Radio Lab: stochasticity
July 21st, 2009 by Steve BowbrickThis is factual radio that'll make you giggle out loud with pleasure. So assured, so clever, so wise. And Jad Abenrad and Robert Krulwich do this practically every week (MP3).
And you might want to give some money to WNYC to help pay for the production of this stuff - since they don't have an inflation-protected licence fee to depend on.
July 24th, 2009 at 3:33 pm
[...] cheers, speechification. [...]
August 9th, 2009 at 8:40 am
Oh this is fantastic! Thank you!
August 29th, 2009 at 8:43 am
A great show.
Firstly the presenters, I like the way they are confident enough to pretend to be a bit naive when introducing a new topic. I also like the way they slightly mispronounced the names of English towns! Being English I thought that was funny. And here’s something I think might interest them. They, well to be fair one of them, mispronounced “Gloucester” – it should be pronounced “Gloster”. Similarly “Leicester” should be pronounced “Lester”. My father said that German spies were caught in World War II because they said “Li-cester Square”, rather than “Lester Square”. But I think this story may well be apocryphal.
Secondly I love the amount of sheer material covered. From covering that amazing coincidences are not really so amazing to covering dopamine and its effects. I found the simple link “Find reward leads to dopamine surge and feel pleasure leads to primed for motion leads to find new reward” very intellectually satisfying. And although I’ve done a psychology degree and already knew about dopamine’s effect on one’s emotions and how a lack of it gives rise to Parkinson’s, I’ve never heard anyone so elegantly make the nice circular pathway of links that was made on this radio programme.
Keep up the good work guys. I also make radio programmes for hospital radio here in England. And, other than my own programmes, I’ve not heard such good radio for a quite a while!
Kevin