Podcast Ponderings
Yesterday was not a blogging day. In essence, it was a ‘cogging’ day, if I may be permitted an Agnewism. Agnew in the since of the alliteration and cog as in cogitation. So I was busy thinking about things rather than blathering about them although from recent evidence that daydreaming is actually constructive, [Link] it would stand to reason, or the inquiry thereof, that blathering is also constructive, except possibly to the most anal of Taylorists.
Most of what I was cogitating – cogging, which I now notice has a definite Kubrick flavor – was things I had heard on podcasts, starting yesterday and continuing through today. The remainder has to do with books I am reading. It is the former that I have come to some mastication of although I do not yet “grok in fullness”.
On tuesday I listened to two podcasts from Public Wireless International’s ‘The World project, podcasts of science and technology, respectively. From the first I heard the opinion of some Turkish physician that Charles Darwin is a Terrorist. Evidently this strange statement – I am not sure how a human dead and buried for years can be considered in the present tense – comes about as a frustration over anyone questioning the propagator’s beliefs. IOW, religion not rationality. Normally this podcast is fairly good, but the staffer from Sigma Xi, the research organization – they gave up on calling themselves a research honorary when they decided to ruin their fortunes – is on vacation and unpresent to exert any adult, scientific influence on the professional (?) mediasts. Still, they are better than most of the drivel on science that some across.
The second was the technology podcast; its signal contribution was an opening statement that the podcast was guaranteed to be “Michael Jackson free.” I am not sure how that could be guaranteed since I am not sure what penalties I might exact to recompense me if their statement was inaccurate but happily it was indeed the situation. Unfortunately, the contents of the podcast were less than engaging, largely flawed by the error, noted so well by the historian James Burke, that we tend to confuse products with technology. This podcast was full of product nonsense but scant technology. Also, as did the science podcast, entirely too much politics, which reflects much of a recent PEW survey on attitudes towards science that fails to address the matter of how this politicization of science propaganda has alienated not only nerds and geeks but apparently bogs as well.[Link]
The podcast this morning was the usual CBC Quirks and Quarks episode, this one dealing, among other topics, with the Human Microbiome Project [Link] at the Yankee government’s national institut of health. This is one of the projects that is adding to our understanding of what humans are, in this case about 0.8 – 0.9 by cell count of microbes in or on our (?) bodies. Two pieces on attention grab here. First, there is a topography or geography of the microbes on our skins; not only does density vary but so does microbe demographics. And second, the commonality of the demographics of microbes is at least one nine common among all humans and perhaps as much as three nines.[1] This latter has some intriguing aspects.
One of these is that we share some much commonality that it is very difficult for us to actually give each other new microbes. Also, inimical microbes are the exception so inane extremes to prevent transmission may be effectively useless and likely detrimental in the unintended consequences of actually damaging our populations of beneficial microbes. This seems an appropriate insight to gain at the gym, especially among the teacher taliban, where such “foot shoots” are common. So clean up the equipment but be careful of what you do to yourself.
[1] For the maths challenged, that is 0.9 to 0.999.
