This is a special extra episode of the podcast, not one of the “proper” five hundred. A book I’ve written, on the TV series The Strange World of Gurney Slade, has just become available for pre-order from Obverse Books, so to publicise that I’ve done an extra episode, on the pop music career of its star, Anthony Newley. The next normal episode will be up in a day or two. Transcript below the cut.
Erratum: In a previous version of this episode, I mentioned, in passing, my understanding that Newley was an alcoholic. This has been strongly questioned by some fans, who took offence at the suggestion, and as it was utterly irrelevant to the point I was making I have deleted those three words rather than cause further offence. (more…)
Grant Sanderson is a math educator and creator of 3Blue1Brown.
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Here’s the outline of the episode. On some podcast players you should be able to click the timestamp to jump to that time.
OUTLINE:
00:00 – Introduction
05:13 – Richard Feynman
09:41 – Learning deeply vs broadly
13:56 – Telling a story with visualizations
18:43 – Topology
23:52 – Intuition about exponential growth
32:28 – Elon Musk’s exponential view of the world
40:09 – SpaceX and space exploration
45:28 – Origins of the Internet
49:50 – Does teaching on YouTube get lonely?
54:31 – Daily routine
1:00:20 – Social media
1:10:38 – Online education in a time of COVID
1:27:03 – Joe Rogan moving to Spotify
1:32:09 – Neural networks
1:38:30 – GPT-3
1:46:52 – Manim
1:51:01 – Python
1:56:21 – Theory of everything
2:03:53 – Meaning of life
The border between the United States and Canada is the longest border between any two countries in the world. The total length of the land border is 8,891 kilometers or 5,525 miles long. In addition to being the longest border in the world, it is also the longest non-militarized and non-fenced border in the world.
With a border that long, you are bound to have some oddities, and the US/Canadian border has plenty.
Has the loss from Greenland’s vast ice sheet reached a tipping point? According to glaciologist Michalea King, the rate at which its ice flows into the sea stepped up about 15 years ago. The process of glacial retreat is outpacing the accumulation snow and ice in Greenland’s interior and the loss of Greenland’s ice to the Ocean is set to continue for many years to come.
An international study of past climate changes during the last ice age reveals how fast changes to weather patterns and climate states can reverberate around the world. During the last ice age, when temperatures rose suddenly in Greenland a series of changes to the climate in Europe and the monsoons in Asia and South America occurred almost simultaneously - within decades of each other. Climate scientists Eric Wolff and Ellen Corrick have discovered this through studies of stalagmites from caves around the world. It’s a demonstration of how rapidly and dramatically the Earth’s atmospheric system can change when it’s perturbed.
Was the hottest temperature ever on Earth recorded last weekend? A weather station in Death Valley in California recorded a temperature of 54.4 degrees C. Roland Pease discusses the controversy with extreme weather historian Christopher Burt.
Andrea Dupree of Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics reveals the latest on the giant star Betelgeuse which to everyone’s amazement dimmed dramatically at the beginning of the year. At the time some people wondered whether it was about to explode as a supernova but Andrea’s new findings suggest an event at the star which is almost as extraordinary.
If you’re one of the millions of people who used lockdown to try something new like baking sourdough bread, you may well be wondering what’s happening chemically inside your loaf, especially if the end result keeps changing. Well, you’re not alone. Listeners Soheil and Sean are both keen bakers but want to know more about the thing that makes bread rise: yeast. What is yeast? Where does it come from and can you catch it? And how hard is it to ‘make’ yourself? Soon after lockdown took effect, commercial supplies of the stuff disappeared from supermarket shelves across the globe.
The shortage also affected brewers the world over. A big fan of yeast in most of its forms, Marnie Chesterton took on the challenge of creating her own. She talks to the brewers who hunt rare strains to create the perfect beer, and hears from the biologist who says these amazing microbes, used for thousands of years, could be used to make food production more sustainable. And she discovers how this simple ingredient could be instrumental in the fight against climate change.
(Image: Masses of ice break off from the edge of a glacier. Credit: Press Association)
On today’s edition of The Breakdown’s Long Reads Sunday, our selections have to do with one of the hottest topics in central banking: yield curve control.
The first piece is from the St. Louis Federal Reserve and is a primer on YCC, including past U.S. implementations as well as versions from Japan and Australia.
Our second piece is an op-ed about how dramatically markets reacted to this small detail from the Federal Open Market Committee minutes, and what it suggests for their desires involving YCC.
While the Curious City Scavenger Hunt: Chicago Eats Edition continues to take you all across the city, we’re pulling stories from our archive that dive into the history of Chicago’s neighborhoods. This week, a story from 2017 takes us to Lake View, which once had a thriving Japanese community — but it fell victim to a push for assimilation. As one Japanese-American puts it: “You had to basically be unseen.”
The longbow was one of the most devastating weapons in medieval Europe. It was a weapon that could launch projectiles hundreds of yards and pierce the heaviest of armor. It was the battlefield trump card to heavy armored cavalry.
No country adopted and mastered the longbow quite like the English. One reason why they found the military success they did was due to a complete societal commitment to the longbow.
COVID Update; News Items: Oleandra Snake Oil, Moon Capsules, Vision Debate, Black Dwarf Supernova, Pentagon UFO Task Force; Who's That Noisy; Name That Logical Fallacy: Do Your Own Research; Science or Fiction
This podcast series tells how the Crusades were inextricably linked with the Byzantine Empire. In this episode, we hear about how the Egyptian Fatimid Caliphate tried to destroy the newly established Crusader state of the Kingdom of Jerusalem in the early 1100's. And how it very nearly succeeded.
Please take a look at my website nickholmesauthor.com where you can download a free copy of The Byzantine World War, my book that describes the origins of the First Crusade.
