Posts tagged ‘entertainment’
Brainteaser
December 5th, 2010 at 8:48 am by Dr. Drang
Last weekend, I forced my older son to take a break from Minecraft and Black Ops and work with me on this brainteaser from Coudal Partners:1 There are five houses in a row in different colors. In each house lives a person with a different nationality. The five owners drink a different drink, smoke a…
Release the crackle!
October 5th, 2010 at 11:24 pm by Dr. Drang
On my ride home from work tonight, I heard something I haven’t heard in ages. RSS and some browsers won’t show the player that’s supposed to be here. Click this instead. It wasn’t “Stairway to Heaven”—that pops up every so often when I’m shuffling through my iTunes library. No, what I haven’t heard in ages…
Bull leapers and soybeans
September 20th, 2010 at 4:36 pm by Dr. Drang
When I first saw this cartoon back in June, I instantly decided to include its center panel (the funny one, even though it doesn’t have the punch line) every time I write a post about podcasts and radio shows I listen to. “Minoan bull leapers” captures beautifully the eccentric things you can hear on BBC…
To be played at maximum volume
July 4th, 2010 at 8:59 am by Dr. Drang
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…
Podcast cannibalism
June 21st, 2010 at 7:06 am by Dr. Drang
Well here’s an unfortunate bit of convergence. The Science Show, a radio show about—you guessed it—science from ABC Radio National in Australia, has decided to rebroadcast episodes of Radiolab, a radio show about science from WNYC in New York. This is great for Science Show fans from the antipodes who listen over the air, because…
The things you do endear you to me
June 5th, 2010 at 3:33 pm by Dr. Drang
John will always be my favorite Beatle, but I’m enjoying Paul a lot more than I did when I was a young man. This sort of thing might even get me to forgive him for wasting his huge talent on crap like “Silly Love Songs.” McCartney thanked Obama for the honor and, in a short…
Exile radio documentary
May 24th, 2010 at 9:32 pm by Dr. Drang
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…
Head links
May 18th, 2010 at 11:42 pm by Dr. Drang
Links, of course, make the web go round. They put the Hyper in HTML. But today the links I found were made in my head, the old-fashioned way. The day started with me riding in to work listening to The Science Show podcast from ABC Radio National. That’s ABC, as in Australian Broadcasting Corporation, not…
Backslash backlash
April 14th, 2010 at 8:10 pm by Dr. Drang
Although I think it’s a year or two late, this xkcd strip matches my feelings exactly. And, as with most computer-related irritations, the tendency of people to say “backslash” when they mean “slash” can be blamed on Microsoft. It may be that some earlier operating system used backslash for directory separation, but DOS put the…
Playstation 3 leap year bug
March 1st, 2010 at 9:46 pm by Dr. Drang
As a big fan of Reingold & Dershowitz’s Calendrical Calculations, I’m always on the lookout for calendar-related programming news. This morning I heard (via @jamesthomson) that the Playstation 3 has a leap year bug that screwed up a lot of users yesterday when it became midnight GMT and the calendar flipped from February 28 to…
