Episodes

  • Episode 269-Global Geopolitics with my Grandson

    Episode 269-Global Geopolitics with my Grandson
    Nov 22 2024
    I had the opportunity today to sit down with someone who is truly an expert in navigating the turbulent waters of global geopolitics. He's an expert in one particularly troublesome region, a place that most of us are quite familiar with. Not only does he describe the kinds of threats that can be encountered there, but he also explains scenarios and techniques for dealing with them. This is a great episode--enjoy.
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    15 mins
  • Episode 268-Meet Jerry Berrier

    Episode 268-Meet Jerry Berrier
    Nov 22 2024
    Jerry Berrier is a birder, a wildlife sound recordist, and an outspoken advocate for the natural world. And, he’s been blind since birth. In this episode he tells his remarkable story, and explains how his blindness, while clearly not an advantage in the modern world, does not slow him down.
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    38 mins
  • Episode 267-Sounds of the Not-So-Distant Technological Past

    Episode 267-Sounds of the Not-So-Distant Technological Past
    Nov 22 2024
    I saw a story headline last week that inspired this episode. It told me that Elwood Edwards had died at 74. Don't know who he is? He received $200 to record all the original AOL sounds and inspired at least one really great movie. That got me thinking about other sounds from the more-or-less recent past, so I dove into my sound archives and found a bunch of them. And what I didn’t have, Wikipedia did, so hats off to them for being such an important archive in so many different ways. By the way, if you use Wikipedia, even once a month, please send them the five bucks they ask for each year. We’re talking about the cost of a cup of coffee here, folks—they deserve it. So—sounds. I’ve collected a bunch of them here for your nostalgic listening pleasure. I’ll tell you what they are at the end of the program, but for now, just have a listen. These are not in chronological order, by design; they’re just sounds of the technological past.
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    15 mins
  • Episode 266-Marie Desrosiers and the Charm of Abandoned Places

    Episode 266-Marie Desrosiers and the Charm of Abandoned Places
    Nov 21 2024
    A couple of months ago I was wandering around a small bookstore here in Vermont, where I ran across a book with the magnetic title, “Abandoned Vermont and New Hampshire,” by one Marie Desrosiers. I picked it up and started reading; the next day, I finished it. The book was so compelling that I found Marie online and sent her a message. A few days later we had a chat about her work, and she agreed to do an interview about the books she writes and the photographs of she makes of abandoned places—a field she calls the study of abandonment. Please enjoy.
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    16 mins
  • Episode 265 - Thoughts On A Road Trip

    Episode 265 - Thoughts On A Road Trip
    Nov 20 2024
    Sabine and I just came back from a big, looping three-week road trip that took us as far west as the sand hills of Nebraska, where I wanted to record the sounds of the prairie in the early fall. But we also spent a lot of our time trying to see the country differently than we ever have. Because we’ve both lived in more than one country, we live by Mark Twain’s quote, that “travel is fatal to bigotry, prejudice and narrowmindedness.” We’re in a pretty weird political time right now, so we wanted to get a better understanding of just what this country, this place, is. I’m not sure if we actually managed to do that—I don’t that anyone can—but we definitely came home more enlightened than we were when we left.
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    42 mins
  • Episode 264-The (Truly) First Electric Car

    Episode 264-The (Truly) First Electric Car
    Oct 25 2024
    According to many sources, Apollo 11, which landed on the Moon in July 1969, drew the attention of the entire world. But subsequent missions to the Moon and other ambitions efforts by NASA and its partner agencies drew far less attention. How quickly the sense of awe and wonder wanes. We take computers for granted; our mobile phones are orders of magnitude more powerful than anything that got Apollo to the Moon—and trust me on this, the Apollo on-board computers were wondrous devices for the time, automatically controlling pitch and yaw and roll and the firing of thrusters and retrorockets at precise times. Flying around the world has become mundane, more a chore than an incredible opportunity. We even have electric cars on the road. That’s a different scale of wonder, but you know what I mean. People pay no attention to space launches, yet they’re impressed by cars that run on batteries and can go 250 miles without recharging. But here’s the thing. It ain’t all that impressive. Sorry, Elon. Electric cars are a good idea, and they’re good for the environment—mostly—but they’re not a new idea. In fact, the first truly electric vehicle—a car—was built in 1965. And it wasn’t designed for smooth, modern highways, with conveniently spaced charging stations along the way. No, it was designed to be driven on the Moon. And it did. In fact, three of them made the trip. Let me tell you the story, with a little help from NASA.
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    15 mins
  • Episode 263 - Older Than Dirt And Just As Lively - An Interview With Archaeologist Douglas Frink

    Episode 263 - Older Than Dirt And Just As Lively - An Interview With Archaeologist Douglas Frink
    Sep 25 2024
    The best thing about doing this Podcast is that it forces me to constantly be on the lookout for topics and the people associated with them that might lead to interesting episodes. So, when I learned during a meeting of the Williston Historical Society that South Ridge, the neighborhood where I live in Vermont, yielded archaeological artifacts during the planning, site preparation, and excavation of the neighborhood, I got curious, and went in search of the archaeologists who I assumed were called in to ensure that sacred or culturally significant sites weren’t being disturbed. And that’s how I found Douglas Frink. Douglas is an archaeologist, but more than that, as you’ll hear, he’s a soil scientist. But he’s even more than that. He’s sort of a soil whisperer, because he believes that if we pay attention to the soil, we pay attention to the history.
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    31 mins
  • Episode 262 - Brian Malow, Science Comedian

    Episode 262 - Brian Malow, Science Comedian
    Sep 23 2024
    Occasionally, in the course of developing topics and themes for this program, I run across a genuine treasure. So, full disclosure—as if you need me to tell you this—I’m a pretty serious, card-carrying geek of the highest order. I like science, I tend to geek out on it, and I’m always looking for new sources of knowledge about topics that most people don’t care much about. So, you can imagine my delight when I ran across Brian Malow. Brian is equal parts science enthusiast, educator, speaker, comedian, and a few other things, as you’re about to hear. I heard him speak at a conference years ago in Berkeley, and recently, I asked him if he’d join me on the program sometime. He said yes, so here’s our conversation. By the way, you can learn more about Brian's work and booking him for your event (an excellent idea!) at https://sciencecomedian.com.
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    49 mins