161–167 of 167 posts
I looked, and there's more than 1000 available episodes of IOT on the BBC, they're all (at least every one I've heard) brilliant. I'm curious if anyone here has any particular favourites? I remember really enjoying the Plankton episode because it took me the classic IOT route of "That doesn't sound interesting, but I'll give it a listen" to looking up all the reading list. https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m001r1t5
Ach, very sad. Like Paxman on University Challenge, he was clearly finding it harder and harder towards the end. I hope he's alright, it'd be a tough one to let go of, I can't imagine a better show to present. Brilliant series, can't recommend highly enough to anyone who's not encountered it.
i wouldnt be surprized if hes been gently pushed out. unfortunately the clarity of his voice has noticeably worsened. listen to a 10+ year old episode and he sounds much clearer as a native speaker its all fine and intelligeable, but for anyone ESL it'd be challenging bc its so much mumbling now
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i wouldnt be surprized if hes been gently pushed out. unfortunately the clarity of his voice has noticeably worsened. listen to a 10+ year old episode and he sounds much clearer as a native speaker its all fine and intelligeable, but for anyone ESL it'd be challenging bc its so much mumbling now
I'm ESL, I'm Polish native speaker. I had, and I still have a lot of issues with understanding his accent. It's very hard for me to get what he's saying.
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I'll do the opposite: The P vs NP episode is aboslutely horrid. Probably the first and last time that they had any informatics people on the show. One major issue is that the experts didn't explain what we mean by "hard". Melvyn thought, as normal people do, that 'hard problem' means you've gotta be real clever to solve it, not that it takes a lot of steps to solve (and how the number of steps increases as the proble…
In 45 minutes assuming only the education of the (wo)man on the Clapham Omnibus explaining P vs NP is always going to be extremely difficult. I've never made the mistake of thinking that after a 45 minute episode of in our time on, say, Cyrus the Great, that I'm now in a position to write an essay on the man. I would assume that none M/NS/CS types don't make that mistake after listening to the episode on P vs NP.
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In 45 minutes assuming only the education of the (wo)man on the Clapham Omnibus explaining P vs NP is always going to be extremely difficult. I've never made the mistake of thinking that after a 45 minute episode of in our time on, say, Cyrus the Great, that I'm now in a position to write an essay on the man. I would assume that none M/NS/CS types don't make that mistake after listening to the episode on P vs NP.
I'm not sure what the goal was here, that's not what I'm saying.
Assuming that you had perhaps not contemplated this observation by way of analogy I shared my suspicion that an expert on Cyrus the Great might be very annoyed about the way he was discussed.
The problem, of course, is that such analogies are extremely difficult to make as subjects such as M/NS/CS very much have right and wrong answers in the way that history tends not to.
He's one of the great ones! People might also enjoy "This Cultural Life" https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m0010fl4 More than 100 episodes already with some of the world's leading artists and creatives.
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TRIP was formed in the turbulence of the crashing conservative governerment and it was a breath of fresh air to have people close to the inside who were commenting on unfolding events nearly daily while also saying all the things that traditional media didn't. I looked forward to TRIP every time Boris blundered so that I could hear the guys disect it with a few personal anecdotes thrown in from their time in power. N…
I find Political Currency better these days since Ed Balls and Osborne are at least both people who had very key political roles in their own right (Balls during the Blair government in the Treasury with Gordon Brown, then Shadow Chancellor, Osborne as part of Cameron's rise to power and Chancellor), plus there's the odd tidbit of opinion on the current government which you sometimes wonder whether is coming through…