Pod Thoughts

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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