Edgy podcast reviews

I hope one day Daniel Sellers is going to explain to us why Jana Selllers and he chose such a tough name for their podcast review podcast. As I see it, the name came about in stages. It started more simply as That Podcast Show, which had as a weak point that it could be about anything, but on the other side had something cheeky. I mean THAT podcast show, sounds like the show you and I need to talk about - right. Then they added Edgy Reviews From. This made clear it was a review show. But why Edgy? And why so long: Edgy Reviews from That Podcast Show.

The name aside, this is THE podcast review podcast around. Its scope is vast - much vaster than mine. ERFTPS are ready to cover all podcasts, everything, anything, that is out there. Only, there need to be at least 10 episodes out and maybe a couple of tiny admission prerequisites, that probably most podcasts cover.

Since my last writing about them, they have reviewed 18 more podcasts. The team on the show, temporarily is Daniel and Sue, because Jana is on maternity leave. (Daniel and Jana create more than just podcasts.) Here are the latest 18.

1. The Kitchen Sink 
2. Cruising Authority
   
3. Roadcast Radio
   
4. My Living Room! Radio Show Podcast (also at Anne is a Man )
   
5. MetroBuzz
   
6. Real Talk (also at Anne is a Man )
   
7. Cue the Film
   
8. That’s What She Said: The Office
   
9. The Office Alliance Podcast
10. Planned Brotherhood 
11. D6 Generation
    
12. Wine for Newbies
    
13. Wikipedia Weekly  
14. Zune Insider
    
15. Common Sense with Dan Carlin (also at Anne is a Man)
    
16. Blogs, Views, and Blues 
17. Camera Dojo
    
18. Space Podcast
    

Douglas Adams - Making history with Ran Levi

The latest show of Making History with Ran Levi (עושים היסטוריה עם רן לוי) was done with the regular professionalism, but with an added element of joy and love. Ran Levy discussed on his show writer, comedian, scientist and visionary the late Douglas Adams. Answer: 42. Credo: Don't Panic. Advise: Never leave home without your towel.

The listeners were signaled in advance and phoned in with their explanations why they loved Douglas Adams. Ran Levi chipped in and while maintaining his academic qualities, didn't hide his own love for Adams. He went through the biography, making excursions into the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, other works of Adams, and, this is a history of science show after all: science.

How did Adams take elementary ideas out of science and technology and apply them in his life and in his stories. How did he see the potential before others did. A vibrating podcast in the series.

More Making History:
Sophie Germain,
Max Planck,
Isaac Newton,
Making History with Ran Levy - Hebrew Review

Terror and Consent - UChannel podcast review

The University Channel Podcast (aka UChannel) reran a lecture at the London School of Economics by Philip Bobbitt, who is hailed to be the most important thinker on issues of geopolitics and terror these days. Bobbitt wrote a book Terror and Consent: The Wars for the Twenty-First Century and was invited to explain his writings.

Terror, Bobbitt teaches, is a war method, not any particular army, movement or ideology. Terror, he argues, will be used in numerous conflicts to come. The wars against terror have only begun and they didn't begin at 9/11, the began in 1990. When the Soviet Union fell apart, the wars on terror became the successor conflict of the Cold War.

What marks the era of wars on terror, is that the are fought in the arena of everyday life. Terror doesn't disrupt the state, it doesn't even harm as many citizens as weird accidents, but it disrupts common security, it disrupts the market. War on terror are not like wars in the past, but they do require a force (army in his view, police in some other's) to protect security, to prevent breaches of human rights and inhumane living conditions and the prevention of the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction.

A lot of what he says seems rather common place. A major discussion is, whether the tasks at hand are tasks for army or law enforcement. It is insightful to have issues of security (terror per se), market, human rights and conditions and the proliferation of WMD's together in one package.

More UChannel:
Nudge: improving decisions and behavior,
Hot, Flat and Crowded,
In 2050,
The Arab-Israeli Conflict,
Civilization and the Hills.

Get your podcast courses before they are gone

Here is a short post about the UCSD podcasts. As every end of the quarter, the university will clean up the feeds and whatever course you had been following, or wanted to follow, or was considering to follow, will be gone. Forever. Go to the UCSD podcast page now and preemptively subscribe to any course you might want to try later and get all, each and every, lectures now, before the season closes.

Courses I have followed:
MMW 4 New Ideas / Clash of Cultures
MMW 4T Understanding / Pre-Modern World (be aware, most files are empty)
POLI 113A East Asian Thought / Comparative Perspective

Course recommended by Dara from Do It Yourself Scholar
VIS 22 Formations of Modern Art

But there are lots and lots more!

The Depression - EconTalk podcast review

These days there are plenty of podcasts taking one economic take or another at the current economic downturn that is going on. I am not sure yet whether it may already be sufficiently termed a depression, but surely it is repeatedly compared with The Depression of the 1930's. Very few, however, take a comparative delve into the 1930's depression.

The latest edition of EconTalk is an exception to that (EconTalk podcast feed). In this chapter Russ Roberts speaks with Eric Rauchway the author of The Great Depression and the New Deal: A Very Short Introduction. The one hour talk makes a couple of points about later economic crises, but first of all thoroughly describes what went wrong in The Depression, starting with 1919.

1919 is a bit of an unexpected starting point, yet, with it being the date of the Treaty of Versailles, it is almost naturally the starting point of nearly everything in the twentieth century. While kicking off, Rauchway uses Keynes to say something about pre-1914 Europe that I have heard mention before, but never so neatly and never so specific to economics: Before the Great War, the world and most notably Europe, was a kind of free trading zone, allowing for a global economy and this was killed off by 1919. And the world would revert back into isolationism, until only recently. In broad terms, this development lays the basis to the Depression. There is of course much more and much is comparable to today, but this starting point was a great refreshing insight which makes the podcast right from the get go.

More EconTalk:
Wildlife, Property and Poverty.

Heat - BBC and Berkeley podcasts

BBC's In Our Time is the weekly program that from subject to subject reveals some aspect of the history of ideas. Obviously the history of science and scientific theory and discovery is also vbery relevatn. Hence, from time to time, In Our Time delves into a physics subject, as this week with Heat. In some ways this proved to be a bit of a confusing program. I'll come back to the strength of it, but first of all want to turn to another podcast which much more effectively explains why heat is so difficult to grasp and what it, in modern theory, actually is.

This podcast is Berkeley's returning, math-free,Physics for future Presidents which is named in the fall of 2008 Letters and Science and receives a new name virtually every semester, but is best titled Physics for future Presidents after all (as in the fall of 2006). Around the third and the fourth lecture, professor Richard Muller, in easy steps explains heat and runs the basics of atomic theory, which eventually is needed to capture the modern framework in which heat is understood. With that baggage we can turn back to the more historically oriented In Our Time edition.

So, the strength of In Our Time is to tell the history of how we deconstructed heat and how we came to understand it apart from temperature and heat flows. It gives the names and dates that Muller does not give. It also shows how this scientific development goes hand in hand with practical application in the technologies that sprout the industrial revolution. And what the industrial revolution actually is, for this you must turn back to Berkeley's History 5 . (see: Industrialization and Agricultural Revolution)

More In Our Time:
Baroque,
Neuroscience,
Simon Bolivar,
The Translation Movement,
Miracles.

More Physics for future Presidents:
Letters and Science
Roswell New Mexico,
Nukes,
Hydrogen versus Gasoline.