Posts tagged ‘media’
Crumpled
January 15th, 2012 at 3:28 pm by Dr. Drang
I found a link to this article in New Scientist the other day, and it’s been driving me crazy. The article is entitled “Scrunch time: The peculiar physics of crumpled paper” and it’s crap from start to finish. The article—unsigned, and for good reason—focuses on the work of two physicists at the University of Massachussetts…
That palace in the sun
October 28th, 2011 at 6:57 am by Dr. Drang
I love BBC Radio 4’s In Our Time, and this week’s show is one of its best. It’s called “The Siege of Tenochtitlan.” In 1521 the Spanish conquistador Hernan Cortes led an army of Spanish and native forces against the city of Tenochtitlan, the spectacular island capital of the Aztec civilisation. At first Cortes had…
Radio 2 recording scripts updated
March 22nd, 2011 at 9:37 pm by Dr. Drang
The most recent update to iTunes broke some of my BBC Radio 2 scripts, the AppleScript and Python scripts I use with AudioHijack Pro to automate the recording and iTunesifying of shows I like. The failures occurred in the parts of the scripts that add artwork to the saved shows. I could have just deleted…
Writing well is hard
February 1st, 2011 at 8:14 am by Dr. Drang
You may have seen this article by Jeff Yang at SFGate. He makes the case that Apple’s success since Jobs’ return is due as much to what it doesn’t do as to what it does. It’s been linked on several Apple-centric sites and rightly so: it’s well argued, well sourced, and—with one exception—well written. The…
A nasty, wasty skunk
December 13th, 2010 at 10:09 pm by Dr. Drang
I was a little kid when the great Christmas TV shows were first shown. Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer came out when I was four years old, A Charlie Brown Christmas a year later, and How The Grinch Stole Christmas a year after that. I think I’ve watched them every year since. The Grinch, which was…
Bob Dylan in America
November 13th, 2010 at 9:09 pm by Dr. Drang
I don’t want to go all Cory Doctorow here, but a little loosening of copyright restrictions would sure come in handy now. I’ve been listening to the audiobook of Sean Wilentz’s Bob Dylan in America for the past few days on my bike ride to work. I’m still in the early chapters, and Wilentz is…
David Pogue uses Markdown
October 22nd, 2010 at 7:30 am by Dr. Drang
Well, sort of. I don’t read Pogue regularly, but I couldn’t help following the link in this tweet from Allen MacKenzie, because a good Microsoft bashing is irresistible. It led to Pogue’s most recent post, in which he lays into various deficiencies in Redmond’s latest Mac version of Office—especially Word and Outlook. As I read…
Good Times, bad Times
June 22nd, 2010 at 6:29 am by Dr. Drang
The New York Times has a big article about the Deepwater Horizon, the failure of regulatory agencies to recognize and act on the hazards associated with offshore drilling, and—most interesting to me—the safety device known as the “blind shear ram” that was the last line of defense against a spill. When a newspaper covers an…
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…
BBC bull leapers
June 14th, 2010 at 2:50 pm by Dr. Drang
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…
