Sunday, August 14, 2005

Podcasts

I've been occupying my time during my two hour train rides to work by listening to podcasts on my Apple iPod. My listening selections include The Science Show and All in the Mind, both produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation and Quirks and Quarks produced by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. I used to listen to Quarks on CBC radio when I was a kid in Toronto. It was hosted by David Suzuki in those days.

I'm amazed at how good the Australian shows are. They focus on a topic each week and interview several experts from all over the world. The hosts of the shows are highly knowledgeable. These shows are so much better than NPR's Talk of the Nation Science Fridays. It is rather sad that the United States does not have a decent science show on the radio. It is no coincidence that Canada and Australia are both Commonwealth countries that followed the tradition of a national network in the vein of the BBC.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hope that's not 2 hours each way.

--SJF

Carson C. Chow said...

Yes, that would be 2 hours
each way.

cc

PS I guess spam has found
blogs now.

Anonymous said...

cc wrote, Yes, that would be 2 hours
each way.


Hmm...

PS I guess spam has found
blogs now.


You mean comment spam? I think that problem has been around for at least a year. You gettin' bombed?

Carson C. Chow said...

Yes, comment spam. I set it so it no longer notifies weblogs.com. I think that may have helped since it has subsided from last week.

Anonymous said...

Many thanks for alerting your readers to these excellent broad(pod-)casts. I had never heard of any of these shows previously, and after listening to them for a while now since reading of them here, I quite agree that they're a) excellent, and b) far better than any science broadcasting in this country (the U.S.), even on NPR.

And yes, it's a shame that the U.S. has no comparable science show -- but hardly surprising, alas, given the second-class status that science (and education generally) has with the bulk of our country's population.

In any case, thanks again for publicizing these excellent shows -- I'm thrilled to have found them.