Podcasts update
Feb 10th, 2010 by admin
Some fascinating podcasts on the London School of Economics Events page. Recently I’ve been listening to Nobel Prize winner Paul Krugman during his three-day event in June 2009, where he dissects the global economic crisis:
The Return of Depression Economics Part 1: The sum of all fears
The Return of Depression Economics Part 2: The eschatology of lost decades
The Return of Depression Economics Part 3: The night they reread Minsky
These are great lectures – Krugman is a good speaker, offering both interesting insights dashed with equal parts history and humor. One drawback to listening to these podcasts, however, was that on occasion it was clear that Krugman was referring to some slides which he was obviously using with his lecture. While the podcasts were great, it would be nice if we had a videocast of the event.
Well – seek and ye shall find: Scroll down to June 2009 for all three of Krugman’s lectures in full-color video.
Dan Carlin: Common Sense and Hardcore History
Dan’s an interesting guy. His Common Sense focuses mostly on current events. I don’t necessarily agree with everything he says, but he is entertaining.
But I find myself listening to his Hardcore History series more. While he would be considered an ‘amateur’ historian, I’ve been impressed at his topic subjects. He has touched on some relatively easy-to-overlook topics. Plus, since he’s such a good presenter, you can really get caught up in his breathless descriptions of events. I love how they include faint-yet-distinctly-there sound effects in the background – for example, you could faintly here horses and elephants in the background as he was discussing Hannibal crossing the Alps.
I admit, with no sense of shame, to being a bit of a math nerd. I still find myself gravitating to the mathematics section whenever I’m in a book store of any significant size. So imagine my joy when I discovered that MIT has entire courses online – with video! Brilliant! Now – lots of these lectures are way over my head – Electcromagnetics and Applications, anyone? – but I found the Single Variable Calculus course a lot of fun. Like most math teachers the instructor has a geeky sense of humor that only other geeks could appreciate. And the audio sometimes does not catch the questions being asked by the students, which can make it hard to keep up sometimes. But the lecture notes are pretty good, and the video work is excellent. Be warned – the related rates topic kicked my butt back in high school and it will do so again now….