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.

Piet Hein Eek - Simek podcast recensie

Nu Simek 's nachts op het einde loopt, de show gaat binnenkort uit de lucht, en er geen tekenen zijn dat er een doorstart in podcasting wordt gemaakt, mogen we voorzichtig veronderstellen dat Martin Simek met pensioen gaat. Althans als interviewer, althans voorlopig. In alle berichten is de man zelf nooit aan het woord gekomen en is er geen enkele aanwijzing of hij het wel best vindt zo, of met tegenzin stopt. In de show zelf is er niet zo heel veel van te merken.

Ik vond Simek halverwege 2008 wat zwakker, ongeinspireerd haast en misschien is dat het moment geweest dat intern duidelijk werd dat het programma zijn beste tijd gehad had. Dat hoeft niet zo te zijn, want de interviewstijl van Simek is een wat riskante. Zijn intuitieve, impulsieve benadering van de gast kan heel gemakkelijk misgaan. Er moet iets klikken tussen de gast en Simek anders is er niets aan. Het soort van gasten dat naar mijn observatie de meest nadrukkelijke garantie op succes bieden zijn de iets minder bekende, maar wel geinspireerde en toch ook weer nuchtere gasten. Simpel gezegd, de kunstenaars met wortels in de Hollandse klei.

Zo had Simek er weer een te pakken in Piet Hein Eek. Ik hoef niet al te veel over het interview te zeggen - het is weer vanouds gezellig. Wat rest te zeggen is dat ik benieuwd ben hoe lang het (drastisch ingeperkte) Simek archief on-line blijft. Gezien de geringe tegenstand van de ster zelf, zal er vrees ik niet veel overblijven. Houdt U van Simek, download hem dan nog in 2008, voordat het niet meer kan.

Meer Simek:
Ernst van de Wetering,
Ageeth Veenemans,
Marc de Hond,
Geen podcast?,
Marjan Berk en Johnny Kraaykamp jr..