My online friend Jason roped me into doing a two white dudes chatting podcast (with a difference) and I'm really enjoying it. ¹ The show is called Why Can't We ... ? and, as I say, I'm enjoying doing it immensely.

Now, you may consider that first paragraph marketing. The funny thing is, it also plays directly into our third episode: Podcast Directories. Why can't we get better recommendations of new (to us) podcasts to listen to?

There's a long and throughly-researched article at Mosaic, ¹ the Wellcome Trust's website, explaining Why the calorie is broken. The standfirst expands:

Calories consumed minus calories burned: it’s the simple formula for weight loss or gain. But dieters often find that it doesn’t work.

T...

There was a bit of noise about dead air recently on ADN that reminded me of one of the best bits of the recent Hearsay 2015 audio festival in Ireland. Dead air, in case you didn't know, is silence, usually on broadcast radio, but the term has been adopted for podcasts, which is radio to all intents and purposes. It is far more prevalent in podcasts because people can be very lazy about going back and doing even cursory editing to get rid of those long pauses while someone thinks of something witty to say.

Let's get one thing out of the way at the outset. I have no idea who is responsible for "history is written by the X," where X is any one of a number of synonyms for victors. The internet will give you lots of options: Napoleon, Walter Benjamin, Adolf Hitler, Winston Churchill, Pliny the Elder. I'm going to go with Walter Benjamin, because it suits my purposes.

There are quite a few podcasts that I keep an eye on but do not actually subscribe to. One of those is Econtalk, and recently I spotted a couple of things there that looked interesting enough to mark for listening. Rachel Laudan talked to Russ Roberts about the ideas in her book Cuisine and Empire, and as she's an old cyber-friend and previous guest on my own podcast, I was keen to hear what she had to say.