Month: January 2023

Posted on

Everything Everywhere Daily - Why Are There No Flying Cars?

When airplanes were developed in the early 20th century, the technology developed rapidly. 

Within a matter of a couple of decades, aviation had become a norm for transporting people and delivering mail. 

As flight technology kept improving, people assumed that it would keep improving to the point where everyone would own their own personal airplanes.

…except that never happened. 

Learn more about why we don’t have flying cars and how all the predictions were wrong on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.


Subscribe to the podcast! 

https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes

--------------------------------

Executive Producer: Charles Daniel

Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen

 

Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere


Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com


Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily

Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip

Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Posted on

NBN Book of the Day - Shakespeare’s Life, World and Works 1: Why Read Shakespeare

William Shakespeare, who lived in England from 1564 to 1616, is one of the world’s most popular and most captivating authors. Even four hundred years after his death, his plays still attract audiences around the globe. Why is that? In this course, you’ll learn who Shakespeare was, what kinds of plays he wrote, and what makes his body of work perhaps the greatest work of art ever created. In Episode One, Emma Smith, Professor of Shakespeare Studies at the University of Oxford, tackles the question, Why read Shakespeare? You’ll learn what makes Shakespeare newly relevant for each new generation of audiences and discover what is unique about Shakespeare’s approach to writing--an approach that lets us not only watch but actually take part in his plays. 

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day

Posted on

NPR's Book of the Day - Romance, terror, and the supernatural in Isabel Cañas’ debut novel ‘The Hacienda’

In the aftermath of the Mexican war for independence, a new bride finds herself alone in a haunted house surrounded by people who don't believe her. It's the plot of Isabel Cañas' debut novel The Hacienda, where she blends romance, terror, and the supernatural to tell a story highly embedded with Mexican culture. In an interview with Weekend Edition Sunday, Cañas told Ayesha Rascoe about the themes she wanted to explore in her novel – colonialism, social status, the syncretism of Catholicism and indigenous practices – and her own fear of darkness.
Posted on

Unexpected Elements - The James Webb Space Telescope – the first 6 months

NASA's James Webb Space Telescope has produced amazing images in its first 5 months, but amazing science as well. Roland hears from one of the leading astronomers on the JWST programme, Dr Heidi Hammel, as well as other experts on what they are already learning about the first galaxies in the Universe, the birth places of stars, the strange behaviour of some other stars, and the first view of Neptune's rings in over 30 years.

Over the past 12 months, CrowdScience has travelled the world, from arctic glacierscapes to equatorial deserts, to answer listeners’ science queries. Sometimes, the team come across tales that don’t quite fit with the quest in hand, but still draw a laugh, or a gasp. In this show, Marnie Chesterton revisits those stories, with members of the CrowdScience crew.

Alex the Parrot was a smart bird, with an impressive vocabulary and the ability to count and do basic maths. He was also intimidating and mean to a younger parrot, Griffin, who didn’t have the same grasp of the English language. Scientist Irene Pepperberg shares the consequence of this work-place bullying. 

Take a tour of the disaster room at ICPAC, the IGAD Climate Prediction and Applications Centre (ICPAC) based in Nairobi, Kenya. It’s a new building where scientists keep watch for weird new weather and passes that information to 11 East African countries. Viola Otieno is an Earth Observation (EO) Expert and she explained how they track everything from cyclones to clouds of desert locust.

Malcolm MacCallum is curator of the Anatomical Museum at Edinburgh University in Scotland, which holds a collection of death masks and skull casts used by the Edinburgh Phrenological Society. Phrenology was a pseudoscience, popular in the 1820s, where individuals attempted to elucidate peoples’ proclivities and personalities by the shape of their heads. We see what the phrenologists had to say about Sir Isaac Newton and the “worst pirate” John Tardy.

While recording on Greenland’s icesheet, the CrowdScience team were told by Professor Jason Box about “party ice.” 40,000 year old glacial ice is a superior garnish for your cocktail than normal freezer ice, apparently. This starts a quest for the perfect Arctic cocktail.

Image: An image from the James Webb Space Telescope (Credit: Nasa via PA)

Posted on

Everything Everywhere Daily - New Year’s Traditions

Every year, people around the world ring in the New Year. 

How they do this, however, can differ radically from place to place. New Year’s traditions tend to be even more varied than Christmas celebrations.

As with Christmas, traditions involve drinks, food, and rituals, but usually with a lot more noise and staying up later. 

Learn more about traditions surrounding how we ring in the New Year on this episode of Everything Everywhere Daily.


Subscribe to the podcast! 

https://link.chtbl.com/EverythingEverywhere?sid=ShowNotes

--------------------------------

Executive Producer: Darcy Adams

Associate Producers: Peter Bennett & Thor Thomsen

 

Become a supporter on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/everythingeverywhere


Update your podcast app at newpodcastapps.com


Discord Server: https://discord.gg/UkRUJFh

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/everythingeverywhere/

Facebook Page: https://www.facebook.com/EverythingEverywhere

Facebook Group: https://www.facebook.com/groups/everythingeverywheredaily

Twitter: https://twitter.com/everywheretrip

Website: https://everything-everywhere.com/everything-everywhere-daily-podcast/

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Posted on

NBN Book of the Day - Josiah Ober, “The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason” (U California Press, 2022)

Tracing practical reason from its origins to its modern and contemporary permutations, the Greek discovery of practical reason, as the skilled performance of strategic thinking in public and private affairs, was an intellectual breakthrough that remains both a feature of and a bug in our modern world. Countering arguments that rational choice-making is a contingent product of modernity, The Greeks and the Rational: The Discovery of Practical Reason (U California Press, 2022) traces the long history of theorizing rationality back to ancient Greece. In this book, Josiah Ober explores how ancient Greek sophists, historians, and philosophers developed sophisticated and systematic ideas about practical reason. At the same time, they recognized its limits—that not every decision can be reduced to mechanistic calculations of optimal outcomes. Ober finds contemporary echoes of this tradition in the application of game theory to political science, economics, and business management. The Greeks and the Rational offers a striking revisionist history with widespread implications for the study of ancient Greek civilization, the history of thought, and human rationality itself.

Javier Mejia is an economist teaching at Stanford University, whose work focuses on the intersection between social networks and economic history. His interests extend to topics on entrepreneurship and political economy with a geographical specialty in Latin America and the Middle East. He received a Ph.D. in Economics from Los Andes University. He has been a Postdoctoral Associate and Lecturer at New York University--Abu Dhabi and a Visiting Scholar at the University of Bordeaux. He is a regular contributor to different news outlets. Currently, he is Forbes Magazine op-ed columnist.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Support our show by becoming a premium member! https://newbooksnetwork.supportingcast.fm/book-of-the-day