Mesopotamian sources - MMW 2 podcast review

The first three lectures of UCSD's MMW 2 (Making of the Modern World - Classical Traditions) I learned something I did not know before. I knew the Sumerians were the first culture in Mesopotamia we know of, but I did not know it was only with the archeological discoveries in the area in the 19th century that we actually found out about them. The clay tablets of Ashurbanipals library mentioned them and this is how we know they preceded the Akkadians, Babylonians and Assyrians, to name a few. Those were in the Bible and hence were 'known' until then.

It makes Professor Chamberlain's lectures all the more interesting. As is his style, he takes this one through the texts. The two he discusses in the third lecture are the old Babylonian Enuma Elish and Atra-Hasis which are told to have roots as far back as Sumer, but are Babylonian after all. The first is a creation story and the second a flood story. Much is different with the stories of creation and of Noah's flood in Genesis, but by all means, there are parallels and unquestionably, the Babylonian version precede Genesis.

In the fourth lecture we are supposed to get some more insight in those Sumerian roots and I hope we will still get them. However, what is passed as Lecture 4 in the feed is an empty mp3 file. Maybe there was no lecture and we will still get this craved content. Otherwise, the recording may have failed and we have missed out on the Sumerians, once again and must wait until a later round of MMW 2.

Image: Cuneiform tablet of the Atra-Hasis in the British Museum on Wikimedia Commons (Public Domain)

More MMW 2:
MMW 2 - UCSD history podcast.

More Chamberlain:
MMW 3.

Philosopher's Zone - ABC podcast review

ABC's podcast Philosopher's Zone has not yet taken me in. Naturally, as with other philosophy podcasts, it is always a gamble, from issue to issue. Philosophy is so wide, there are necessarily only a few subjects and angles that appeal to you. Even then.

Philosopher's Zone is presented by Alan Saunders and the format is an interview with one or more guests on a specific subject. In the past weeks there were three subjects that I could make some connection with. The first was Asian Philosophy. The second was about Karl Popper. The third was an interview with Martha Nussbaum.

A recurring problem are the sudden interruptions which apparently correspond with the commercial breaks in the live program, but on the podcast they are outright disruptive. The speaker is in the middle of an interesting train of thought and you are waiting for continuation or a deeper question and then in stead you get a kind of reset and need to start all over. In the issue about Asian philosophy, the result is your are getting selected cuts from a lecture in stead of the whole and are reduced to the tip of the iceberg that is the tip of the iceberg of such a large subject as Asian philosophy. In the other two interviews it is less disruptive, but still a forced shift of subject or perspective.

Despite the quality of the subjects and the speakers, there is a fragmentation that bothered me most of all. More programs that are not live recordings are going through a director's cut, but Philosopher's Zone does not get comprehensive in the cut, it is just cut.

More Philosopher's Zone:
Mary Shelley and Frankenstein.

Power of Cities - UChannel Podcast review

Our Urban Future: The death of distance and the rise of cities, was the title of a recent podcast delivered by UChannel podcast which was a recording of a lecture by Professor Edward Glaeser at the London School of Economics. The title seemed paradoxical. The death of distance would entail the fall of cities. Alternately it would turn an entire territorial unit into one city.

My thinking was not far off. Indeed, in the historic part of the lecture, Glaeser explains why cities emerged and continued to exist over the long time of human history, despite a number of serious disadvantages for people to live in a city: it is crammed, expensive and usually not safe and not healthy. The forces that keep them in, explained by the Harvard economics professor, are proximity and numbers. Or in other words, the city itself.

With many people near, there is more productivity, more innovation. It attracts both the wealthy and the poor. Cities make for a powerful economic potion, however, with the modern technology, distance to the outlying territories are becoming less and less important. Proximity and numbers are one in the cyber-age, yet Glaeser observes in his studies, cities are still the centers of economic advancement. In addition to explaining this, he draws conclusions for city governments as to what are the right policies to stay ahead.

That last part of the lecture was less to my interest, but the analysis of the economic strengths and weaknesses of cities and the adaptation to the history of cities was very interesting and refreshing.

More UChannel:
Gaza (Tony Blair),
Whither the Middle East,
Kafka comes to America,
Lord Lawson and the alarmists,
Terror and Consent>.

New Deal and War Economy - EconTalk podcast review

It is EconTalk's host Russ Roberts's opinion that Roosevelt's New Deal did not repair the economic dire straits the US were in during the 1930's. In fact, he believes this policy only worsened the situation. Although he is the interviewer in the podcast episodes, his views get coverage as well. And this also happened in one of the last issue when he spoke with Robert Higgs about The Great Depression.

Higgs did extensive data research into the economic development in the US during the 1930's and 1940's. His work refutes the commonly held idea that by the beginning of the war, the depression was over and the War Economy itself meant a great boost to American economy and that in fact, as off 1940, it was up and up, thanks to war.

Higgs tries to show how the figures are skewed and how in practice the economy was still recovering and still not back anywhere near the level of 1929. Furthermore, the war meant no boost, it meant an additional burden and life went into yet another economic downturn, with shortages of all sorts. Higgs and Roberts agree to the point that even World War II in the US shows that war is only costly and never good for economy. And Roberts pushes again his view: The New Deal wasn't helping either.

More EconTalk:
The Depression,
Wildlife, Property and Poverty.

Gaza - podcasts on diplomacy and war

With the war raging on in Gaza (or Aza, as we say), you can pick up on the continuous stream of podcasts shedding their light on the problems in the Middle-East. Some specifically about the Israeli-Palestinian stalemate, some more broader, but ultimately addressing this conflict as one of the most central destabilizing factors for the region and eventually the whole world.

The Council on Foreign Relations had a conversation with Tony Blair which was recently published in the UChannel Podcast (The Tony Blair talk on CFR video) Blair lays out the design for a diplomatic process that should improve the situation, which heavily leans on supporting true nation building for the Palestinians and on solving the paralyzing problem, which was also noted by Dennis Ross on UChannel (Anne is a Man's review). Ross called it the mutual disbelief. And though his and Blair's presentations are optimistic in the sense that they see possibilities for policy and diplomacy to solve the issues, taking away the disbelief proves to be crucial. As long as there is disbelief, that is a mutual conviction on the part of both the Palestinian as well as on the part of the Israeli populace that the other side is fundamentally not interested in any kind of arrangement, none of the proposed policies and diplomatic efforts have serious chance for success.

A short and instructive podcast from The Economist, analyzes the current situation and painfully shows how the leadership is failed to such an extent that none of the true players in the field have any weight left (bad news for the conception problem noted before). Two players are the Israeli and the Palestinian leadership, which both are paralyzed by internal power struggles and lack the clout, determination and legitimacy to push forward. Then there is the US that has been the only external power that has been influential enough to really make a difference, yet, the Bush administration has neglected the issue for 8 years and has by now lost also its power and legitimacy to act. Three lame ducks as speaker Yossi Mekelberg characterizes them.



More UChannel:
Kafka comes to America,
Lord Lawson and the alarmists,
Terror and Consent,
Nudge: improving decisions and behavior,
Hot, Flat and Crowded.

More from the Economist:
We want Obama,
Getting comfortable with Obama,
Democracy in America - podcast review,
Issues of Race,
The primary system.

More Israel:
Whither the Middle East,
Desiring Walls,
Gabriela Shalev,
UCLA Israel Studies,
The Arab-Israeli conflict.

Culture, Art and Technology - UCSD podcast review

One of the most exciting lecture series has kicked off: UCSD's CAT 2, Culture, Art and Technology. Last year, I was alerted to this course by DIY Scholar, but once I subscribed, the course had nearly finished. Before I knew it, UCSD took it off line and I had only a few unrelated lectures to go on. It goes to show how important it is, when you decide to try a course on UCSD, to download all lectures as soon as possible and store them for later use.

The feed delivers at this point two files, lecture 1 and lecture 2. Lecture 1 is empty and lecture 2 is actually the first encounter. Professor Tal Golan, who delivers the course, uses this lecture, as do so many other instructors, to introduce the assistants and go over a range of household issues relevant only to the students in the room. By Lecture 3 it will become much more exciting.

It is worthwhile to endure the largely superfluous content of this lecture, nevertheless, because Golan gives a few teasers to warm you up. He does not however define the course as such. It is probably not so easy to define. To call it a history of thought, or a dialectic of knowledge and culture, or the parallel of knowledge construction and social construction, makes it sound fancy, but have a certain level of abstraction that it also either covers too little or too much. Golan avoids such terminology and throws a couple of examples to challenge and entice the audience. How could Aristotle be influential for 2500 years, when science and thought has always reinvented itself (and most thinkers? Why was the switch to a heliocentric picture of the universe so important? By all means this is going to be a thrilling, if challenging, ride of wonder, of a whole different way of looking at the construction of culture.

About the previous course:
The dialectic of knowledge and culture.