Posts Tagged ‘bbc’
To be played at maximum volume
July 4th, 2010 at 8:59 am
What better way to celebrate the Fourth than to listen to BBC Radio documentaries?
I spent yesterday afternoon resetting bricks in the patio and listening to my iPod. First up was last week’s episode of In Our Time, the history/literature/philosophy/science/math Radio 4 series hosted by Melvyn Bragg. The topic was Athelstan:
Athelstan, the grandson of Alfred the Great, came to the throne of Wessex in 925. A few years later he unified the kingdoms of England, and a decade after that defeated the Scots and styled himself King of all Britain.
As well as being a brilliant military commander, Athelstan was a legal reformer whose new laws forever changed the way crime was dealt with in England. Unlike his predecessors, he pursued a foreign policy, seeking alliances with powerful rulers abroad. And unusually for an Anglo-Saxon king, we know what he looked like: he’s the earliest English monarch whose portrait survives.
This is the quintessential In Our Time topic: so English it predates the Norman Conquest. If that doesn’t fire up your patriotic juices, I don’t know what will.
Second was a two-part Radio 2 documentary on the slightly more contemporary—though no less British—topic of glam rock. I liked the show overall, but suggest you fast forward through the first 20 minutes or so. That section is dominated by the reminiscences of producer Tony Visconti, and it’s unbelievably dull—yes, far duller than the discussion of Athelstan’s victory at the Battle of Brunanburh. Visconti has flat, affectless voice and it sounds like he’s reading from his 1970 diary: “Then Marc came over to my flat on Tottenham Court Road, and we had a curry.”
Fortunately, it picks up after that. American listeners may be surprised to hear that there was a real competition between Marc Bolan and David Bowie. There was no T. Rextasy on this side of the Atlantic, where Bowie was far and away the dominant figure.1
Glam was more about the look than the sound, and the documentary spends a lot of time describing the bands’ outfits—a topic you’d think would be more suited to TV than radio. But somehow it works.2 The interviewees (with the exception of Visconti) are funny and interesting, and the music is always playing under the talking. One surprising omission is that no mention is made of glam’s obvious influence on hair metal of the ’80’s.
The two episodes of The Glory of Glam are available for listening (or recording via Audio Hijack Pro or Wiretap Studio) for a couple of days. The Athelstan show can be downloaded directly from the In Our Time archive.
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And gave this post its title. Google the phrase if you don’t get the reference. ↩
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It’s sort of like Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy’s success on American radio in the ’30’s and ’40’s. Hard to imagine a ventriloquist act could work on the radio. ↩
BBC bull leapers
June 14th, 2010 at 2:50 pm
My wife cut this Zits cartoon out of the Tribune a couple of weeks ago, thinking, I guess, that Walt Duncan and I have something in common.
I don’t know what she’s on about. As I write this, my iMac is recording (via Audio Hijack Pro) a BBC Radio 2 documentary on David Frost, who has, as far as I know, never leapt a bull.
Just to clean up a loose end, if you didn’t listen to that Jagger’s Jukebox show I linked to back in late May, you didn’t miss much. The idea behind the show was that Mick would make up a playlist of songs the Stones were listening to around the time of making Exile on Main Street, and the host, Paul Sexton, would play them and elicit reminiscences and bon mots from Jagger. What came out was two hours of utterly conventional picks from the early 70s—almost every song was something you could hear on a classic rock station.
Jagger’s mots weren’t especially bon, either. The interview portions were like listening to a kid with a new tape recorder trying to get Grandpa to tell stories about the olden days when all Grandpa wants to do is fall asleep in his chair watching The Price is Right.
But there was one funny anecdote near the end of the show. They had just played Betty Wright’s “Clean Up Woman” (which, I admit, would not be played on a classic rock station), and Jagger told this story of Jeff Beck trying to learn the song’s guitar part.
Well, it’s funny if you’re a Jeff Beck fan.
Exile radio documentary
May 24th, 2010 at 9:32 pm
Last week, the BBC aired an hourlong radio documentary on Exile on Main Street, coinciding with the album’s reissue. If you’re interested in that kind of thing, you have two days to listen to it—or record it via Audio Hijack Pro or Wiretap Studio—through the BBC’s Listen Again service.
I listened to it on my iPod while riding home from work today. I don’t think I heard anything I didn’t already know, but there were several interesting bits, and it made a hot, humid ride go faster.
Keith Richards has nearly completed his transformation into Ken Shabby, ending every sentence with a wheezing, mumbling laugh:
Mick Jagger still gives a wicked quote:
Charlie Watts also gets interviewed for the show, and I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that he says nothing memorable.
But at least Watts is acknowledged. Bill Wyman is mentioned a few times, but is name-checked less often than Nicky Hopkins. And I would swear Mick Taylor’s name doesn’t come up at all.
The interviews make it clear that Jagger is ambivalent about Exile’s high status among the Stones’ albums. It’s always been considered more of a Keith album than a Mick album, and Mick doesn’t like looking second best. This is the guy who, by all accounts, held onto the Rock and Roll Circus film for almost 30 years because the Who gave a better performance than the Stones did.
While I like Exile, I’ve always thought it had too much filler; a single album’s worth of tunes puffed out into a double album. Sort of like the White Album on the Beatles side, which is often rated higher (by the public, not critics) than the much superior Revolver. Some people weigh art by the pound.
At the end of the show, there’s a promo for a show on Memorial Day1 called Jagger’s Jukebox, which will play songs selected by Mick for their influence on the Stones in general and Exile on Main Street in particular. I’ll be setting up Audio Hijack Pro to record that one, too.
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OK, the Brit’s don’t celebrate Memorial Day, but that’s the day it’s on. ↩
BBC iPlayer site-specific browser
February 24th, 2010 at 10:00 am
As I’ve mentioned at great length in earlier posts, I use Audio Hijack Pro to record BBC Radio shows that are streamed over the internet but don’t come in podcast form. Until recently, I’d been using Safari to open the stream URL. Generally, this worked out fine, but if I wanted to browse while recording something in the background, I had to follow two rules
- Don’t open any sites that play sounds, as these will be recorded on top of the show.
- Don’t quit Safari when I was done browsing, as that will kill the recording.
Sometimes I’d forget to follow these rules and ruin a hour or more of recording. Whenever this happened, I’d try to fix the problem by swearing at myself, but that never seemed to work.
What has worked is creating a site-specific browser (SSB) for recording. I used Fluid1 to create an SSB, called BBC iPlayer, that opens a generic BBC page.
BBC iPlayer, then, is the application whose sound output gets hijacked by AHP.
AHP tells BBC iPlayer to navigate away from the generic page to the URL for the stream. Now I can browse in Safari without worrying that something I do will screw up the recording.
Luckily, the various scripts I wrote for getting the streaming URL from the BBC—all collected in this GitHub repository—are browser-agnostic, so they didn’t have to be edited at all. Only the settings in AHP itself needed updating.
I was going to use the current BBC logo as the icon for the BBC iPlayer SSB, but its horizontal layout doesn’t work well as an icon. So I found a screenshot of the old spinning blue globe logo (the one you’d always see during Monty Python’s Flying Circus) on this BBC logo history page and did a bit of editing.
It doesn’t look great at a small size, but it’s instantly recognizable to me.
One more thing: As you can see in the AHP screenshot, one of my upcoming recordings is of an episode of Radio 2’s semi-regular show, The Record Producers. The subject of this Saturday’s show will be Todd Rundgren. Obviously, I have no idea if the show will be any good (personally, I’m hoping they don’t spend too much time on Bat Out of Hell), but Todd fans will probably want to listen regardless.
Unintended Consequences of Math
February 17th, 2010 at 11:30 pm
I thought last week’s episode of In Our Time was particularly good, even though I already knew most of the facts presented and disagreed with much of the discussion of those facts. Actually, maybe I liked it because I disagreed with it. It gave me a lot to think about, which thinking I will now inflict on you.
In Our Time is a weekly radio show broadcast on BBC Radio 4, the hifalutin BBC station. People outside the UK can get the podcast. Each episode covers a fairly restricted topic, with panel discussion moderated and prodded by the host, Melvyn Bragg. Unlike most American shows of this type, In Our Time puts real experts on its panels, not journalists hawking their latest books. Each show’s panel is usually made up of professors of the subject from various British universities. The scope of the show is immense, as you can see from looking at its archive. The most recent three shows, for example, covered
- George Eliot’s Silas Marner;
- the 14th-century philosopher Ibn Khaldun; and
- the unintended consequences of pure math.
It’s this last one that got me thinking.
Most of the show was given over to stories, told in the style of James Burkes’ Connections series, of concepts developed purely for their own mathematical beauty (that’s the pure math of the episode’s title) that suddenly became useful for practical purposes decades or centuries later.
The first of these stories, told by the delightfully-named Colva Roney-Dougal of the University of St. Andrews, purportedly explains how the solution of cubic equations led to the electric chair. In the 16th century, while investigating the solution of cubic equations, Cardano found square roots of negative numbers in his solutions. This led to the use of complex numbers. It turned out, hundreds of years later, that complex numbers were very convenient in the analysis of alternating current.
(Phasor image blatantly stolen from here.)
If you know anything about the competition between Thomas Edison and George Westinghouse over use of DC and AC, you can see where this is going. As part of his campaign against AC, Edison touted its use in electrocution.1 Therefore, we’re supposed to think, the electric chair was an unintended consequence of complex numbers.
But, and this is pointed out in the show, while complex numbers make the analysis of AC easier, they’re not required. In fact, the electric chair was first designed before anyone used complex numbers to analyze AC. So yes, it’s interesting that complex numbers can be used in AC analysis (as they can be used similarly to analyze mechanical vibrations and problems in plane elasticity), but it really isn’t right to call the connection a consequence.
The use of the term consequence is even less apt in the second example: the application of conic sections to celestial orbits and the trajectories of projectiles. There’s no question this is an interesting connection. The Greeks studied conic sections for their intrinsic beauty, and it was definitely an exercise in pure math. There’s no particular reason to believe they’d be applicable to gravity-controlled motions. But again, this isn’t a consequence, it’s a discovery. Planets didn’t start orbiting in ellipses because Kepler said so.
(Image from Duk at Wikipedia.)
The third story eventually works its way (via Cardano and de Moivre) to Gauss’s use of the normal distribution to predict the position of an asteroid. The asteroid had been observed for only a short time before the view of it was blocked by the sun. Gauss recognized that the observations prior to its disappearance had errors that followed the normal distribution and was able to give the best prediction of where it would be after it reappeared.
The normal distribution had been described by previous mathematicians—de Moivre and Laplace, in particular—studying games of chance and other random phenomena, and Gauss’s use of it to analyze observational errors was definitely a consequence of that earlier work. But here I would disagree with the characterization of that earlier work as pure math. Early studies of probability were intensely practical because of their connection to gambling. There was nothing pure about it.
I would classify the fourth connection, between non-Euclidean geometry and relativity, as I did the conic section/orbit connection: interesting but not a consequence because there’s no cause and effect relation.
The last story, finally, does what all the stories were supposed to do: it describes how the study of prime numbers, once thought of as the purest of pure math topics, now has a very practical and thoroughly unexpected application in cryptography, keeping our credit card numbers safe as we shop online. The historical connection between the pure math and the practical application wasn’t made very strongly—it was basically some hand-waving about Alan Turing—but the story may have been rushed because the show was nearly over.
I was amazed that the show finished without a single mention of “The Unreasonable Effectiveness of Mathematics in the Natural Sciences,” a famous paper written in 1960 by a physicist, Eugene Wigner. (How famous is this paper? Type “unreasonable” into your browser’s Google search field and see what comes up. It was the seventh suggestion when I tried it.)
The theme of the paper, as you can guess from the title, is how amazing it is that mathematics—often developed for completely different purposes—works so well to describe the physical world. While the In Our Time episode’s theme is not exactly the same as this, it’s damned close. Even the episode’s title is an echo of the paper’s title.
Fairly early in the show, one of the guests,2 John Barrow of the University of Cambridge, dives right into the main topic of “Unreasonable Effectiveness,” giving a very reasonable explanation of why many topics in math have applicability beyond their original conception. In his view, the whole of math is a collection of patterns, with the number of patterns increasing as math has progressed. It is, therefore, not surprising that some of these patterns match the patterns found in nature. How Barrow manages to go through this explanation without mentioning Wigner’s paper, I’ll never understand, but this was my favorite part of the show.
I doubt I’ll have as much to say about this week’s episode, but I bet I’ll enjoy it.
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No, I’m not going to link to the video of the electrocution of Topsy the elephant. I’m sure you can find it on your own if you really want to see it. ↩
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Occasional listeners of In Our Time know that the guest panel consists of three experts and may be wondering who the third guest is. Regular listeners will have guessed that it’s Marcus du Sautoy of Oxford, who seems to appear on every BBC show on math. ↩
One-off recordings with Audio Hijack Pro
December 15th, 2009 at 7:05 pm
I’ve written once or twice about using Audio Hijack Pro to record a few weekly BBC radio shows from their internet streams. I use the BBC’s Listen Again feature to schedule the recordings not when the shows are running, but late at night when I’m not using my office computer. The BBC also runs irregular programs of just one or two episodes that I like to record. In the past, I’ve always just recorded these one-off shows when I see that they’re available; there was no obvious way to schedule one-time recordings of these programs because I wouldn’t know the stream URL in advance.
Since the BBC revamped its web site, the stream URLs for upcoming shows are easy to determine. Just go to the page with the show’s description and copy the eight-character string at the end of the URL
The stream URL will be that eight-character string appended to the end of http://bbc.co.uk/iplayer/console/.
I’ve set up a dummy recording session in Audio Hijack Pro called “BBC” that has all my usual settings. When I want to record a one-time show, I make a copy of it and change the URL, the schedule, and the tags.
An AppleScript called “Add Show to iTunes Radio Playlist” runs after the recording is made. It’s a simplified version of the AppleScripts I use for the weekly programs; it does everything they do but get a track listing from the show’s web page.
1: (* Audio Hijack Script *** (C) Copyright 2003-2007, Rogue Amoeba Software, LLC
2: "set shufflable" and "set bookmarkable" lines added on 20070725
3: "add to Radio shows" line added on 20080904 *)
4:
5: on process(theArgs)
6:
7: --Coerce args to be a list
8: if class of theArgs is not list then
9: set theArgs to {theArgs}
10: end if
11:
12: --Into iTunes ye files shall go
13: tell application "iTunes"
14: repeat with theFile in theArgs
15: set aTrack to (add theFile)
16: delay 60
17: set bookmarkable of aTrack to true
18: set shufflable of aTrack to false
19: add (get location of aTrack) to playlist "Radio shows"
20: end repeat
21: end tell
22:
23: end process
As you can see from the comments at the top, the script is adapted from an example provided by Rogue Amoeba. My additions are Lines 16-19, which set a couple of track properties and put the track in my “Radio shows” playlist. The delay 60 command provides plenty of time for the track to get into iTunes before we try to set its properties. I’ve found that if I run the script without the delay, Lines 17-19 don’t do anything. The script is saved in the ~/Library/Application Support/Audio Hijack Pro/Recording Scripts folder.
One last script. A couple of years ago I wrote a Python script that printed out the schedule of of weekly shows to be recorded. With the addition of a few lines, it now prints out both the weekly and one-off shows:
God's Jukebox: S------ from 12:30 AM to 3:35 AM (185 min)
Monty Python's Wonderful World of Sound: --t---- from 10:30 PM to 11:35 PM (65 min)
Sounds of the 60s: S------ from 12:10 PM to 2:15 PM (125 min)
Sounds of the 70s: -M----- from 8:00 PM to 10:05 PM (125 min)
Trevor Nelson Soul: ---W--- from 8:00 PM to 9:05 PM (65 min)
The weekly shows and one-offs are distinguished by the case of the letter indicating the day of the week. Notice that tonight’s Monty Python show uses a lowercase t instead of uppercase. The script is called ahtimers, and it uses the appscript library.
1: #!/usr/bin/env python
2:
3: from appscript import *
4: import datetime
5:
6: # Get a list of all the sessions.
7: allsessions = app('Audio Hijack Pro').sessions.get()
8:
9: # Make a list with the sessions that have scheduled timers.
10: timersessions = []
11: for s in allsessions:
12: for t in s.timers.get():
13: if t.scheduled():
14: timersessions.append(s)
15: break # go to next session after finding a scheduled timer
16:
17: # Get the length of the longest name of a timersession.
18: longest = max(len(s.name()) for s in timersessions)
19:
20:
21: # Make a 7-character string with the days that the timer runs.
22: def timerdays(t):
23: daylist = ['-'] * 7
24:
25: # Put a lowercase letter in daylist where the next recording is scheduled.
26: dstring = 'smtwtfs'
27: wday = (t.next_run_date.get().weekday() + 1) % 7 # convert from Mon=0 to Sun=0
28: daylist[wday] = dstring[wday]
29:
30: # Put uppercase letters in daylist where regular recordings are scheduled. This
31: # may overwrite the lowercase from the section above.
32: if t.runs_Sunday():
33: daylist[0] = 'S'
34: if t.runs_Monday():
35: daylist[1] = 'M'
36: if t.runs_Tuesday():
37: daylist[2] = 'T'
38: if t.runs_Wednesday():
39: daylist[3] = 'W'
40: if t.runs_Thursday():
41: daylist[4] = 'T'
42: if t.runs_Friday():
43: daylist[5] = 'F'
44: if t.runs_Saturday():
45: daylist[6] = 'S'
46: return ''.join(daylist)
47:
48:
49: # Print the info for all the sessions with enabled timers.
50: for s in timersessions:
51: for t in s.timers.get():
52: if t.scheduled():
53: dur = t.duration()
54: durstr = '(%d min)' % (dur/60)
55: st = t.start_time()
56: et = st + datetime.timedelta(seconds = dur)
57: dow = timerdays(t)
58: ststr = st.strftime("%l:%M %p")
59: etstr = et.strftime("%l:%M %p")
60: fmtstr = "%" + str(longest) + "s: %s from %s to %s %s"
61: print fmtstr % (s.name(), dow, ststr, etstr, durstr.rjust(9))
The additional lines are 25-28. Two things are worth noting:
appscriptuses Python’sdatetimemodule when returning date information, anddatetimetakes Monday to be the beginning of the week. Since I consider Sunday the beginning of the week, Line 27 converts the output ofweekday()to my convention.- Both one-time and weekly timers will return a value for
next_run_date, so thedayliststring will have lowercase letters for both types of program after Line 28. Lines 30-46 go on to overwrite the lowercase letters with uppercase letters for the weekly timers.
When I get to the office tomorrow morning, the Monty Python documentary will waiting for me, ready to be synced to my iPod.