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Science for the Car Ride?
qaffle asks: "Being a commuting college student I've been putting many hours on the road recently and have gotten sick of the repetition of regular radio and music in general. I've been trying to listen to talk radio but all that is ever talked about is sports and I can only listen to Bears updates for so long. I'm curious if anyone knows of any sites online where I can find good science, computer related, or physics audio discussions online that I could listen to on the drive. This should give me a good variety and the ability to listen to something interesting during mid-late morning and early afternoon drives."
Books on Tape saved me during my long Los Angeles commute. It's a rental service: you rent tapes, listen to them, drop them in the mail when you're done (postage is already paid). You get a month to listen to them before they're late.
The books are unabridged, so they tend to be 10 - 20+ hours long. They have a frequent renter program (rent 10, get one rental free), and an online discount - rent 3 at once and you get a 5% discount. What else - you can space when they arrive - one big shipment, one every other week, once a month, whatever. And, once you're hooked, you can refer a friend, and get another free rental!
I often order 10 books at a time, delivered every other week for 5 months. Very handy.
You can rent CDs, too. They have two types of CD recordings: high quality & mp3 (resulting in 5+ discs, or one).
They're located at http://www.booksontape.com/ They have samples online so that you can hear the readers voices. I have my favorite readers - resulting in listening to authors that I would never have read normally, but I liked the reader so much I thought I'd give them a try.
I recommend the service very highly! If you decide not to use them, but listen to other tapes or CDs, be sure to get unabridged tapes. The abridged ones are short and miss a lot.
Sure enough, they've got an audio archive. Best thing is, individual interviews are downloadable mp3s or oggs. (Check out the 'what's an ogg' link beside each of the latter!)