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From the 99% Invisible podcast, the story of how Charles Dickens’ pet bird (eventually) inspired Geico’s caveman commercials. I loved this.
If you liked it too, you might consider backing their Kickstarter campaign raising funds to produce their third season.
Jesse Thorn had me on Bullseye again to talk links. We discussed Benton’s ham (see if you can make it past the “we’re about to go ham” crack at the beginning) and Senna, one of my favorite films from the past six months.
I was pleased to make an appearance on the most recent episode of Jesse Thorn’s pop culture radio show, Bullseye. I shared a couple of my favorite links from the past month, both of which worked pretty well for the radio. The whole show is available here or you can just listen to my segment:
Well worth a listen: Dan Benjamin interviews Mike Monteiro on The Pipeline podcast about his design work and Twitter infamy. The last 10 minutes or so, where Mike calls out designers who don’t talk to clients, is gold. One of the reasons I got out of design is that I was never very good at that part of the job and as Mike says, you have to be able to not only accept but embrace selling your designs to truly succeed.
The newest episode of Radiolab is about parasites. It features what is one of my favorite links from the past few years: the story of Jasper Lawrence’s quest to infect himself with hookworm in order to cure his asthma (also available here).
Based upon what I read, and what I learned about the hookworms I decided that I was going to try and infest myself with hookworms in an attempt to cure my asthma. I was not willing to wait ten or more years for the drug companies to bring a drug to market. It was obvious to me that hookworms, for a healthy adult with a good diet, are quite benign. This account details my experiences, how I went about it, and the things I have done since infestation to calibrate my level of infestation so that in the end I was able to cure my asthma and hay fever with hookworms. These same techniques are of course applicable to any hookworm infestation, whether you want to control asthma, hay fever, colitis, Crohn’s disease or IBD.
Lawrence even sells hookworms to others so that they won’t have to travel to a third world country to contract them.
A Life Well Wasted is a well-produced podcast about “video games and the people who love them”, sort of a gaming version of Radiolab or This American Life. Each episode is accompanied by a limited edition poster designed by the awesome Olly Moss.
Update: The Bygone Bureau has an interview with A Life Well Wasted’s creator, Robert Ashley.
Quick hitter from Radiolab as a preview of the new season: composer David Lang talks about a piece of music he made for a morgue. Appropriate listening for the crappy rainy day here in NYC. Hopefully the weather will be better for Radiolab’s live premiere of their fourth season on Feb 21 at the Angelika.
Speaking of podcasts, The New Yorker has a couple of interesting ones on iTunes: readings from the Fiction section and from the weekly Comment essay in Talk of the Town.
Radiolab has been getting some love from quite a few of the sites I read (Snarkmarket originally turned me on to the show), so I thought I’d offer mine as well. I don’t listen to the radio or to podcasts, but lately I’ve made an exception for Radiolab. It’s about science, the editing is wonderful and unique, Jad Abumrad is one of the best radio voices I’ve ever heard, and to top it off, their shows are really fascinating.
Their show on Memory and Forgetting from last June is particularly good. If you don’t have time for the whole thing, the Adding Memory (especially Joe Andoe’s story) and Clive segments are almost must-listens.
You can listen to Radiolab on their site, on a variety of US radio stations, as a podcast, or though iTunes.
Update: Radiolab did a session at the Apple Store in Soho about their editing process and thought process. (thx, dan)
Listeningtowords looks like the beginning of a nice resource for sharing/discussing freely available audio files of lectures. Lots of stuff here I’ve never seen before.
Some podcasts are available from Core’s Design 2.0 conference held in NYC back in February. The next conference is in SF in June.
The Edge has a transcript and an mp3 recording of an event called The Selfish Gene: Thirty Years On. The speakers include Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins.
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