From the category archives:

Pod Thoughts

Cities that live on thin air

April 13, 2010

Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time had a pair of episodes on the history of cities that were packed with fascinating ideas, any one of which could probably have spun off into a programme of its own. And of course I shouldn’t criticise for what wasn’t there. But really, to spend 80 minutes discussing the history [...]

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Look at the teeth on this nag

February 20, 2009

I am deeply grateful to Darwin College Cambridge for organising a wonderful set of Darwin Lectures in this the year of Darwin excess. I’m even more grateful that they recorded them in reasonably high quality and made them available over the intertubes. And not just available, but easily available as a podcast that I can [...]

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Come in please No. 13, your time is up

January 12, 2009

Tim Harford’s Undercover Economist has long been a favourite of mine in the Financial Times. So when I discovered BBC Radio 4′s More or less, which he hosts, I hastened to subscribe to the podcast, and I have not been disappointed. I’m only now catching up, though, and am delighted to share with you something [...]

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Tidy, tidy, tidy

December 8, 2008

It isn’t often that a TedTalk provokes actual belly laughter. Snickers yes, sometimes an appreciative titter. But outright guffaws? I can’t remember too many, and certainly not sustained through an entire presentation. Ursus Wehrli managed it, in a talk filmed in February 2006 but only recently uploaded. The premise is simple. Much (modern) art is [...]

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Sniff sniff? Ah! Tropical wetness, zesty freshness and bursting floralcy

November 21, 2008

It was, perhaps, the most inauspicious start to a TedTalk I’ve ever known. A shiny guy, wandering back and forth, telling the audience that soon they would be experiencing the top notes of a fragrance, Beyond Paradise, which had been split up by the perfumer who created it for Esteé Lauder into “successive bits”. Watching [...]

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Nourishing arguments

September 22, 2008

It’s easy to laugh at Berkeley. So Right-on. So Convinced. So Radical. So Parochial. And yet, as I see it, they do seem to heading in the right direction. At least three links today persuade me of that. First, Ann Cooper, director of nutrition services for the Berkeley Unified School District. I listened to her [...]

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So I know that. So what?

September 19, 2008

Why is it hotter in summer than in winter? That was one of four science-ish questions that Jonathan Drori put to TED in February 2007. As it happens I knew the answer to that one and to the other three. Drori said that it was surprising how few people, including — gasp — MIT students, [...]

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Balls in the air

March 27, 2008

Enough with the melancholia accusations. This morning’s TedTalk put me in an entirely different frame of mind. Juggling! I love juggling. The Raspyni Brothers are so web 2.0! and funny with it. The best I’ve ever seen live were the Gandinis, ages ago at the Edinburgh Festival. The very notion of slo-mo juggling, the objects [...]

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Vive la difference

March 11, 2008

Philippe Starck knocks ‘em dead at TedTalk 2007. And all the time I’m watching, I’m thinking, “is this possibly how Eddie Izzard comes over in France?”. Laughs, yes, and pathos too, but somewhere, deep beneath the surface, some rather stimulating ideas.

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Listen to Africa

February 21, 2008

I’ve been devoting my morning and evening commutes to catching up with TEDTalks, which had been languishing since last autumn. Yesterday and today I was simply blown away by three in succession. George Ayittey: fire and brimstone Patrick Awuah: learning and leadership Chris Abani: laughter and hope Of course, to call them African is to [...]

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Did the fat man sing?

June 24, 2007

I have no idea what happened in the last episode of The Sopranos. As far as I am concerned, Christopher’s girlfriend has just been befriended by her FBI agent. One day, surely, I’ll catch up. As I caught up with NPR’s Pop Culture podcasts, however, I was struck by just how much attention the question [...]

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NPR on the mainline

June 19, 2007

I subscribe to three NPR podcasts; Popular Culture, Music, and Science and Medicine. It’s more than I can actually keep up with, because they are generally so interesting that I can’t simply leave them on in the background, as I generally could with Radio 4. So I have to actually listen. Sometimes there’s no time, [...]

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You can study love

December 3, 2006

Sitting on a long flight from Paris to DC, watching a Tedtalk by Helen Fisher. She’s a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University, and she has been studying love in its various guises; lust, romantic love and attachment (“so that you can stand living with someone”). A fine talk it was, which I was enjoying. [...]

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Stand up and be counted

October 5, 2006

Interesting times on the [tag]atheism[/tag] front. [tag]Martin Amis[/tag] is on top form in a wonderful essay called The Age of Horrorism. I can’t possibly do it justice, and wouldn’t dare to précis, so just go and read. (Part two and Part three.) Then there’s [tag]Richard Dawkins[/tag]‘ new book The God Delusion. I have not yet [...]

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Cry, baby? Die, baby.

September 6, 2006

The three threes. “Three hours a day, three days a week for three weeks.” That, apparently, is what parents have to go through to get a conventional diagnosis that their baby suffers colic. Just one little factoid from a podcast on NPR about a clinic in Rhode Island dedicated to colic. A trial that, as [...]

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First Podcast: The Field Part I

August 23, 2006

Brave new world. I’ve read all about how easy it is to foist podcasts on an unsuspecting audience, but never had the need, until now. And even now I am pretty sure that I do not fully understand the business of making the podcast available to subscribers. But I’m told that Feedburner will do the [...]

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What about fertility?

August 17, 2006

Amy Smith’s Tedtalk was really stimulating, especially the wrap up — if we were in Zambia, 300 of you would be farmers … and 100 of you would have AIDS. But there’s something a little disturbing about her thesis. Rewind. [tag]Amy Smith[/tag], a professor of engineering at MIT, invents stuff to help poor people in [...]

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Idiotribute

July 5, 2006

I’m sure there were others, but for me the tribute album thang started with A Vision Shared, a wonderful set of Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly songs. Since then the tribute album has become almost a genre of its own. Several feature prominently on my playlists. I don’t have Springsteen’s We Shall Overcome but I will [...]

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Thieving bastards

May 29, 2006

The Queen (R) and Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh, arrive at Kew Palace in Kew Gardens for a private family dinner to celebrate the Queen’s 80th birthday, April 21, 2006. REUTERS/Luke MacGregor What truly appalls me about the lead photo on Yahoo News UK & Ireland today is the sheer bare-faced cheek of them [...]

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Zoology of Numbers

May 26, 2006

Rebecca sends me to What’s special about this number, a total delight. And the first entry, under √-1, reminds me that I meant to thank the BBC’s In Our Time podcast on negative numbers, a few weeks back, for enlightening me about a road near where I live over in ScienceLand. Via. G. Cardano commemorates [...]

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Christianity been goin’ downhill since Constantine died

April 23, 2006

My venerable old 2G iPod — “ohmigod,” she gasped, “it’s so, so … huge” — has been giving me gyp in the headphone socket department, and just when I was becoming addicted to my podcasts. After one too many sessions of jiggling the plug just so, and knowing I won’t be able to handle delicate [...]

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Subsidized religion

April 6, 2006

I’d like to recommend Prof. Rodney Stark’s latest [tag]podcast[/tag]. Alas, I cannot. Not because of the ideas. The lecture continues his series on religion (blogged earlier) by looking at the rise of different religious groups in Rome, effectively making the case that the dead hand of state-subsidized religion permitted, and could not prevent, the widespread [...]

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Credible credo

March 30, 2006

I believe in Darwinism and evolution and biology. I believe in atheism. I believe you get one shot; the rest is dust. That’s my creed, and I’ve decided not to even bother defending it any more. A lot of ideas have been simmering away under this one. Like the survey that found Americans trust atheists [...]

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New entertainment

March 14, 2006

I do not consider myself an early adopter. Friends will snigger, but I am not all that much of a geek and I am usually a little way behind most crazes. Ahead of some, true, but not by all that much. I have a second generation iPod, for example, and I’m unlikely to upgrade until [...]

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