Gordon's Notes

Around the time Spain and Portugal were swarming over the Americas and the European Renaissance was firing up, a semi-divine Sufi Ruler [2] ...

After years of making past IOT episodes available only for streaming, the BBC is making the archive of their History of Ideas program availa...

I've mentioned David Brin's prescient 1999 book,  The Transparent Society , a  few   times . In today's panopticon it's a pr...

Every physics hobbyist should be familiar with the names of Smolin, Gribbin and Greene. All are literate physicists who've written excel...

This morning I listened to the excellent IOT program on Antarctica . I didn't know ice flowed like molten meta. Because of that, for the...

Melvyn and Shula do not have the best chemistry in during the In Our Time program The Rise and Fall of the Zulu Nation . I can see why Melv...

When we think about science, most of us think of dramatic breakthroughs. We think Darwin and Wallace, Einstein and Bohr, Copernicus and Curi...

In Our Time, Radiation is a superb 50 minute review of 19th century physics -- with bits before and beyond. This is the physics that brough...

Wow. You know, this really did deserve more than just a small aside on the recently redesigned IOT web site... BBC - Radio 4 Melvyn Bragg...

Once it was Maracanda, ruled by Alexandere . Centuries later, before Rome fell , the Persian speaking Sogdians flourished there, at the hea...

The first I remember hearing of Boethius was this In Our Time programme on The Consolation of Philosophy … In the 6th century AD, a su...

In the 2003 In Our Time explored the cultural history of war: BBC - Radio 4 - The Art of War . During the programme, one of the guests men...

This IOT Program starts slowly ... BBC - Radio 4 In Our Time - The Sunni-Shia Split ... In 680, near Karbala in Iraq, a man was killed in th...

Jon Udell, one of my favorite deep thinkers, is championing community collaborated audio sources, a kind of 21st century radio service ... I...

In Our Time  's  Ada Lovelace  program, by necessity, involved quite a bit of discussion of Charles Babbage . Babbage, with some help fr...

The first two programmes of the 2008 season were a bit dull, but Melvyn has picked up the pace nicely with a piece on Godel’s incompleteness...

Towards the end of The Social Contract , after discussing the continuity between Rousseau and the The Terror , David Hume appears and we lea...

Fifteen hundred years of fascinating nonsense. That's what I think as I listen to In Our Time's "The Music of the Spheres"...

We're doing one of our family mega-drives. Thousands of miles with 1 dog, 3 children, 2 adults, one van. It works. Better than a reasona...

This is a bit scary. The NYT has noticed In Our Time. Is this an ominous step towards the mainstream? Worth Listening to: Obscure BBC Radio...