The Red Notebook

The good old BBC has yet again made me proud to be a licence-fee payer. They have just made the entire audio archive of Radio 4’s wonderful In Our Time available online.

Unfortunately, you can’t download the programmes as mp3 files to listen to in your car (I have a work-around, but it’s complicated), some of the older programmes are only available in crappy RealPlayer™ format, and you need to be in the UK to listen to the programmes (unless you can figure out how to access the BBC iPlayer via a proxy server)—but, despite these reservations, this is a very big move by the Beeb.

Some programmes I shall enjoy listening to again include:

Baconian Science
On the Jacobean thinker Francis Bacon and Baconian Science.

Calculus
The dispute between Sir Isaac Newton and Gottfried Leibniz over who invented calculus.

Darwin: On the Origins of Charles Darwin
Darwin’s early life in Shropshire and his three years at Cambridge.

Darwin: The Voyage of the Beagle
How Darwin’s work during the Beagle expedition influenced his theories.

Darwin: On the Origin of Species
How Darwin was eventually persuaded to publish On the Origin of Species in November 1859.

Darwin: Life After Origins
Melvyn visits Darwin’s home at Down House in Kent.

Electrickery
On the dawn of the age of electricity.

Evolution
On the future of gene therapy and advances in evolutionary biology.

Human Evolution
On the six million year old story of human evolution.

Human Origins
On the evolution of the human species.

Humboldt
On the Prussian naturalist and explorer, Alexander Von Humboldt.

Lamarck and Natural Selection
On Jean-Baptiste Lamarck, the 18th century French precursor to Darwin.

Mammals
On the rise of the mammals which began 65 million years ago.

Maxwell
The work and legacy of the often overlooked 19th century scientist James Clerk Maxwell.

Nature
On the attempt to define humanity’s part in the natural world.

Plate Tectonics
On plate tectonics, a theory that transformed our idea of the earth.

Popper
On the Anglo-Austrian philosopher Karl Popper.

Science’s Revelations
On whether science has ruined our sense of poetic wonder at the world.

The Cambrian Period
On the Cambrian period, when there was an explosion of life on Earth.

The Geological Formation of Britain
On the geological formation of Britain.

The KT Boundary
On the KT Boundary and the extinction of the dinosaurs.

The Lunar Society
On the 18th century group of pioneering scientists and engineers.

The Natural Order
On the science of taxonomy; the classification of the natural world.

The Origins of Life
On when and how life on earth originated.

The Permian-Triassic Boundary
On the Permian-Triassic boundary in evolutionary history.

The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 1
Melvyn Bragg travels to Oxford, where the young Christopher Wren and friends experimented.

The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 2
How Newton tested the lines between government-funded research and public access.

The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 3
The 19th century blooms scientifically with numerous alternative, specialist societies.

The Royal Society and British Science: Episode 4
The more discreet role played by the Society in the 20th century.

The Scientist
On the origin of the concept and the historical role of the scientist.

The Second Law of Thermodynamics
On the Second Law of Thermodynamics from steam to the Big Bang.

The Whale – A History
On the evolutionary history of the whale.

This afternoon, the Beagle Project’s Director of Science, Dr Karen James, and I recorded a podcast, which I have named ‘Messages from Above’, for reasons which will become apparent if you listen to it. It contains lots of Darwinny goodness, and some pretty cool space stuff.

I’ve never been in a podcast before. They might just catch on.

Listen now:

Download | Embeddable Player

…recorded in deepest Wales, in online now. And top-notch stuff it is too.

Peter McGrath interviews fellow projecteer Dr Karen James about why we need an HMS Beagle, what it’s got to do with Nasa, what the Doc does for her day job, how Darwin’s statue moved, and a bunch of other stuff. All accompanied by courting house sparrows. Go and download immediately.

Well done, chaps. The Emmy is in the post.

The guest this week on BBC Radio 4’s Great Lives programme was Sir David Attenborough. Sir David nominated Robert Hooke. Great choice! Hooke’s biographer, Lisa Jardine, also contributed. I’m downloading the podcast as I type.

For one week only, you can listen again to the program, or download the mp3 file.

The Beagle Project’s Karen ‘Nunatak’ James and Peter ‘I Need a Nickname’ McGrath have been interviewed on the Minnesota Atheists Talk radio show. MP3 file here.

One for the car tomorrow, I think.

I caught the following while I was demolishing my kitchen this afternoon:

BBC Radio 4: GreatLives – Alfred Russel Wallace

The man who almost scooped Darwin. Redmond O’Hanlon chooses naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace as his Great Life. When you compare their jungle adventures, there’s a similarity between the two. Dr Sandy Knapp adds to the general enthusiasm for beetles, butterflies and bugs, and Matthew Parris presents.

Duration, 28mins. The programme is available on the mp3 file for one week only [apologies for the previous broken link].

• Books: Alfred Russel Wallace: a Life by Peter Raby
• Gruts Books: Trawler by Redmond O’Hanlon

BBC: In Our Time: Genetic Mutation (podcast)

Melvyn Bragg discusses genetic mutation with his guests Steve Jones, Professor of Genetics in the Galton Laboratory, University College London; Adrian Woolfson, lectures in Medicine at Cambridge University and Linda Partridge, Weldon Professor of Biometry at University College London.

Downloading to my iPod as I type…

Royal Society Podcasts: Robert FitzRoy FRS: sailing into the storm (mp3)

John Gribbin is the author of more than a hundred books of popular science, including ‘FitzRoy: the remarkable story of Darwin’s Captain and the invention of the weather forecast’. In this talk, he discusses FitzRoy’s career as captain of HMS Beagle and as a pioneering meteorologist.

Postscript: I have now listened to the podcast. It was very interesting, although the recording quality was pretty poor.

See also: FitzRoy’s Bicentenary

Last week’s edition of BBC Radio 4’s The Material World (which you can listen to online here) began with an excellent interview with Professor Mike Majerus, the geneticist and lepidopterist who first identified weaknesses in some of Bernard Kettlewell’s classic experiments investigating industrial melanism in peppered moths, along with Jerry Coyne, who first wrote about Majerus’s findings in Nature magazine.

The interview explains how the experimental weaknesses were blown out of all proportion by creationists, who saw the flawed experiments as somehow disproving evolution. It goes on to explain how Majerus has painstakingly repeated Kettlewell’s experiments, having carefully removed the flaws, and verified Kettlewell’s original findings. It also makes a lie of the claim often made against evolution that it is unscientific because it makes no predictions by predicting that industrial melanism in moths will continue to decline in the UK, now that the air is a lot cleaner, whereas it will start to rise in countries where pollution is on the rise, such as China and India.

A fascinating programme. (The second half contains an interview with the recent winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine, Sir Martin Evans, which is also pretty interesting.)

Just finished watching John Horgan speaking with PZ Myers on Science Saturday (70 mins). Highly recommended.

Contrary to all expectations, PZ neither sports horns nor spouts fire. In fact, entre nous, I think he looks a little bit like me!

I must have been living with my head buried in the sand. I am totally addicted to podcasts, but, until I read yesterday’s Blog Go the Heads announcement on the Cosmic Variance weblog, I had never even heard of Bloggingheads.tv.

What a fantastic concept! Two side-by-side talking heads having a conversation via video link. And what a great show too: the one of the aforementioned Cosmic Variance’s resident (astro)physicists, Sean Carroll, in a 79-minute conversation with science writer George Johnson about string theory, religion, love, the anthropic principle, and old photographic plates. Two highly intelligent people having a highly intelligent conversation about science.

It’s the future of television.

Some recent podcasts that I have enjoyed:

• Guardian Science Extra: Steve Jones (mp3)
  Interview with Steve Jones about his new book, Coral: A Pessimist in Paradise.
  Related links: Home page | Feed | Subscribe via iTunes
• Guardian Science Extra: Richard Dawkins (mp3)
  Interview with Richard Dawkins author of the ‘The God Delusion’, about religion, science, and his recent argument with Robert Winston.
  Related links: Home page | Feed | Subscribe via iTunes
• TED Talks: Measuring the fastest animal on earth (mp3)
  UC Berkeley biologist Sheila Patek gives a wide-ranging talk on the effort to measure the hyperfast movements of peacock mantis shrimp heels using high-speed video cameras recording at 20,000 frames per second. She and her team slowed down the movements of these amazing animals and showed they had the fastest known feeding strike in the animal kingdom. (In 2006, Patek’s team announced an even faster animal part: the mandible of the trap-jaw ant.)
  Related links: Show notes (inc. video) | Home page | Feed
• TED Talks: Biomimicry (mp3)
  With 3.8 billion years of research and development on its side, nature has already solved problems that human designers and engineers still struggle with. In this inspiring talk, Janine Benyus provides fascinating examples of biomimicry—the way humans mimic nature in the products we build and the systems we implement. And because the champion adapters in the natural world are, by definition, those that can survive without destroying the environment that sustains them, biomimicry can contribute to the long-term health of our planet.
  Related links: Show notes (inc. video) | Home page | Feed

See also: Previous list of podcasts

Some recent radio programmes and podcasts I have enjoyed that are available online (you wouldn’t believe how long it took me to retrieve all the following links, so make good use of them!):

• BBC Radio 4 Frontiers: Linnaeus (RealPlayer, eugh!)
  Peter Evans celebrates the 300th anniversary of Carl Linnaeus, the Swedish Natural Historian, who gave us many of the names of plants and animals we still use today. (Why doesn’t this excellent series have a podcast?)
  Related links: Show notes | Home page
• BBC Radio 4 In Our Time: Ockham’s Razor (RealPlayer, humph!)
  Why is William of Ockham significant in the history of philosophy, how did his turbulent life fit within the political dramas of his time and to what extent do we see his ideas in the work of later thinkers such as Thomas Hobbes and even Martin Luther? (Note: His eponymous razor is hardly mentioned—and might not even have been his—but don’t let that put you off.)
  Related links: Show notes | Home page | RSS feed
• Guardian Science Weekly Podcast: 21st May, 2007 (MP3, yay!)
  Featuring Alison Pearn from the Darwin Correspondence Project on Darwin the scientist, Darwin the student, Darwin the devoted dad, and even Darwin the comedian. (Guardian story here.) [Note: Alison Pearn is featured at two different points on the podcast.]
  Related links: Show notes | Home page | RSS feed | Subscribe via iTunes
• TED Talks: E.O. Wilson: Help build the Encyclopedia of Life (MP3, yup!)
  As E.O. Wilson accepts his 2007 TED Prize, he makes a plea on behalf of his constituents, the insects and small creatures, to learn more about our biosphere.
  Related links: Show notes | Home page | RSS feed | Zipped MP4 video
• Royal Society Podcast: Robert Hooke (M4V, iPods only, naughty!)
  A fascinating look at the disorganised paper trail left by Robert Hooke, the Royal Society’s first Curator of Experiments, and at the efforts of contemporary historians to piece together his paperwork and restore his legacy. (I just wish the ever-enthusiastic Lisa Jardine had let her archivist colleague get a word in edgeways.)
  Related links: Home page | RSS feed | Archives weblog (and Feed)
• New Scientist Podcast: Darwin’s Descendant (MP3, woot!)
  Author Matthew Chapman recounts his experience as a great-great-grandson of Charles Darwin covering a court case that pitted evolutionary biologists against proponents of Intelligent Design. (One of the last episodes of the late, lamented New Scientist podcast.)

See also: Video and podcast highlights (22-Oct-2006)

Some recent videos and podcast episodes I’ve enjoyed:

• New Scientist Podcast: Interview with Edward O. Wilson part 1 / 2
  Celebrated biologist and author E. O. Wilson discusses his efforts to persuade the American evangelical community to join with scientists in preserving the world’s biodiversity.
• Tech Nation Podcast: Dr. Moira Gunn speaks with David Quammen
  about his new book The Reluctant Mr. Darwin. Quammen explains why Darwin kept his theory of evolution under wraps for twenty years, and how he came to publish it in such a hurry.
• Royal Society Podcast: Bill Bryson: A short history of nearly everything
  A 2005 lecture by popular author Bill Bryson.
• Royal Society Podcast: Why creationism is wrong and evolution is right (iPod and iTunes only)
  Steve Jones is as entertaining as ever, but I had hoped for something a bit more hard-hitting.
• BBC Radio 4 In Our Time: Alexander von Humboldt (Real Player™ eugh!)
  The remarkable career of the Prussian naturalist who inspired Darwin.
• YouTube Video: Richard Dawkins on Stephen Colbert
  Clip from some American comedy TV programme. Quite funny. Watch it before the copyright people take it down. [Thanks to Adam Turinas, FCD, for the tip-off.]

Woot! In Our Time is back on Radio 4, and the first programme in the new series was about Darwin’s great hero, Alexander von Humboldt:

• Download MP3 file

(only available for one week, I think)

• Listen again (permanent archive in crappy Real Audio player format)
• In Our Time Podcast RSS feed

One for the morning commute tomorrow.