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 of cities without once mentioning food and how you get it from where it is produced to where it is consumed, seemed a bit of an oversight. Rather than complain at length, however, I’ll just suggest that anyone who feels the same way I do could do worse than watch Carolyn Steel’s Tedtalk How food shapes our cities. You too, Lord Bragg.

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 subscribe to through iTunes U.

So what am I building up to?

This: come on guys! How hard would it have been to have given us the images too? I don’t need the whole TedTalk multi-camera TV show manqué. Heck, I don’t even need to see the speaker’s lips move. But nor do I want to listen to them telling me to look at this green block of sequence, or those cute owlish eyes, or the other little known picture of the Beagle while I remain stubbornly in the dark. It’s even worse when the audience laughs uproariously at what’s on the screen. I feel so … neglected.

How hard would it have been to get the slides and sync them up to the talk? Easy peasy lemon squeezy. Tell you what, send me the presentations and I’ll do it for you, Darwin College. Tomorrow.

P.S. I’m even sadder to discover, after exercising due diligence in researching the links, that the “videos”, for example here, are also black blanks. The link says “watch online”, but why would I want to watch a black rectangle? Is it just me? I don’t believe so.

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 from the 12 December 2008 episode.

An item on Britain’s barmy house numbers, as some might put it, featured a totally inane justification for omitting the “unlucky” number 13, from local councillor Stephen Clee. He actually admits pandering to local prejudices:

“We have to listen to what the people say … The local community were saying to us, ‘we don’t like living at number 13, so can we do something about it.’ … That’s why we introduced a policy to not use that particular number.”

Listen for yourself:

So, if the local community said, instead, we don’t like living next to Pakis, or gay people, or people who use wheelchairs, would it be OK to have an official policy listening to that too?

Kudos then to the few local authorities that, like Edinburgh City Council, state that “in all instances, the number 13 is never omitted”.

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 not very tidy. So Wehrli tidies it up. And he is very, very funny with it. As soon as I stopped spluttering long enough to tell The Squeeze she asked “What’ll he do with Jackson Pollock?”. I couldn’t think. But do him he does, although I won’t give the game away. He also does some older pieces, including a Breughel and Vincent’s bedroom at Arles: “At least now you can do some vacuuming.”

Why is this so funny? Because we all know about the Swiss and orderliness. Wehrli plays on his own Swissness beautifully. But also because we share in the joke; these are not obscure works. They are well known, and we “ought” to appreciate them, even if we don’t fully understand them. I wouldn’t be surprised if lots of people actually find the tidied up versions more attractive. I know I did, at least for some of them.

That may also be why Einstein’s untidy allotment is sprouting all over the blogosphere. Can the person with the famously untidy hair also have had a famously untidy plot? Yes, and this seems to be where it started.

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 them on the iPod, I don’t often miss not being there for a TedTalk. But this was unfair. I soon forgot that.

Luca Turin addressed one of the neuroscience questions that has always puzzled me: how do we detect smell? Why does one molecule smell like this and another like that? The prevailing view, so prevailing that no alternatives exist on an industry website, is that there’s a kind of lock-and-key mechanism. The shape of the odorant fits the shape of a receptor and triggers it to fire. The brain interprets the pattern of impulses as a particular smell. I’ve honestly never felt too comfortable with this. So many molecules, so many smells, so few receptors.

Turin also doesn’t believe the shape theory. He unearthed another theory, that the vibrational frequency of a molecule is what triggers the receptor. And he presented some evidence. Molecules with very similar shapes — but different “notes”, to deliberately abuse the perfumers’ term — that smelled very different. And molecules with the same note, but different shapes, that smelled the same. Better yet, he put his money where his mouth is, and started a company to make odorants to order. Turin talked about the search for a substitute for coumarin, which has a manly kind of warm hay tobacco smell and is a carcinogen. They found a molecule with a rather different shape but the same vibrational pattern, and it smelled like … warm hay tobacco: coumarin.

The big point is that tonkene, as they called it, after the Tonka bean that is a primary source of coumarin, is not carcinogenic, and is exactly what the fragrance industry wanted. They frankly couldn’t give a stuff whether it vibrates or is shaped just right. It does what they need it to, and they’re prepared to pay for it.

That, I think, was Turin’s big point. It’s interesting to know exactly how the molecules talk to the brain, and he even had a stab at suggesting how vibrational energy triggers a response in the cell, but in the end what really counts is being able to make predictions that are borne out in the real world. The battle between shape and vibration is not over yet, but while the shape guys don’t really have a predictive theory of anything, the vibration guys do, and can use it.

I started off upset that I was missing something in Turin’s TedTalk, and ended up feeling that this was one of the few TedTalks I’ve experienced that wasn’t long enough.