Britt's Blog

I’m working through a backlog of old Point of Inquiry podcasts, and just listened to this episode:

Greg Craven – What’s the Worst That Could Happen?

It’s an interview with high school science teacher Greg Craven, who created a massively viral YouTube video which presents a somewhat different way of looking at the global warming debate, which is to acknowledge that science will never provide THE TRUTH, or an absolutely certain answer to whether global warming is happening, whether it’s anthropogenic, etc. and so deftly side-step the “yeah-but-als” of the climate-change denialists.

So, consider both sides: What if it’s right? What if it’s wrong? Moreover, consider both responses: What if we do nothing? What if we make the drastic changes required to reduce our atmospheric carbon output?

Which response carries the greatest risk?

And remember, we’re already running the experiment by doing little to nothing to reduce our carbon output.

The first video is pretty simplistic (you can skip it without missing much):

This followup (which responds to criticisms) is better:

I’m struck by the fact that he considers only the possible negative outcomes. A lot of the kicking and screaming about carbon reform makes me think of this cartoon:

I’m not saying Craven’s argument is as bulletproof as he seems to think it is, but I like how he urges you to gather your own information, make your own assesements and come to your own conclusions. I also respect a guy who’s willing to put something up on YouTube and actually read and respond to the comments.

I’m going to subscribe to his newsletter check out his book, which, it is claimed, is about how to make big decisions with limited information. As suggested in the interview, this could be a great part of a freshman seminar course.

If you are not listening to RadioLab, why the heck not?

A recent episode The New Normal, encapsulates all that is awesome about RadioLab. Here we have some very sciencey animal behavior stuff, plus genetics of artificial selection, and then a very touching human interest story about a transgendered movie theater owner who becomes mayor of a conservative Colorado town, and to top it off a rumination on how we became human.

Awesome.

“To the Best of Our Knowledge” is a show out of Wisconsin Public Radio, also available, of course, in convenient podcast form.

It caters to the literate and the nerdy. I love how they’ll drop a reference to, say, Sisyphus, without being compelled to tell the audience, “That was the guy who had to keep pushing the rock up the hill.” ‘Course, that means that a few references go whistling over my head, but it’s a small price to pay to not be condescended to.

Lately, I’ve been impressed by Boots on the Ground, their 5-part series on the war in Iraq. It is most definitely not easy listening. This is rough stuff. But if Americans are fighting and dying and killing over there, the least I can do in my fat, safe, cushy civilian life is listen to some grown men break down on the radio from time to time.

Check out also Channeling Creativity, featuring My! #1! Favorite! Comic! Author!, Lynda Barry, writer of the amazing Ernie Pook Comeek, who is apparently now living in rural Wisconsin. Wow. Go fig. Anyway, she is awesome, and she will have a special place in my heart as one of the purest, most authentic voices of childhood.

If you’re not listening to the Moth podcast, like Dan and me, you really should be.

The Moth consists of true stories, told on stage, without notes, from famous as well as regular people.

An excellent recent episode which would be of interest to my Gentle Ithacan Readers is Alternate Ithaca Tom.

Tom ruminates about mid-life crisis and wonders about what might have been, specifically if he had studied Animal Behavior at Cornell University. He conflates Ithaca’s town and gown community and seems a little unclear on academic life in general, but nonetheless it’s a lovely piece about Ithaca and mid-life crises in general.

I felt an eerie sense of resonance as I listened.

One reason is that I am doing the typical holy-crap-I’m-on-the-tenure-track-do-I-really-want-to-do-this-for-the-rest-of-my-life thing. (This probably doesn’t qualify as a mid-life crisis, unless, heavens forfend, I die at the age of 66.)

The other reason is that I’ve often thought about the fact that according to the Many-Worlds Interpretation (which Tom explains quite well) there is a universe (many of them, in fact) where I went to Caltech, the other grad school I was accepted to.

In our Universe, I visited campus, got a somewhat creepy desperate vibe off the grad students, and decided I would probably be really, really unhappy living in southern California. But of course one still wonders.

Unlike Alternate Ithaca Tom, who springs, it seems, fully realized into Tom Weiser’s mind, Alternate Pasadena Britt is a mystery to me. I bumbled into planetary astronomy more or less by accident, so what does Alternate Pasadena Britt study? Did she end up doing planetary anyway, or follow Unbranched Undergraduate Britt’s passion for space and plasma physics, or does she do solar physics, or is she a radio astronomer, or what? Did Alternate Pasadena Jason marry her? Was she academically successful, or did she burn out and punt on grad school? Did she realize that she liked teaching and wanted to do that, or did she go on to do research postdocs instead?

How many million weird little things happened to me in Ithaca, things that would be impossible in Pasadena, to make me the person I am today? How many snowfalls and long, gray, Ithacating days, how many moments of stunning beauty looking over Lake Cayuga or lingering in a gorge, how many chance encounters at Wegmans, how many idle thoughts while waiting for the TCAT or for the elevator in Space Sciences… let alone the friendships made, the mentors met, the students taught, the miles and miles on the Stairmaster at the Ithaca College faculty gym…

How many versions of us had the courage that we lacked to do the brave thing at a critical juncture, or the wisdom and foresight to make the non-obvious lateral move that makes all the difference?

How many versions of us out there died in car crashes, got cancer, ruined their careers with bad decisions, went broke from poor financial management, or suffered all the other fates we worry about?

Is it at all comforting to think that there is a person out there who zigged where you zagged?

I heart Ockham’s Razor: both the principle, and the Australian Broadcasting Company radio show, which I listen to by podcast.

This morning, I listened to a great episode about hormones, and I learned a ton about the history of our understanding of the brain and nervous system.

I really don’t know about biology. I mean, I took high school bio, and I like reading science magazines and the web and stuff, but, jeepers, I really don’t know much biology. This was also brought to my attention when, earlier this semester, I needed to give a lecture about isotopic fractionation in C4 plants, and I discovered that photosynthesis is hard. Previously I thought I had a pretty reasonable grasp of photosynthesis. H₂O, CO₂ and sunshine go in, O₂ comes out. Simple, eh? Turns out this is all a planetary astronomer needs to know about photosynthesis, but the actual, like, process that happens inside the cell? Extremely complicated. Yes.

Like, more complicated than the Standard Model of particle physics. Like, more complicated than magnetohydrodynamics.

Or maybe the real problem is that I don’t know any chemistry. ;)

But anyway, check out Ockham’s Razor if you want a weekly 15-minute injection of More Smartness into your life.

I’m at the end of my queue of podcasts, with just two more to share with you.

Continuing the trend of completely irrelevant introductions, I would like to say that I love comment spam. I approve all posters in order to ensure the high quality of commentary that you have come to expect from blurrypicturesofmycat, and I don’t have any kind of a spam filter, which means I have to go through and disapprove a staggering amount of comment spam.

I have to applaud the more clever random-text comment spam that actually get me to hesitate a moment before I realize they’re just a random excerpt from a novel or news article that happens to be bizarrely apropos. The comments which are nothing but a deluge of filthy, filthy descriptions of porn have a charm all their own, but my favorites are the comments that try to coax me into accepting them through pure flattery. “This is amazing sight! I thank you!!!” “You are stunnning brilliant!” “I read your blog everyday. You have excellant info!” I know, rationally, that it’s bot-generated bullshit, but it still warms me, somehow.

As such, it also pleases me to assume that all the Cyrillic comment spam is saying the same thing, but in Russian.

Getting on to the podcasts:

Radio Lab
I haven’t been listening to Radio Lab for very long, (it’s a relatively new show). They’re pretty experimental, playing around with sound, sound effects, and different ways of presenting information, but the content us usually interesting enough to sustain me through the weirder parts. Each week’s show is on a different topic, and it’s a little more unified than This American Life, and a little more fact-delivery-oriented, but some part of me keeps wanting to lump it in as the same genre. It’s the same, yet different. “Real different,” as they say in the Midwest. ;) I’ll leave it at that. :)

X Minus One
This is nothing more than the classic 50′s SF radio program, featuring dramatic productions of the work of all the great authors of the day. They’re wrapped up, irritatingly, in lots of ads for the US Navy. (I haven’t exactly figured that out yet. They’re public domain, so I guess somebody just picked ‘em up and sold advertising on them. To the gubmint. Well, I guess it makes sense for a lot of the stories, thematically.) No host, no intros, just classic science fiction radio drama Lotsa, “Now, see here!” and “Well, I’ll be…” plus suggestions that you’d be really cool if you joined the Navy.

Holy bejeebers, is it cold out. It doesn’t make me all that eager to start classes again when Nature is all like, “Stay inside! Stay inside and drink cocoa!”

But, what the hell, if our hominid ancestors listened to the Howling Voice of Winter we’d all be hangin’ out in Africa…. where the snot doesn’t freeze in your nose.

Hmmmm….

Anyway, here’s your next installment of podcasts, which you should pay attention to, because apparently I am now a famous podcast reviewer.

Public Radio Exchange (PRX)
PRX is a clearinghouse for radio pieces, offering tons of original use for use by public radio stations, with peer review. Kind of like Flickr for radio expression. The podcast offers the occasional select short piece. The wide variety makes it hit or miss, according to your taste, but I’ve heard some real gems. Indeed, PRX is where I was introduced to Pferdzwackur’s Tin Man, a series which I still maintain is the single most brilliant thing I’ve ever heard.

Are We Alone?
The podcast of the SETI Institute rocks because the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence encompasses all the most exciting aspects of science: astronomy, space exploration, evolution, the paranormal and skepticism, artificial intelligence, environmental science, transhumanism, and much much more. Seth Shostak (astronomer and punster) and Molly Bentley (radio-savvy mad scientist’s daughter) deliver it all with a quirky, enthusiastic amateurism and lots of help from experts.

This American Life
TAL is such a public radio bastion that I hope I don’t have to explain it, but if not, each week, of course, they pick a theme, and bring your a variety of stories about that theme. The TAL slots on our local public radio stations just doesn’t seem to conform to our radio-listening schedule, so I’m gettin’ my Ira Glass fix online.

It must be time for more podcasts!

Point of Inquiry
The Podcast of the Center for Inquiry, whose mission (from their website) is “to contribute to the public understanding and appreciation of science and reason, and their applications to human conduct.” The podcast deals with science, medicine, religion, and ethics from an atheist/rationalist/skeptical viewpoint, and in a somewhat heavy-handed manner, sometimes. Thankfully they’ve eliminated some of the commentary (which was often sophomoric and over-the-top) and stuck to what they do well, interviews by D.J. Grothe with intellectuals, mostly on their own side, but sometimes not. Plenty of food for thought.

Selected Shorts
This PRI program of short stories read by respected actors is hit or miss for me. Sometimes I’m really interested in the story, and sometimes it’s just not my taste. It’s always of very good quality, though.

Studio 360
Kurt Anderson brings us the public radio spin on art, TV, music, et cetera. Another quality PRI podcast, making it easy to get you public radio fix over the internets. Because it’s so varied, I always find something fascinating in each show.

More podcasts, in easy-to-digest tripartite format. In other news, I’m still passin’. I made the questionable fashion choice to wear blue jeans, a hooded sweatshirt, and a pony tail to the office today. On my way over to the mail center, a custodian fixed me with the most dazzling smile, and said, “It’s so great to see students back on campus!”

Carrying on…

Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me
Exactly how much NPR news do you listen to? There was a time when I could answer a truly embarrassing percentage of Wait Wait questions correctly. Wait Wait… is a transcendently excellent news quiz show, hosted by Peter Sagal, with Carl Kasell (you know, the guy who reads the news on the hour on NPR), and, on some sort of arcane rotating schedule, the inimitable Paula Poundstone, the unspeakably brilliant but oddly named Mo Rocca, the disarmingly folksy and subversively sharp Tom Bodett, and several other bright and clever panelists. One of my favorite features is “Not My Job,” where they bring on a famous person and then ask them a bunch of questions that they would have no real reason to know the answers to. This segment is somehow always a raging success, whether the guest is a prospective Republican First Lady, George Bush’s press secretary, an infamous left-wing movie director, or a basketball star. In what is sure to loom as one of the greatest mistakes of my life, I missed a taping of the show at Beloit College because I went to a stupid meeting of the stupid Division for Planetary Sciences of the stupid American Astronomical Society.

Ockham’s Razor
From the Austrialian public radio network, ABC, an interesting show hosted by Robyn-with-a-y Williams, who invites an Australian intellectual from some random field to have their say for about 15 minutes on a subject they think is interesting. Sometimes the topic is current events, sometimes it’s historical, and sometimes it’s scientific, often with a skeptical bent. I love the variety, and I especially like getting a non-US perspective on historical events or current scientific concerns.

On the Media
We’re so saturated with media for so many of the hours of the day, and I think it’s good to take a step back and think about it all on some kind of a meta level. I like how Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield balance earnestness with irreverence, sometimes playing the role of ruthless gadflies, sometimes confused media consumers, and sometimes admirers of the artistic.

Your intrepid reviewer has taken a break from dodging tornadoes (no joke: actual tornado the next county over today… in January) to bring you three more of the podcasts near and dear to my heart.

Kick Ass Mystic Ninjas
I probably should admit that I mostly listen to KAMN because of the theme song, but also because of their interesting reminiscence and analysis of classic sci fi. The subject matter runs the gamut from the intellectual (Stranger in a Strange Land, Left Hand of Darkness, etc.) to the goofy (Knight Rider, Airwolf), and everything in between. This is definitely on the casual end of the podcast spectrum, basically some friends sitting around chatting.

NPR Playback
This amusing little show features NPR news stories each month, from 25 years ago. Explore the politics, pop culture and events of 1982… and the January 1983 show should be coming up soon.

NPR Shuffle
My 20-minute commute to work wasn’t very environmentally friendly, but it did give me a daily double dose of intelligent news and information. Now that I walk to work, I listen to NPR shuffle instead, which features an assortment of stories—and they’re not just from Morning Edition and All Things Considered.