Oxford University Press has a Dictionary of National Biographies which probably is also available in print, but can be accessed on-line at a premium. It contains biographies of some sixty thousand people in British history, from 400 BC to today. For promotion they have a podcast every fortnight Oxford Biographies that delivers spoken biographies in seven to fifteen minutes. (feed)
By now a wide variety of free audio biographies have accumulated and if they not appear all in the feed, you can find them in thematic sections on the website.
The most recent of the biographies was a very interesting one about Roald Dahl. I loved reading Roald Dahl all my life, but knew next to nothing about his life. The biography serves that purpose and makes connections between the facts of his life and his work. Dahl emerges with an expected contrary nature, but with a few unexpected opinions and remarks.
The latest video on the vodcast Feed Me Bubbe shows how to make an eggplant lasagna (episode #30). I am not sure if I am going to make the lasagna, but I am definitely going to experiment with what I learnt from Bubbe about eggplant. I like cooking with eggplant a lot, but have struggled with getting it right.
First off, Bubbe tells what aubergine to choose: not too big - those contain a lot of seeds. The seeds, if not bitter, they are a less pleasant look in your dish, so it helps to have fewer. Then, she gives the most interesting idea to get rid of the bitterness of the vegetable. She peels it - I would never do that, unless for a sour eggplant soup - and then puts the pieces in a colander (new English word to learn!) under a dish with a weight on it. Thus she presses some of the juice out. It is the juice, she claims that is bitter.
I must check that, but there is another advantage she acquires by her handling of the pieces. She treats them with salt and rinses them afterward and claims that thanks to this procedure, the pieces will soak up less oil when fried. That is also very important. Eggplant is a sponge that has few calories by itself, but can take in so much oil when frying, you have to keep adding and wind up with a fatty, saturated dish.
Show #30 is not (yet) available for embedding, so this is another video from the makers of Feed Me Bubbe.
Oxford University is commemorating a hundred years since the birth of the philosopher and historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin. For the occasion there is a special podcast which contains a number of lectures by Berlin. I have reviewed one on Moses Hess and here I would like to point to DIY Scholar, who has reviewed one on Jean-Jacques Rousseau.
Also the Australian broadcaster ABC paid attention to the centenary and aired a conversation with Isaiah Berlin on Philosopher's Zone, which was also podcast. Before this they had invited John Gray to speak about Isaiah Berlin, which was also a great listen.
Back to the Oxford series. That series closed with a lecture by Alan Ryan who did a wonderful job in trying to capture Isaiah Berlin. (Oxford on iTunesU, iTunes feed)
Occasionally I have run into the cooperation between the BBC and The Open University at Open2.net. I should engage one day in a systematic search for the podcasts over there. Until then, here is one among them I discovered when I researched my review of Michael Sandel's appearance at Philosophy Bites. As it turns out, Dave Edmonds and Nigel Warburton have made a podcast for Open2.net under the name Ethics Bites (feed). Ethics Bites seems to have podfaded, but the feed is still accessible and full of great content.
I have listened to the last two episodes, Free Speech and The ethics of Climate Change. These interviews are conducted along the same lines as Philosophy Bites, where Nigel Warburton interviews the guest and in around a quarter they summon up the field. James Garvey's remarks on climate change, gives a good inventory of what the dilemmas are and this is ethics that is immediately relevant for politics. Garvey, in this respect, is very outspoken and even if you think prejudiced, the podcast forces us to ponder.
The talk with Tim Scanlon about Free Speech was especially useful for me, because of the added attention I have given lately to podcasts with Michael Sandel, John Gray and Isaiah Berlin. The subject of freedom and the evaluation of John Stuart Mill has turned out to be a returning subject in all of these. Tim Scanlon's appearance on Ethics Bites touched on Mill and Freedom as well, thus greatly contributing to the overall picture.
TVO's podcast Big Ideas had a fantastic lecture by Don Tapscott in which he laid out how learning has drastically changed since we entered the digital era. The generation of people born as of 1978 have grown up with computers and the internet and developed a radical different approach to knowledge, learning and intellectual exchange in general.
The essence of Tapscott's message is though that this is not necessarily bad. Quite to the contrary, he shows a lot of admiration for the new learners and expresses the hope that this new generation is actually better at handling the challenges of the day. In his mind, the former learners were too passive for this. Growing up with TV, frontal education and information gathered in books, made earlier generations wait for knowledge to arrive and take it at face value. Modern learners immediately compare and actively collect information.
His favorite example is that of an excellent student who admits he never reads books and thus on the face of it symbolizes how our intellectual world goes down the drain. Yet, Tapscott follows up on this and shows what the student is capable of and extracts from him how he does acquire knowledge and even knows what is in the books he did not read. This is the lecture for all those who fear our youth goes down the drain and feels guilty for wasting ones time on the internet in stead of learning the good old fashioned way.
In my days as a student I have learned a little bit of cultural anthropology. Thanks to a course on Berkeley I have learned much of the missing component in my knowledge, that of biology. Aptly, the course is called An introduction to Biological Anthropology, or simply anthropology 1. As in number 1, the course to kick anthropology off. (feed)
So it is really the basics that I lacked and were added here. The importance of evolution for the human beings and their social behavior. The way in which human evolved and what all of this means for humanity today. It is something that I completely overlooked, that the rural habitat seems an eternity for man in comparison with industrial and urban modernity. However, in terms of evolution, these are a blip on the human clock and this essentially means, man is physically shaped to be a hunter gatherer.
Nevertheless, and this is the strength of the course and I recommend especially the last lectures for this subject, the recent developments of agriculture and industrialization are still significant biologically. They imply a radical change of the habitat and consequently completely different constraints on genetic developments. So even if our history is too recent and almost too short for out biology, there is an effect. All of this leads to better understanding of human beings and their society.
By now a wide variety of free audio biographies have accumulated and if they not appear all in the feed, you can find them in thematic sections on the website.
