allwhitelegos / Ryan

Huffduffing since April 16th, 2011 feralstructures.blogspot.com

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Huffduffed (15) activity chart

  1. Point of Inquiry — George Lakoff

    George Lakoff is a cognitive linguist at the University of California at Berkeley. But unlike many of his scientific peers, he’s known as much for his work on politics as for his research.

    Lakoff the famed author of many books on why the left and right disagree about politics, including Moral Politics, Don’t Think of an Elephant, Thinking Points, and most recently, The Political Mind: Why You Can’t Understand 21st Century Politics with an 18th Century Brain.

    Throughout these works Lakoff has applied cognitive and linguistic analysis to our political rifts, and his ideas about "framing," "metaphor," and the different moral systems of liberals and conservatives have become very widely known and influential.

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    —Huffduffed by allwhitelegos 2 years ago

  2. Radiolab — ‘Cities’

    In this hour of Radiolab, we take to the street to ask what makes cities tick.

    There’s no scientific metric for measuring a city’s personality. But step out on the sidewalk, and you can see and feel it. Two physicists explain one tidy mathematical formula that they believe holds the key to what drives a city. Yet math can’t explain most of the human-scale details that make urban life unique. So we head out in search of what the numbers miss, and meet a reluctant city dweller, a man who’s walked 700 feet below Manhattan, and a once-thriving community that’s slipping away.

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    —Huffduffed by allwhitelegos 2 years ago

  3. Radiolab — ‘What Does Technology Want?’

    Are new ideas and new inventions inevitable? Are they driven by us or by a larger force of nature?

    In this conversation recorded as part of the New York Public Library series LIVE from the NYPL, Steven Johnson (author of Where Good Ideas Come From) and Kevin Kelly (author of What Technology Wants) try to convince Robert that the things we make—from spoons to microwaves to computers—are an extension of the same evolutionary processes that made us. And we may need to adapt to the idea that our technology could someday truly have a mind of its own.

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    —Huffduffed by allwhitelegos 2 years ago

  4. Radiolab — ‘Gravitational Anarchy’

    A mysterious case of the topsy turvies and a return to the question of what felines feel when they fall.

    In this podcast, we revist some ideas from our recent epsiode on Falling. We begin with a story excerpted from an essay by Berton Roueché, which first appeared in the New Yorker in 1958 and was later published by Dutton in a book called "The Medical Detectives." Read for us by the actress Hope Davis, it tells the true tale of a woman named Rosemary Morton, who had a little, um, trouble with gravity. After that, we return to a segment from the Falling episode that has troubled some of our listeners: the mystery of falling cats. Neil deGrasse Tyson, astrophysicist extraordinaire and Director of the Hayden Planetarium in New York, takes us to task for using "bad data." We call on science writer David Quammen to help us fight back and, in the end, we wonder how we can ever know the mind of a falling cat.

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    —Huffduffed by allwhitelegos 2 years ago

  5. Radiolab — ‘The Good Show’

    In this episode, a question that haunted Charles Darwin: if natural selection boils down to survival of the fittest, how do you explain why one creature might stick its neck out for another?

    The standard view of evolution is that living things are shaped by cold-hearted competition. And there is no doubt that today’s plants and animals carry the genetic legacy of ancestors who fought fiercely to survive and reproduce. But in this hour, we wonder whether there might also be a logic behind sharing, niceness, kindness … or even, self-sacrifice. Is altruism an aberration, or just an elaborate guise for sneaky self-interest? Do we really live in a selfish, dog-eat-dog world? Or has evolution carved out a hidden code that rewards genuine cooperation?

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    —Huffduffed by allwhitelegos 2 years ago

  6. Radiolab — ’ Blood Buddies’

    In this new short, a tree full of blood-sucking bats lends a startling twist to our understanding of altruism and natural selection.

    In our recent episode The Good Show, we grappled with a troubling question: how can goodness and self-sacrifice thrive in a world that Darwin tells us ought to favor selfishness? We follow up on that idea with Jerry Wilkinson, chair of biology at the University of Maryland-College Park, who describes an amazing discovery he made in 1977 that revealed an entirely new way of explaining selflessness.

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    —Huffduffed by allwhitelegos 2 years ago

  7. Radiolab — ‘The Universe Knows My Name’

    In this new short, we explore luck and fate, both good and bad, with an author and a cartoon character.

    Questions of fate and free will come up all the time on Radiolab, whether we’re telling a story or talking to a scientist. And in this short, we decided to take a playful approach to the subject. Paul Auster tells a couple good yarns (true ones) that make Jad and Robert wonder whether the universe is playing puppet master. Then Pat Walters and Lulu Miller talk to Michael Barrier (he’s the guy you call if you have a big profound question about Looney Tunes). Along the way, they answer a question that has been bugging Lulu for a long, long time.

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    —Huffduffed by allwhitelegos 2 years ago

  8. Radiolab — ‘Lost & Found’

    In this episode, Radiolab steers its way through a series of stories about getting lost, and asks how our brains, and our hearts, help us find our way back home.

    After hearing about a little girl who gets lost in front of her own house, Jad and Robert wonder how we find our way in the world. We meet a woman who has spent her entire life getting lost, and find out how our brains make maps of the world around us. We go to a military base in New Jersey to learn about some amazing feats of navigational wizardry, and are introduced to a group of people in Australia with impeccable orientation. Finally, we turn to a very different kind of lost and found: a love story about running into a terrifying, and unexpected, fork in the road.

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    —Huffduffed by allwhitelegos 2 years ago

  9. Radiolab — ‘The Loneliness of the Goalkeeper’

    This week on the podcast, football! No, it’s not a Super Bowl recap. Jad and Robert present a piece from across the pond—a piece about soccer they fell in love with when they heard it at the Third Coast festival in Chicago.

    Back in October, Jad and Robert hosted the awards ceremony at the Third Coast International Audio Festival. And one piece, well…kinda blew their minds. Partly because it’s beautiful (it won one of the big awards), and partly because it has a lot to say about symmetry—a topic we’ll spend a full hour on in an upcoming episode. (By the way: Jad and Robert will be performing the symmetry show live in New York, Los Angeles, and Seattle in March, get more info and tickets here!)

    So, consider this an appetizer for the symmetry shmorgishborg to come. "The Loneliness of the Goalkeeper," presented by writer, broadcaster, and former goalkeeper Hardeep Singh Kohli, and produced by Adam Fowler, is a Ladbroke Radio production, and was originally broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Enjoy!

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    —Huffduffed by allwhitelegos 2 years ago

  10. Radiolab — ‘A Flock of Two’

    In today’s short, we get to know a man who struggles, and mostly fails, to contain his violent outbursts…until he meets a bird who can keep him in check.

    Animals rescue people all the time, but not like this. Jim Eggers is a 44-year-old man who suffers from a problem that not only puts his life at risk—it jeopardizes the safety of everybody around him. But with the help of Sadie, his pet African Grey Parrot, Jim found an unlikely (and seemingly successful) way to manage his anger. African Grey Parrot expert Irene Pepperberg helps us understand how this could work, and shares some insights from her work with a parrot named Alex.

    And one quick note from our producer Pat Walters: Jim considers Sadie to be a “service animal,” a designation under the Americans with Disabilities Act that protects the rights of individuals with disabilities to bring certain animals into public places. The federal government recently redefined the term service animal to include only dogs and miniature horses. And while Jim disagrees with the change, he says he hasn’t run into any problems yet—in fact, the local bus company has already told him they’ll make an exception for Sadie.

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    —Huffduffed by allwhitelegos 2 years ago

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