybe Grant could arrange one on overlanding. It'd need a suitably academic title - "19thC Romantic Conceits in Adventure Travel" should get them rolling in. We've already got a basis for the syllabus over in the discussion about what is adventure riding.