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Sources of Intelligent Audio for Commute?
confusus writes "Trapped in the daily routine of commuting for 1-2 hours every day, I started to ponder different ways of recycling commute-time waste. I tried listening to the radio, but 9.9/10, it ends up being just 'duh-whatever.' Then, I tried listening to audio books: it is really hard to find audio books that are tailored toward nerds. Thus I decided to find audio of interesting/geeky/nerdy/sciency interviews, talks, lectures. What would be the websites which provide such content?" I'd really like to find more informative downloadable audio content, too. Perhaps informed commentary and self-guided tours of historical and other sites, like national parks and significant buildings in the U.S. and elsewhere, basically self-guided audio walking (or driving) tours. Can anyone recommend a source?
If you commute 2 hours per day, 5 days
a week, 50 weeks a year (for a total of
two weeks "time off" for good behavior
each year), you pull in 500 hours/year
in a metal cage. If you do a decade of
work like this, that's about 208 days
in a car. Or, about the length of time
for a first-time non-violent felony
prison sentence, like robbery without a
real gun, grand theft auto (the real
thing, not the game), embezzlement,
and similar crimes. The difference
is that if you committed a real crime,
you'd at least have a chance of getting
away with it. But since you took this
crappy job, you're being sentenced to
a metal cage, without the benefit of
having potentially profitted from a crime.
Pray tell, what crime did you commit to
be sentenced to this metal cage that you
call "your commute"? Or do you not value
your freedom enough to demand or expect
something better out of life? (Don't be
ashamed if this is what you want for
yourself; the world does need cogs after all.)
Read the article I wrote for my LUG on podcasting. I also gave a presentation at our last meeting.
I link several podcasts that I like.
As a bonus, you can even get it in Ogg.
yo.
It is a perfect setting - lots of free time, a CD player, and nobody else around. (You feel pretty stupid repeating words over and over again in a foreign language if you are around other people). All of the Pimsleur lessons are 30 minutes each.
Also, Canadian Broadcasting is good if you can get it. You'll recognize a few programs as "oh, *that's* what PBS was ripping off when they did this program...".
Back when I was doing an occasional 1.5-hour-each-way commute from NJ to Long Island, I found it was just about right to listen to a bit of traffic radio plus tapes of the Grateful Dead Hour. These days I usually work from home, with an occasional 1-hour commute into San Francisco by train, but since I don't have to drive I can use my laptop.
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
If you are into space related science you may wish to listen to MP3s of the SETI Radio Network broadcasts. The topics are generally much broader than just SETI and the interviews with scientists and researchers are actually pretty good. They only produce an hour a week, but it will at least cover one of your commutes to work.
Listen to off the hook, they have archives and hourly long episodes of many years, should keep you entertained for awhile. http://www.2600.com/offthehook/archive_ra.html
http://www.oyez.org/oyez/resource/nitf/273/
They provide a basis for our legal system, and reflect some pretty important times in our history. Plus, there are inevitably arguments for and against that I had never considered, (Can I mod justices +1 insightful?)
It's interesting how it is with listening and driving. They seem to use totally separate and non-dependant "processing power" in the brain, or at least in my brain. I have noticed that attempting to communicate in any way (speaking to a passenger, a cell phone, whatever) is detrimental to my attention to traffic and the road, but having tunes or talk radio on does not.
I really do not see an issue with the poster's request. Having something to listen to does not, in my own experience, reduce the "bandwidth" that goes to the road.
In fact, I'll even go further: when fatigue starts to set in, having silence in the car is far worse than listening to anything that keeps your brain occupied. Nothing seems to induce sleep better than a quiet, monotonous drive.
Look at the tomato! Isn't it sad? He can't dance! Poor tomato!
Then there are two excellent "audio lectures" companies that basically record college freshman-level lecture courses on CD. (One of them is called the Teaching Company, and the other, I forget.) Most of these are decent, and some are quite excellent. There are lots of titles available, and if you're like me and have an interest for almost everything academic, you won't run out of stuff.
Now, I hate to say this, but it has come to my attention that many of these recordings are available illegaly through newsgroups and some p2p sources like eMule. I leave it to your conscience what to do with this information (keeping in mind just how many immoral acts are legal and illegal acts moral). If you asked me whether I prefered motorists who enrich their minds with bootleg lectures about the Aneid, Roman history, or Feynman's excellent lectures on Relativity to motorists who adhere religiously to federal IP laws, I must say that I'd choose the former. But don't ask me. I teach ethics at a major university.
http://freeaudio.org/
-russ
Don't piss off The Angry Economist
I cannot emphasize enough the value of This American Life when it comes to my 2 hours of commuting each day. I use vsound, realplayer, lame and gtkpod on Debian to make mp3 files of the freely available real streams from their website and get them on my ipod.
I'm sure someone more clever than me could script something in bash to automate this, but I just have it record in the background while I'm doing other things on my PC.
In Our Time is a show presented by Melvyn Bragg, who discusses a different subject each week, with expert guests. In general they apply a historical context to some scientific, technological, religious, philosophical or political movement.
Interesting recent subjects have been:
Quality of guests is high: for example, Simon Sing was on the crypto program, Roger Penrose and John Gribbin are regulars, etc.
As well as being broadcast on Radio 4 on old fashioned analogue radio, In Our Time has the honour of being chosen as the BBC's experiment in podcasting.
One podcast that I enjoy is Dr Karl on JJJ in Australia. It's a segment where people ring up and ask science questions and Dr Karl tries to answer them. He also takes answers from other listeners on the web. Normally quite interesting.
Find out how to listen at http://www.abc.net.au/science/k2/stn/podcast.htm