The History of Islam podcast

The most essential history podcast right now must be The History of Islam podcast (feed) by Elias Belhaddad. Current affairs have a very palpable presence of Islam and much of the history since the rise of Islam (and it rose at lightning speed) has a strong presence of Islam. Yet most historiography (and podcasts as well) can only offer the perspective from without. Yet, as we are in crisis with Islam (and maybe we always were) it seems without a doubt extremely important to acquire understanding of Islam. I certainly feel that way.

Elias Belhaddad clearly has set this as a goal: to inform about Islam and convey its perspective to his audience. The consequence of this is that while we have proceeded 14 episodes into the series, we have only just now arrived at Muhammad and he is about to leave for Medina. Belhaddad has deliberately spent most of his time until this point in laying out the groundwork for what he sees is indispensable for understanding the world and people from which Muhammad and Islam came about.

He has invested in explaining the environment of the Arabian Penninsula and how the harsh nature designates the mentality and life style of the Arab peoples. Then he has gone through great lengths laying out the history of the Quraysh clan, how they came to control Mecca and from there on along the lineage down till Muhammad.

He is clearly passionate about the subject, he has great admiration for the Arab people (though not without criticism), he knows his Arabic and personally I assume he is a Muslim, although he has not divulged any such details about himself which is his full right of course.

Hence this is a podcast of great relevance, done with passion and with much purpose. In addition his audio is good and his delivery is much to my liking. Nevertheless I keep wondering with each and every episode: why is this important? What is the take away message? I am sure Elias has a clear idea where he wants to go, and why he narrates the way he does, but he reveals very little of it. Maybe he feels this keeping of the cards to his chest is an advantage, but I wager, the podcast would gain in depth if he were to be transparent on his decisions of what to put in, what to leave out and what it is he wants to make clear in particular.

A podcast on climate, energy and food - Saeed Ahmed guest post

I am very happy and proud to present you another guest post by Saeed Ahmed. Saeed is a psychiatrist, a Pakistani by origin who lives and works in the US, where he has also received his professional training. He is a very thorough podcast listener, taking on themes and building wide playlists around them. Or he takes on podcast university courses and carefully goes through the whole series.

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Despite the fact that food and energy are probably the two most important "things" (after air and water) for us to live, a remarkably small number of available academic podcasts have focused on these. Classes on environment may mention or perhaps spend a few lectures on these, but in general these don't get a comprehensive treatment. Furthermore it is shocking how few non-academic podcasts are devoted to these topics, although you'll find science podcasts will cover these sporadically.

It may be of some interest to podcast listeners to check out BIBC 140: "Introduction to Biofuels" by Stephen Mayfield, currently offered from UCSD (feed). As with other UCSD podcasts, if you are interested in this, get it now, before it might disappear (although I hope it is one of the one's they retain, and both the material and delivery is excellent.

Everyone has heard of global warming by now (despite the best efforts of Fox News), but how many people realize that this is the century when many things we take for granted will start to run out? Peak oil in the US occured in the 1970s, and worldwide peak oil is probably occurring now (there is some dispute about this, because for a variety of reasons, oil-producing countries and companies are not very transparent about the reserves they control). But peak oil isn't all we have to worry about; there is peak coal, and peak gas, and peak phosporus. Peak phosphorus? Turns out it is may become one of the rate limiters in food production. Food and fuel are more tied together than ever before. The reason food is comparatively cheap is because of fossil fuel. Locovores may be on to something, despite what some pundits say, who discount the transportation element, which is going to become much more expensive. On the flip side, renewables aren't cost-effective yet. But things are improving. Storage, intermittency, and grid issues limit growth here. At some point in the not to distant future, they will catch up economically.

Mayfield covers these topics and their interrelationships systematically and comprehensively, occasionally with the help of other lecturers. It seems to, given where we are in the early part of the 21st century, we may all benefit from learning about this material (even if much of it is very scary). In addition, I believe that after listening to these lectures, many items in the news and market trends become much more comprehensible, and often faulty analyses by medial talking-heads become more apparent.

Ian Morris at SALT Seminars (The Long Now)

We have encountered Ian Morris before on this blog when I reviewed his appearance on Radio Open Source. Also his lecture at SALT Seminars (aka The Long Now Podcast) comes forth from his book Why the West Rules for Now.You will get the same point again, how geography shapes history in general and how in particular the West profited from the circumstance it was closer to the Americas than China. Morris is a great speaker, so even if you are not immediately drawn to this subject, you are bound to enjoy this audio (feed). You can also see the lecture in video, which comes at a premium, but in my opinion not much is gained by the visuals.

What you can learn from this lecture by Ian Morris is not just how the West pulled ahead of the rest of the world and what the set of circumstances were to trigger this and how this in his opinion worked. His view is a general theory of history and therefore the approach, with such a prominent role of geography, can explain much more than just the rise (and impending fall) of the west. For example, as you can learn from the Q&A session at the end, it also explains how the peoples of the steppe rose to become dominant and what next development neutralized their relative advantage.

Mind, this theory is not just about geography. People's scientific, technological and cultural achievements are also crucial, yet Morris claims that every human advance is rapidly copied all over the world, neutralizing the social advantages and setting the balance back to a geographically determined stacking of the cards. However, the new technologies do cause certain geographic criteria to become more or alternatively less important. As to the main point, not until ocean travel becomes technically available, the distance to the Americas is not a relevant factor to set the west apart from the east.

More SALT (Long Now):
Quick podcast reviews,
Disappearing cultures - Wade Davis,
Ran Levi about The Long Now,
The Long Now Podcast.

Money, finance and an unexpected link in history

When you learn about finance, you do not exactly expect to find out new data about Florence in the Renaissance or about the Dutch revolt against the Spanish in the 16th century. But it just happened to me.

This morning I was continuing my listening in on the Berkeley Lecture series Geography C110. As I have written before, this is a course in economics with excursions in to history, geography and politics. For all who tend to shy away from economics - this might just be the course that is going to do it for you. And for all those who like geography; eventually this is geography, but there is a lot of economics to take. (feed) And then there is history...

The first few lectures had a lot of history and after that, we sort of reached the late modern era and the lecturer, Professor Walker, spent more time in laying out the economics and their geography as we experience them today. He systematically went through the economics of areas, from global capitalism all the way down to city economies and discussed production and labor and then reached finance. And finance is not the easiest part of the course, as money is eventually abstract and the mechanics of it are often counterintuitive and the terminologies inconsistent.

So you might as well skip finance. However, now that we live in a world with a financial melt-down, the interest is renewed and some of the shady mechanics are more self-explanatory as we have seen them in action (and fail). And where did this strange abstract world come from? Walker explains how it is thoroughly modern, but finds its roots in late medieval Europe. And then in lecture 19 throws a couple of statements about history that are worth pondering: The Medici family started out as bankers and financed the Florence government and this is how they got to control the city themselves. And: the bankers from the Netherlands (this includes nowadays Belgium) financed the Habsburgs and when the Habsburgs defaulted, the Dutch revolted.

The bit about the Dutch Revolt seems a bit off. I have read and listened to quite a lot about the Revolt and never found this bit. However, I wouldn't rule out that if the Habsburgs defaulted to banks in Antwerp this would have added to the grievances.

Geography C110 - Berkeley

This lecture course is about history, geography and economics all merged into one didactic presentation and it has me very excited. This is the way I like to be taught history, or economics and geography for that matter. Professor Richard Walker is a captivating, outspoken and effective lecturer who gets the job done very well, time and again. We are talking about the course Geography C110, Economic Geography of the Industrial World at Berkeley, which I have praised before and is being taught again this semester. (feed)

In case you have done some following in previous semesters, you still may consider following again as Walker makes numerous references to what is currently going on in politics and economics. He has a wonderful talent to clarify the interactive mechanics of regions (geography), economics, politics and historic developments. Not only does this make for a very integrated and comprehensive course in modern history - from the industrialization until today. It also explains a lot about what is going on today, whether it is the financial crisis, the rise of China and India (or not), the downfall of Europe and its creature the EU (or not) and the stagnating hegemony of the US as well as failing states and developing states.

The only question I have is: how well does this course work for listeners who do not have a clear view on the historical narrative of modern states and economy, of a map of the world and the specifics of its regions and the mechanics of macro-economics? For me, this course is a beautiful welding of these three separate disciplines into one whole picture. If you are fuzzy on some of the elements, will that help explain more, or will it cause you to drop out and fail to follow what Walker is on about? Can I get some comments on that?

By the way, if you want to see the power points, Walker promises in his first lecture to send them to anyone who applies for it by email to him. walker@berkeley.edu

More Geography c110:
Geography C110 - Berkeley Lecture series 2008.

Also recommended in this respect:
Geography of World Cultures, (review, site:Stanford on iTunes U, feed).
Enhanced podcast (maps are added to the audio) about the spread of languages and religions in the world. We see that the political and cultural boundaries are not the same as the boundaries of language and religion.

Global Geopolitics (review, site:Stanford on iTunes U, feed).
Martin Lewis systematically discusses, in nine lectures, all areas on the globe and disclose the problems in geopolitics. Enhanced podcast (maps are added to the audio).

Geography 130 (Berkeley) Natural Resources and Population (review, site, feed)
Lecture series that explains how our earth is populated, why it is populated the way it is, how we use our resources and in the process we come to understand how the system is strained.

After the Cup - Africa past and Present

Africa Past and Present is a richly varied podcast with conversation about all kinds of subjects related to Africa. Specialists are invited on the show to shed their light in their realm of expertise. The podcast is produced at Michigan State University by the historians Peter Alegi and Peter Limb. It is not just about the continent itself, but also about African influence elsewhere, whether by virtue of the African population living abroad or otherwise. (feed)

I have occasionally pointed at this podcast in the past and I continuously keep an eye on the feed ready to pick up a subject that connects with my interests. This came up with the latest issue where the meaning of the World Cup for Africa was discussed. The conversation was recorded on the eve of the final of the World Cup 2010 in South-Africa. There is some discussion of football, especially about the Ghana team, but mostly about the feat of organizing the tournament for South-Africa in particular and Africa in general.

The greatest concern, also in other media, is how the huge economic investments will pan out. The podcast mentions Greece as an example and makes a connection between Greece's current financial crisis and its organizing of the Summer Olympics 2004. It is pointed out that the World Cup, though big, is not as huge as the Olympics and it is assumed South-Africa learned from the Greek mistakes. Yet, the financial outcome still has to be figured out, the reputation of South-Africa and even Africa in general, has greatly benefited from the World Cup.

More Africa Past and Present:
Podcast Review: Africa Past and Present.

More Africa:
Desmond Tutu,
New weeds in Africa,
Atlantic History,
World History between 100 BCE and 1200 CE,
Sudan and the fallacy of statehood.

The Caucasus

As usual, Marshall Poe did a fascinating interview at New Books In History and it reminded me of two old university lecture series from Stanford you can still get on iTunes. Guest on the show was Charles King to speak about his book The Ghost of Freedom which attempts to tackle the history of the Caucasus.

Poe lets King explain how intricate and unusual it is to write a history book that focuses on a geographically defined place and a large one at that. Also, the Caucasus is an area with a complicated history torn between many different ethnicities and influenced from three very different imperial or cultural spheres: the Turkish, the Russian and the Persian. Besides, this is not a place we are particularly familiar with and so it is even more difficult to find our way in the labyrinth. Here is where the Stanford course lends a helping hand.

Martin Lewis offered two series of enhanced podcasts which also made a stop at the Caucasus. Geography of World Cultures (feed) and Global Geopolitics (feed) which were taught in 2007 and 2008 at Stanford. With the help of maps (added to the enhanced podcast) Lewis dove into the spread of cultures, languages and religions in this mountain range. On top of that, he offered a passage to the geopolitical tensions of the area, and there are not a few. I add the Caucasus map from the series about World Cultures (part of lecture 6).

Marshall Poe picks out three dualities from the Caucasus and lets Charles King elaborate upon them. These are relationships between locals and one of the big neighbors and King describes how they are close and strained of late. Those are the relationships of the Georgians with the Russians, of the Armenians with the Turks and of Azerbaijan with Iran.

More NBIH:
The genocide and the trial,
Nation and Culture,
Three New Books In History,
The fourth part of the world,
How the Soviet system imploded.

More Martin Lewis:
Guantanamo Bay,
Africa,
Descriptive and prescriptive mapping,
Global Geopolitics - Martin Lewis,
A listener's guide to Geography of World Cultures.

Good climate for everyone - UChannel on global warming

I had never thought there would be something like climate engineering until I heard a podcast from UChannel Podcast. Daniel Schrag of the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Harvard University was invited to speak about this subject at Princeton University, the home ground of UChannel Podcast. Climate engineering is what the word suggests: technological interference with the earth's climate and this is neither science fiction nor a list of possible measures that are all too expensive to contemplate.

There is little talk of what can be done, because, naturally the talk focuses on the ethics of the subject. If we can, should we be allowed. Or as Schrag has it, if we can and the dangers of global warming are as great as we can possibly fear, then maybe we must. But Schrag is no ethicist, he is a geologist, so he is most at ease and informative when dealing with the relevant facts. A bit of what can be done and a whole lot of what range of challenges and dangers are involved with global warming and the science of predicting its effects.

The magnitude of the subject is overwhelming and I must admit, I have an intuitive reaction against climate engineering. I think, messing with the environment got us in the bad shape we are in, do we need more messing. Promising a Mediterranean climate for everyone sounds worse than too good to be true, it sounds like the words of the sorcerer's apprentice. Schrag pays attention to these intuitions and replies to them. His tendency, as stated above: the situation is so bad, we have no choice. It is like applying a tourniquet to prevent us from bleeding to death. Indeed, you wouldn't apply a tourniquet to a healthy person. Question remains: do we really know how sick we are?

More UChannel Podcast:
Robots and War,
Sudan and the fallacy of nationhood,
Against intervention,
Lakhdar Brahimi on Afghanistan and Iraq,
Europe versus Islam.

Do you like the blog Anne is a Man? You can show your appreciation by participating in the Anne is a Man - support the blog campaign. You only have to click the link as a means of saying: 'I like what you do, keep doing it.' Over 30 people have already done this before you.

Anne is a Man recommends podcasts for Blog Action Day 2008

In my last post for the day, I want to point you to a number of podcast series that deliver a lot of relevant content for today's subject, poverty. Some of them had a specific episode mentioned today, but some of them not. However, these podcasts, mostly university lectures, are of high quality and very relevant even if they are more general, that is addressing Economics or Geography and no specific poverty subject. This is my chance to steer you towards those podcasts as well.

General economics and politics podcasts I would like to recommend are
Economics 100B (Berkeley) (review, site, feed)
The Economist (review, site, feed)
EconTalk (review, site, feed)

In addition, there are a number of great geography podcasts that cast a lot of insight on how poverty related subjects work such as industrialization, resources, population rise and decline and geopolitcs:
Geography 110 (Berkeley) Economic Geography of the Industrial World (review, site, feed)
Geography 130 (Berkeley) Natural Resources and Population (review, site, feed)
Global Geopolitics (Stanford) (review, site, feed)

Lastly, there are a number of podcasts that bring a new subject with each episode and among those there are many excellent and relevant ones:
UChannel Podcast (review, site, feed)
LSE Podcast (review, site, feed)
CFR Podcast (review, site, feed)
Social Innovation Conversations (review, site, feed)
Open Source (review, site, feed)
Big Ideas (review, site, feed)

Happy listening.

Geography of Europe - Arizona State University

On iTunes U, at the Arizona State University, I found an undergraduate course Geography of Europe. (feed) This is available on podcast - this is how I went through the lectures. When you begin to follow, it becomes clear that there must be a video version somewhere, but possibly only for ASU students. There are visuals, but the podcast can easily be followed, even with minimal knowledge of Europe.

What is exceptional about this course, is that it is a new media course to begin with. The lecturer, Dr. Duncan Shaeffer, records the course from a studio, without an audience. From the explanations in the first podcast, I understood, that this course can be followed and credits can be acquired following, by iPod or video, in your own time. I assume there are some access requirements, but I did not pay attention to that. If you are just interested in the study credit, but just the content of the course, skip the first lecture.

The course is very long, some 60 lectures and goes over the following subjects in consecutive chunks of lectures: the physical environment, population, languages, religion, economy, tourism and services and geopolitics. This allows for you to pick out a section by theme. No matter which subject you take up, the speed at which the lecture proceeds is very slow. The course operates on a low level and each lecture takes a long time, a lot of arguments, to make a point. For example, the entire second lecture is dedicated to arguing Europe is not a separate continent from Asia.

For me, the course was too long winded. I am a European and consequently, most data were trivial to me and I couldn't stand to go through hours and hours of these basics. For those unfamiliar and in need of a comprehensive and complete introduction to Europe, this may serve quite well.

(Picture by NASA)

More GeographyMore geography:
Economic Geography of the Industrial World,
Global Geopolitics,
Geography of World Cultures,
Natural Resources and Population,
Plate Tectonics.

Geography C110 - Berkeley Lecture series

There is a Geography course on Berkeley's Webcasts called Economic Geography of the Industrial World (link) by Professor Richard A. Walker. The list of subjects look very promising. It looks very economic also, but in the first lecture Walker emphasizes the geographical nature of the course. This means, less equations than to be expected in economics and more importance attributed to geographical notions such as regions, resources and so on.

The first lecture is also an expose about crisis and Walker claims he has been able to explain and even predict the most economic crises of the last decades. His analysis, if not convicing, at least shows how regions are important. The housing crises, now and the one of the early nineties, he demonstrates, occurred in very specific and even roughly the same areas and left the rest of the country rather unaffected. What he goes on to explain about price and credit developments not only sounds completely economic, but also the dynamic doesn't seem to me entirely alien to what economic models show.

So it is going to be really interesting to see how this claim of geography on economic issues will develop. The course is easy to follow, even if you miss out on the graphs Walker shows. I am definitely goign to sit this one out until the end. When relevant, I will write more reviews.

More geography:
Global Geopolitics,
Geography of World Cultures,
Natural Resources and Population,
Plate Tectonics.

Iran Podcast - podcast review

Here is a short review and can't resist to give. It is about a podcast that has podfaded, so it seems, since the last episodes date from over a year ago. I am talking about the Iran Podcast.

I ran into this podcast (pun not intended), because of my unfortunate attempt to listen to The antique history of Iran. In iTunes I overlooked the fact this was in Persian, because name, description and episode titles were in English. When I looked this up, I noticed the list iTunes also always gives: people who subscribed to this podcast also subscribed to... Here the Iran Podcast was listed. Now that I had my mind set to obtaining information about Iran, I had to have at least something.

What makes the Iran Podcast so charming is that it is a paradigmatic example of an amateur podcast, a kind of podcast with which podcasting started in past years, but a kind that seems to be going out of style. A young American with a PC and a personal field of interest, sits down and records short monologues on the subject and achieves a kind of unique and rare content which would never reach regular media. In this case, podcaster Cameron Uslander, has his roots in Iran and in a fresh, light, short and more intelligent than pretentious way tells about his culture. Especially the feast of Norooz receives ample attention.

Guantanamo Bay - Global Geopolitics podcast review

Now that the US Supreme Court has decided that the prisoners in Guantanamo Bay have the right to challenge their detention in federal court, our attention is, for a moment at least, back on this piece of Cuba. It always bothered me: how can the US have a naval base on Cuba - they are enemies, or at least not the best of friends. From a quick look at Wikipedia I learn, the base has been there, ever since 1903 or so. How did that work during the Cuban Missile Crisis?

I always pictured Guantanamo as something in Cuba's periphery. An island off the coast - even if it is called a bay. But in the Global Geopolitics podcast (feed) Professor Martin Lewis shows a map of Guantanamo Bay. The bay is on the main land of Cuba. And the US base, doesn't even surround the entire bay; it is on the entrance to the bay. A deeper section of the bay is Cuban, Bahia de Guantánamo. The case gets more and more peculiar.



The map of the bay is only a tiny section of the lecture, which deals with the geopolitical situation in entire Latin America.

More Global Geopolitics:
Africa,
Descriptive and prescriptive mapping,
Global Geopolitics - Martin Lewis.

More Martin Lewis:
A listener's guide to Geography of World Cultures,
Geography of World Cultures by Martin W. Lewis.

Africa - Global Geopolitics podcast review

There is a quest going on on this blog, the quest for Africa. The drive to listen to educational podcasts is the drive to knowledge and understanding. Since I detected a gaping hole in my knowledge about Africa, both contemporary and historically, I am especially on the lookout for podcasts that shed some light on the large continent. Few do, which explains why this search turns to quest.

The next stop in this uncertain journey is the Global Geopolitics podcast (feed) by Stanford's professor Martin Lewis. Lectures 7 and 8 are dedicated to North-Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa. Especially lecture 8 on what we used to call 'dark' Africa, fills some of the gaps. Look at this map of the various empires, states and cultures who reigned in Africa over the centuries.



Little is said about these, but seeing them on the map and having them named, at least gives some pointers to more research. The podcast however, since it's main purpose is not to dwell on history, but rather on showing modern geopolitics in maps, continues with the various points of interest. The process of decolonization, the various wars and civil wars and the current hot spots. Nigeria, Cameroon, Chad, Sudan (also featured in North-Africa), Uganda, Central Africa, Kenya, Congo, Ethiopia, Eritrea and Somalia. Give or take another country - the gaps remain enormous.

More:
The Kingdom of Ghana,
World history outside the European box,
Thinking Outside the European Box,
Descriptive and prescriptive mapping,
Global Geopolitics - Martin Lewis,
A listener's guide to Geography of World Cultures,
Geography of World Cultures by Martin W. Lewis
Podcast Review: Africa Past and Present,
Africa - Stanford Travel,
Africa - Counsel for Foreign Relations.

Geography 130 - lecture podcast review

Geography is a wide reaching science. When I was in school it used to intrigue and baffle me at the same time. Naturally when geography dove into history, I was content, but I remember it turned to geology and was more like chemistry and physics and I hated it. Berkeley's geography course Geography 130 Natural Resources and Population has this spilling into other disciplines effect no less. It comes with the subject.

In order to understand the world population and its relation to natural resources, you naturally wander into ecology (how does the environmental system work? What are environmental systems?), into history (how did the population came to be as it is and how has it dealt with its resources in history), but also economics and even the logic of science. I should have expected economics, obviously the problems around population and resources are about scarcity and the solution about economic policy, but I did not expect it to be so thoroughly about economy - as if it were an economy course, rather than geography.

One of the first thinkers to point at population growth as a problem was Thomas Robert Malthus and he gets a great deal of attention at the beginning of the course. This is not only pure economics, here we also get a bit of logic of science. Professor Nathan Sayre, the lecturer, begs his students to critically asses Malthus, notice his prejudices, his feeble reasoning (uncritical extrapolation from small-scale examples to macro-economics) and the fact he produces a non-falsifiable theory. Nevertheless, Malthus was ground breaking and laying the foundations of political economy and inspiring thinks such as Marx.

In short, this is a lecture series containing a great intellectual challenge and an intelligent discourse about the subject. A very good podcast therefore, but one marked with the regular defects of lecture podcasts: the listener is not part of class discussion - if you can bare with that, the series is absolutely splendid.

Related articles:
Berkeley Spring 2008 has kicked off,
Descriptive and prescriptive mapping,
Urban Air Pollution - Environmental History Podcast,
A listener's guide to Geography of World Cultures,
Agricultural revolution first - History 5 podcast.

Descriptive and prescriptive mapping

In Stanford's Global Geopolitics course (feed) professor Martin Lewis makes a remark which reminded me of a very similar one in a language podcast. I wrote about it; one can approach grammar prescriptively and descriptively. The same thing Lewis states about maps. Maps can be made to carefully describe the situation on the ground, also geopolitically, but maybe more often they are prescriptive and represent the area as it ought to be. One may safely assume that any map that attempts to merely describe a geopolitical situation has prescriptive implications.

What we are seldom aware of is that even the simplest standard maps are prescriptive and Lewis tries to bring the point home by giving descriptive maps for example of Somalia (divided up in separately ruled area and just as many unruly, clan-controlled regions) or of the Western Sahara, or of Kashmir (divided up between India, Pakistan and China).



The course will successively address the various global regions and thus, by means of maps, give some insight in the major, sometimes even hardly known or forgotten geopolitical contests. A very fascinating course, especially for map lovers and a great successor to the previous Geography of World Cultures (feed). So far we have had three lectures; an introduction and exposes about East-Asia and South-Asia and thus far, we can see it has considerable overlap with the previous course. In many ways that should not surprise us as naturally the geopolitical tensions are rooted in much of the cultural, religious and linguistic divisions in the world.

Relevant other reviews:
Global Geopolitics - Martin Lewis,
A listener's guide to Geography of World Cultures,
Geography of World Cultures by Martin W. Lewis,
The End of Hegemony,
Prescriptive and descriptive grammar.

Global Geopolitics - Martin Lewis

Stanford has done it again. This is apparently their preferred modus operandi, but it is the one least accessible to podcast listeners. They have a new course available on audio. You cannot find the audio on the Stanford website, it is only on iTunes U. There, you can download the audio as regular audio files, not as podcasts (that is, iTunes will not treat the files as podcast files, which means, they do not show up in the podcast section and they do not operate as podcast files: skip in music shuffle and remember playing position). Finally, you cannot subscribe. Stanford starts out like this with most of its courses. Some, like Hannibal, History of World system, Historical Jesus and more, later on, turn into podcasts.

I have waited for nearly a week. Two lectures have become available. The course has already been reviewed on Open Culture and we are still in the previously described mood. Other than that, the course looks to be great. The predecessor of this course was Geography of World Cultures, also by Martin Lewis. Again this is an enhanced podcast; we get the lectures with the maps as graphics along with the podcast. The advice is therefore to listen on the laptop and enlarge the maps in order to get a good look. For people with average players: the files are not in MP3 format and if you transfer, you will likely lose the graphics, the maps. And the maps are in this course the strawberries on the pudding.

Martin Lewis will, in nine lectures, systematically discuss all areas on the globe and disclose the problems in geopolitics. An example is given in the introduction with the border between Afghanistan and Pakistan. The Pakistani side of the border is a place called Waziristan where Islamabad rules more formally than effectively and this has become relevant globally since this is where the Taliban are hidden. See map.



Relevant other reviews:
The History of the International System,
A listener's guide to Geography of World Cultures,
Geography of World Cultures by Martin W. Lewis,
The End of Hegemony.

Podcast Review: Africa Past and Present

Africa is the great unknown. Not only for me I guess, for most in the West, or the rest of the world for that matter. The State University of Michigan supplies a podcast called Africa Past and Present. After having heard two issues, I am still not much smarter on the past, but at least a little more on the present. In any case a must listen for everybody.

It is not just heavy-handed serious stuff. The podcast also paid attention to the African soccer Cup, which was won by Egypt, even if the podcast predicted the Ivory Coast would win. But that is a mistake anyone could have made - I myself thought the Ivorians were really good. Other subjects that have been are the diversity of Islam in Africa, film in Africa and the new media.

I suppose the range of subjects will continue to be as wide and no matter how curious I am to find out about the history of Africa, even if this podcast will fill in the picture of contemporary Africa and its recent history, it is a podcast very much worthwhile.

More Africa on this blog:
The Missing Link on counting,
Apartheid and Environmental History,
Environmental History and South Africa,
Africa - Stanford Travel,
Africa - Counsel for Foreign Relations.

Plate Tectonics - IOT

The wonderful quality of In Our Time is to grant access to any which subject. I have seen this in the past with Victorian Pessimism and Gravitational Waves and this week we see it with Plate Tectonics. Even these subjects technical or remote from common interest are elevated in such a way, that one is engaged. What could be interesting in Plate Tectonics apart from the nearly surreal notion that the land under our feet is like a ship sailing on the ocean of molten rock beneath?

Such a notion is hard to accept and IOT reveals it took the world of geography some time to accept the theory. Once it did, a lot was gained. The guests explain the greatest merit of Plate Tectonics: it supplied a unifying theory for the world sciences. It brought land and sea, climate and rock, bio-diversity and the flipping poles together. What Plate Tectonics shows is that this earth is one big system in which all sub-systems are integrated.

Once having established that, Melvyn Bragg advanced to the next step: of all is integrated, then what is the virtue of the next theory, Gaia Theory. This is the theory that proposes to treat the earth system as a living organism, yet another surreal notion. One of the gathered specialists knocks it as absurd and the other praises it. The discussion lits up with true controversy. Who would have expected that?

More In Our Time
The Fisher King,
The Charge of the Light Brigade,
Albert Camus,
The Nicene Creed,
Four humor medicine.

A listener's guide to Geography of World Cultures

Now that I have finished Stanford's enhanced podcast Geography of World Cultures by Martin Lewis, I think it is very appropriate to give a listener's guide into the lecture series (see Stanford on iTunes U). The main reason being, no matter how excellent and deeply fascinating this course, it is a series that relies heavily on visuals, most of which the listeners misses out on

Central are the maps and these maps are part of the enhanced podcast. In order to sufficiently discern the details, one needs a large screen to see and simple mp3 players do not offer that quality. I have followed the course on PC, maybe a large iPod can do some of the same, but generally the advice is to do as I did - sit down in front of a computer screen.

The series breaks down in two major sections. The first six lectures (ignore the titles, they are synchronized with the planning, not with the actual lectures) are about the spread of languages. This is the part that is far the easiest to follow. Occasionally Lewis will point to the map and the listener will miss out on the indication, but generally the context suffices. Only when it is question time - about twice per lecture, one drops out of the visual connections. The same goes for the last four lectures, those about the spread of religion, but here the points Lewis indicates on the maps are far less intelligible. In addition there are frequent drops in sound quality and there is an entire section (the major part of lecture #7) about animism which is accompanied by slides that are not in the podcast visuals.

Hence, the language part is recommended for everybody, the religion part for the die hards especially #7 and #8 (#9 and #10 about Judaism, Christianity and Islam are much better). Die hards are the map freaks and the scourers for general knowledge about cultures that is rarely offered in such a comprehensive way. If only one could have physically attended the lectures...