I went over to the Radiolab web site not long ago as to listen to a few recent editions (since Radiolab is on the radio at odd times). About a year ago, I posted a review here about the Radiolab experience \u2013 a combination of brilliance and annoying presentation (too much time spent chuckling to jokes and puns that aren’t shared with the listener). The recent stuff is about the same; except that some of it lacks the quality science reporting that made Radiolab worth putting up with. <\/p>\n
One short Radiolab piece focused on startling coincidences in people’s lives. And that was about it, other than a quasi-philosophical rumination based on an old Warner Bros cartoon (coyote versus roadrunner) as to whether you would prefer the universe to be against you or to totally ignore you. Maybe this was a hint that our minds have a propensity to make too much of our coincidences, and that coincidences don’t prove that the universe has a \u201cmeta-awareness\u201d of us, that determines our luck and lot in life. But it this was left hanging, and no experts were brought out to talk about probabilities of life events or genetic propensities in our brains to seek patterns and trends, even when there are none. So,we get all of the Radiolab smarminess, but none of the hard scientific content. Radiolab-lite; oh, just what we need.<\/p>\n
I regularly watch PBS’s Nova scienceNOW, a Radiolab-style version of the classic NOVA show hosted by astronomer Neil DeGrasse Tyson. And to be honest, Nova scienceNOW is getting more and more annoying too, in the Radiolab tradition. As to boost the entertainment content, they recently had Penn and Teller on, to help demonstrate how magicians use knowledge about people’s attention and brain processing to create amazing illusions. Penn and Teller on NOVA; ugh, not good. Actually, Penn Gillette on any show is not good (even though he seems a bit less unctuous as he ages). <\/p>\n
Tyson is now doing more and more cute little \u201cfiller\u201d pieces using costumes and scripted humor and cartoon blips. And his story correspondents (like Mo Rocca on the recent brain show, a political comedian who graduated from the Daily Show) keep getting less and less serious, throwing more tongue-in-cheek questions at experts and researchers when discussing the details of, say, a new laser sculpting device or a magnetic brain pulse inducer. The standards are going down at PBS; it seems like fewer and fewer serious NOVA’s are being made, being pushed aside by the magazine-article style NOW series. So: Radiolab and then Radiolab-lite, and now NOVA-lite. (Probably no coincidence that Robert Krulwich of Radiolab started NOVA scienceNOW and hosted its first season; and now Tyson obligingly slides down Krulwich’s tiny-attention-span path.) <\/p>\n
And PBS has the nerve several times a year to demand payment (the dreaded \u201cpledge campaigns\u201d) and to make you feel like a schmucky freeloader if you don’t become a sponsoring member. With PBS’s new focus on diminishing attention spans, they are losing mine.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I went over to the Radiolab web site not long ago as to listen to a few recent editions (since Radiolab is on the radio at odd times). About a year ago, I posted a review here about the Radiolab experience \u2013 a combination of brilliance and annoying presentation (too much time spent chuckling to […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,9],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1928"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1928"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1928\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1930,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1928\/revisions\/1930"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1928"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1928"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1928"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}