I am so very easily entertained

I used to live in Houston and enjoyed listening to NPR just as I do here in Austin. The local NPR station in Houston is KUHF, University of Houston. There was one program I really enjoyed The Engine of Our Ingenuity by Professor John H. Lienhard. Being the technology geek that I am I would purposely run late for the office so I could catch the program in the morning.

I found this while looking at the NPR.org main site for available podcast. I listen to other standard NRP programs during the morning and afternoon drive time. But every once in a while I want my technology fix.

The Engine of Our Ingenuity program is sort of like The Rest of the Story program by Paul Harvey. Some history of technology is revealed to the listener. At the end of the 4 minutes your are just wowed.

The very best part is these radio programs are now provided as podcast feed. So now I can save these and listen to the program at work or in the car or both. You can also download the audio files from the author’s site http://www.uh.edu/engines/engines.htm. Also on this site is the full transcript of the programs. These go back for many years. I just need to find a way to convert the audio file to import them to iTunes.

No Dancing for you!

Heard this on NPR during the drive home this Monday.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5029929

Seems there is a law in NY city prohibiting dancing in bars and clubs. Ha. And I thought we in Texas had things hard because if the Bible belt and all. But dang. No dancing is NY. Wow so wonder what that means for the girls or Coyote Ugly. Didn’t really catch the why and how of this but seems to me that you could just as easy outlaw drinking or smoking in bars. Oh, wait they did that. Actually, I think NY was one of the first major cities to do this. Still make you think about the power of government and the stupid laws that can be put into place.

P-

Golf – Evolution vs. Intelligent Design

So I generally listen to the radio in the morning on my way to work. I’m always stuck in traffic on MoPac headed North to the office. There are two main station I switch through as I travel the 20+ miles at 5-10 mph. The first one, 101X (http://www.krox.com/) , I like not so much for the music, because the play list is frankly tired and repetitive, but for the on air personalities. These guys are pretty funny especially Jason. The other, KUT (http://www.kut.org/), I like because of Morning Edition and just getting some NEWS in my life. Though many consider this liberal journalism, I still enjoy it.

Anyway, this Wednesday I heard a news segment on NPR from Frank Deford. Frank is the Senior writer at Sports Illustrated magazine. His subject was very topical. If you’ve been reading the news in any for the past 18 months you are aware of the battle brewing between the two camps of Evolution and Intelligent Design. Now I’m not about to get into the definitions. You can Google these yourself. What I thought was a total hoot was the way Frank presented how Golf evolved over the many centuries and comparing this to the two. Listen to this yourself. I’m sure you’ll agree this is too funny.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=5024450