Jonathan Coulton Answers Your Questions
…from podcasters and other people in the Web 2.0 world? What are the ways each respective media space has contributed to your career? Also, touring is a big part of…
We talk to a U.S. Geological Survey physicist about the science — and folly — of predicting earthquakes. There are lots of known knowns; and, fortunately, not too many unknown…
Yes, it expands the mind but we usually don’t retain much — and then there’s the opportunity cost.
As Kevin Kelly tells it, the hippie revolution and the computer revolution are nearly one and the same.
Playing notes on her piano, she demonstrates for Steve why whole numbers sound pleasing, why octaves are mathematically imperfect, and how math underlies musical composition. Sarah, a professor at the…
Everyone agrees that massive deforestation is an environmental disaster. But most of the standard solutions — scolding the Brazilians, invoking universal morality — ignore the one solution that might actually…
Columbia astrophysicist David Helfand is an academic who does things his own way — from turning down job security to helping found a radically unconventional university….
Steve is on a mission to reform math education, and Sarah Hart is ready to join the cause. In her return visit to the show, Sarah explains how patterns are…
Also: are the most memorable stories less likely to be true? Stephen Dubner chats with Angela Duckworth in this classic episode from July 2020….
Hank Green is an internet phenomenon and a master communicator, with a plan to reform higher education. He and Steve talk about the video blog that launched Hank’s career, the…
How final is a final offer, really? Does anonymity turn nice people into jerks? And should you tell your crush that you dreamed about marrying them?…
How final is a final offer, really? Does anonymity turn nice people into jerks? And should you tell your crush that you dreamed about marrying them?
…from podcasters and other people in the Web 2.0 world? What are the ways each respective media space has contributed to your career? Also, touring is a big part of…
Harvard economist Raj Chetty uses tax data to study inequality, kid success, and social mobility. He explains why you should be careful when choosing your grade school teachers — and…
Humans have a built-in “negativity bias,” which means we give bad news much more power than good. Would the Covid-19 crisis be an opportune time to reverse this tendency?
…1000 only gave “Snakes” a 5.9. That dropoff of 2.0 is large, but not the largest. But given that 7.9 is normally a very good rating, and 5.9 not too…
The political scientist Yuen Yuen Ang argues that different forms of government create different styles of corruption. The U.S. and China have more in common than we’d like to admit…
Humans have a built-in “negativity bias,” which means we give bad news much more power than good. Would the Covid-19 crisis be an opportune time to reverse this tendency?
A new book by an unorthodox political scientist argues that the two rivals have more in common than we’d like to admit. It’s just that most American corruption is essentially…
…few hours, I start to have withdrawal symptoms. I’m fairly certain that if Web 2.0 were around when I was in high school and college, I’d have a blog and…
…violence, arrest of blacks decreased 3.3% and arrests of whites increased 2.0% I also looked at 23 high-crime cities that accounted for 28% of the murders and 32% of the…
…highly expansionary. Estimates excluding education spending suggest fiscal policy multipliers of about 2.0 with per job cost of under $100,000. The authors split federal spending into three types: Agencies providing…
…0.201 2.7 1.7 Jamal Crawford SG 961 0.030 0.6 0.078 1.6 1.1 Lamar Odom PF 643 -0.079 -1.1 0.111 1.5 2.0 Ronny Turiaf C 418 0.171 1.5 0.101 0.9 -0.4…
…digital content once the buyer has paid for it. If Amazon can succeed in making ebooks behave more like old-fashioned books, the result might be first sale 2.0, and a…
…as I read about Web 2.0 concepts I the ideas were becoming tangible in business plan pitches I was seeing. Entrepreneurs were asking questions about who needed to be an…
…into the ground and probably into the community’s ground water.” “The site had trees down, roads and driveways missing, and big boulders of earth, or what looked like gray earth….
…you feel like wading into the conversation, you might wish to sample Dot Earth, Watts Up With That, and RealClimate, which presents “climate science from climate scientists.” The discussions at…
Also: are the most memorable stories less likely to be true?
The endless pursuit of G.D.P., argues the economist Kate Raworth, shortchanges too many people and also trashes the planet. Economic theory, she says, “needs to be rewritten” — and Raworth…
He graduated high school at 14, and by 23 had several graduate degrees and was a research assistant with Stephen Hawking. He became the first chief technology officer at Microsoft…
Recorded live in San Francisco. Guests include the keeper of a 10,000-year clock, the co-founder of Lyft, a pioneer in male birth control, a specialist in water security, and a…
