Pod Thoughts

Trying not to feel guilty about misunderstanding shame

April 2, 2012

Garret Hardin’s idea that the emotion of shame can help to manage a common resource has always been a favourite for me. Up to 150 people, as Hardin suggested, can help one another do the right thing (for them all) by instilling a feeling of shame in transgressors. Seems he and I have been wrong. [...]

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Oi! RoySoc! Do it right!

February 22, 2012

I heard this woman from Southampton University give a talk called History of the Web Part I to the Royal Society, and it was quite good, even though, possibly even because, there were a couple of things I disagreed with. And being a glass half full sort of guy, most of the time, we could [...]

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Like a bird on a wire

August 2, 2011

Time was when a blogger in search of inspiration looked no further than the search terms people brought with them. Me too. Today, though, I happened to delve into my muck filter and discovered the schizoid spammer pictured above. So am I appreciated, or despised? You be the judge. In any case, inspiration is often [...]

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Malthus revisited, again

June 25, 2011

Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time on BBC Radio 4 is unfailingly interesting. Even sub-par episodes are head and shoulders above most other discussion programme. This week’s episode, on Malthusianism, was no exception, being full of insights into the background and context of Malthus’ famous Essay on the Principle of Population. I learned much, not least [...]

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Climate refugees examined

May 12, 2011

More or Less is one of my favourite programmes on BBC Radio Four. Not for the presentation style, which for me sometimes grates like fingernails on a blackboard, but for what they present, which makes it well worth getting beyond the style to the substance. And last week’s episode was particularly good for its first [...]

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Coins aren’t random, thumbs are

February 1, 2011

Listening to Lord Bragg and his guests discussing random and pseudorandom numbers taught me a thing or two, and raised a couple of “issues”. One, trivial, can be dismissed at once: why was there no discussion of the amazing prescience of the shuffle function on so many people’s iPods? Because it interests no-one except the [...]

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Want to know more about the revolution

January 12, 2011

Melvyn Bragg’s two recent programmes on the industrial revolution were entertaining, informative and thought-provoking. Entertaining because Melvyn going full-tilt for one of his guests is always a pleasure, and Pat Hudson gave as good as she got. Was Britain, especially in the north, away from the impractical doodlings of the Royal Society, a hotbed of [...]

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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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