That Whole Thing About podcast: Recent Episodes
Duncan Fisher
Duncan Fisher's almost-daily series about what's on our minds in news, memes and rumors. Have we seen it before? Is it real? Is it going to kill us? There's history and context worth knowing about!
Alone in Summer Science Academy. The profanity of foreigners among the gods. Zoltan builds a submarine. There are trilobite eyes. And lo! Amanda among the maidens.
Men's war. Which is to say, junior high. War without clear lines. Leaderless. And fought for no objectives. But also sanctuary. Science movies, cloud chambers, boxes of minerals. And more tribes, where Star Trek bifurcates into engineers or gamers. And above all, The Nutcracker, where noblewomen market their daughters to Dougs.
Life on Planet Grade School has died. Lonely departures. Rocket Summer. The horrors of Bryson Junior High ahead. How will Civilization save Doug Foster?
Doug finds artifacts, Civilization in highball glasses and garlanded girls who sing in Greek.
Dougie leaves the grade-school peerage, discerns Civilisation, and speculates on the Orphic mysteries of Girls.
What, and where, is consciousness? We're getting confused about it. The neuroscientists have much to say on the matter. Is what they say enough?
Why did the London Season crash in the early 1860's? And why does this matter? The answer is that one lady grieved her husband, and disrupted the power elite of a whole empire.
Think older people are hidebound about rules, and we're not? Think again. Think also about why.
The Necronomicon of the Mad Arab Abdul Alhazred is the most dangerous book of magic ever compiled. Fewer than a dozen copies exist. Scholars won't touch it. Dealers shun it. Those who read its secrets die. Except, not really. The Necronomicon doesn't exist.
Lying press? Government hoax? Tycoon dictators, and doctors discredited? We've seen it before. All of it.
Pigeon-passengers flew messages out of Paris in the winter siege of 1870. A few brought back replies. The gimmick? They travelled outward by balloon.
Listen to Duncan read his novel, a coming-of-ager he calls Burying Euclid. Today, chapter one: 'Gradations of Men'.
A national health system in America? A bad idea, and unpatriotic ... or is it? Let's explode some myths.
The corporate way of doing business gives us a lot of good stuff. And we need stuff. That's all it does, though. If the corporation were a person, you wouldn't want it as a friend.
Everyone knows the Mountain South talks in fossilised English from the King James Bible, right? Scots-Irish leftovers from the seventeenth century? There's a lot of that, yes ... but other language traditions feed into 'hillbilly' speech too.
Everyone knows about the Victorian opium dens. Or thinks they do. Historical reality is different.
So, Cornell researcher Daryl Bem has shown that there's extrasensory perception. His colleagues aren't so sure. Did he, or didn't he? The answer may lie with how science is done.
Isn't it okay to get on social media platforms? To be part of online communities? That depends on what we mean by 'community.'
We've be sure for a long time that dinosaurs evolved into birds, not modern reptiles. Now the story itself has evolved, on good scientific grounds. It's become clear that birds ARE dinosaurs.
Thinking of selling your house and moving galaxies? Think again. Here's why ours is such a hot ticket.
So we've imaged our second black hole! Exciting news. But what is a black hole, anyway?
Part 3 of Duncan the Landlubber's only blue-water sailing cruise, from dark Wales to ancient Spain, on the Galician coast.
Is gender a fluid thing, or a rigidly determined thing? The debate is a little ahead of the science. But here's a quick rundown of some of what is known so far.
Great idea, time-travel. But it is possible? One way of conceptualising time itself is by the behavior of rogue particles like kaons and B mesons. On that evidence, time really does like it flows in one direction, and one only.
Those cute old telegraph lines in the age of hoop skirts and top hats? They were actually data lines, put to some sophisticated uses. One was regulating and standardising time, by star power and machine-driven precision relays.
Having survived the terrors of the Bay of Biscay (part 1), Duncan sees Spain, ancient land of civilisation and mystery.
Epigenetics is the study of how our cellular DNA regulates our biology and many of the diseases and syndromes we acquire. It's not about genes -- it's about gene expression. Sometimes, it turns out, we're studying the wrong genome. There's a whole other one, and it turns out to matter a lot, sitting in the various bacteria we carry with us.
A travelogue for a change, and why not! Duncan's one-and-only blue water sailing cruise. A desert boy meets the mighty Bay of Biscay.
What did we English speakers speak a thousand years ago? Anglo-Saxon, or 'Old English'. Here is a famous church inscription, how to read it, and what it means.
The discussion has moved beyond 'medical marijuana' now, to pharmaceutical derivatives of cannabinoid molecules. They're not ready for production, but they're showing a lot of promise.
Is it possible to inherit memories? Some people feel like they have. But what does science say about it?
Were Victorian women better off than their Georgian grandmothers? The answer isn't straightforward, and it comes with some surprises.
'Yiddish' and 'Jewish' mean the same thing? Technically, yes. Learn the origin of Yiddish, the language, a leftover form of 'Middle High German'.
Lewis Carroll may have had a crush on Alice Liddell, the real-life Alice in Wonderland. Or did he? Was there something off-color about Victorians and children? Or is our generation the weird one?
No, our ancestors were not smaller than we are -- not when they ate like we do. Hear about the origins of that myth.
We get a lot wrong in our movies and storytelling about the early part of Europe, between Rome and knights in shining armor. Here's the cook's tour of what really happened.
The Puritans were a harsh bunch. But they had their soft spots. One was for the Jews. Why?
Who invented Christianity? Was it Jesus? Or was it Paul? Hear what A.N. Wilson, the novelist, makes of the problem.
The Roundhay Garden scene is the world's earliest moving picture footage. It's 2.5 seconds from 1888. It's fascinating by itself -- but so is its backstory.
In cathedrals, everyone looks and marvels overhead. But what's down low, scratched quietly in stone? Thousands of personal markings. In Canterbury, 800 years of little human voices.
Did they really die from taking a chill in the olden days? Yes. With lousy prophylaxis, lousy nutrition, and no remedies for infection, these people, who couldn't even keep warm, were sitting ducks for whatever came along.
Pop culture likes warrior queens right now, and one was reportedly dug up in Sweden recently. But was she?
Why do we think we're spiritual but not religious? Maybe each is a feature of the other. Here is how one young man journeyed into that wisdom.
Mauve was big stuff in the Victorian world. Making it synthetically in 1856 was even bigger. The Edwardians recognized the achievement, and industrial chemistry, eventually.
Can a machine produce images of what you're thinking? Yes, and Jack Gallant's team of neurobiologists at Berkeley have done it, sort of.
In the west we can misunderstand the motives of our non-western enemies at war. What seems rational and fair to us in conflict can be a point of piety and sacrifice to others.
'All in your head', they say. 'You just think you're better.' Placebo effect, it turns out, has a physiological basis after all. You can feel better because you really are better -- and the other way 'round.
Tabloids get things wrong. A lot. Here is a clumsy misrepresentation of a routine piece of research recently. It's worth knowing what really happened.
It's a popular misconception among English speakers than our ancestors talked to each other in Latin. They did not. So what did they speak? And where does this myth come from?
The Self Help industry is booming, particularly when it comes to 'health'. Is it too commercial, too superficial, to be worth buying into? What do we want it to do for us -- and can it deliver?
Why is the pattern of reporting so similar when we hear about aliens and about ghosts? Are these cultural expressions of a common need? Maybe it's worth thinking about what that need is.
There is a beautiful tradition of Christianity in Japan. What can we learn of the Japanese perspective on the life of Christ? Here is a look at Shusaku Endo, novelist and biographer of Jesus.
Older people talk differently. They hear things differently too. Where did that come from? The answer is technology, but it runs deeper than you think.
Do we perceive exactly the way our ancestors did? Did they see the world just like we see it? Evidence is, our visual preferences have evolved. And they're still evolving. This is an exploration of our ever-changing experience in the world of the eye.
So you think you know Dracula. It's about this supernatural curse from the Balkans, right? Actually, it's about science, and the way the Victorians were inventing epidemiology in the 1890's.
Some of us listen to science, and think faith is childish. Some of us follow our faiths, and think science is impious. Do science and faith need to conflict? Or can they actually complement each other?
We're beating each other up lately over science. Some of us don't trust it -- the process or the people who sell it. What is the process? To what extent IS it trustworthy?
Some people's experience with the supernatural is profound. Here is kind of teaching case. It's the true-life story of a couple who share their home with a family of ghosts -- friends, really -- from the eighteenth century.
Popular culture is full of talk about ghosts. All that talk is complicated, and its roots are tangled. What do we think, and where does it come from? And what do we do when we meet a ghost we think is real? Is that different from pop-talk? What do we think, and how do we change?