Doctor Eclectic

Lauren Branch was my first undergraduate editing assistant on this podcast. She has since gone on to other journalistic endeavors, and opened her own business. Some of the links are automatically routing through the Wayback Machine where the website and blog are stored. I’m fixing the new ones as I post them, but I hope to go back and get the others this fall. Original Website Blurb from 2011 Toda...

Part Two of a two-part interview. Original Website Blurb from 2011 Well, we got renewed for another year.  That's pretty exciting.  Over the course of that next year, I'm going to be spending at least as much time promoting the show as producing the show.  It's like Dr. Holekamp said during our interview: the point of much of her hard work is simply to make sure these creatures are around for futu...

Things got extra-busy at GSW last week, and I skipped a couple of days. Sorry about that. We finish up this Saturday, and once August rolls around I’ll be back to posting new content on Mondays, as well as the remaining VSI episodes, which may roll into September. Original Website Blurb from 2011 I’ve been wanting to do this show for almost a year. It was one of the first ones I thought of, and no...

Original Website Blurb from 2011 Forgot for a second there whether I was referencing Rocky & Bullwinkle or Monty Python. In any case, thanks to Tom Drury for our new theme music. Links and such from today's show: The Spanish Inquisition http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spanish_Inquisition Cullen Murphy's new book, which actually covers all the Inquisitions interview on Fresh Air http://www.npr.org/201...

Original Website Blurb from 2011 Lesson number one : Conference calls with four people are difficult to follow. Lesson two : Hit the record button first thing, before you get distracted. Lesson three : It’s really hard to be topical and timely when you’re doing things part-time. It’s been over a month since this article came out. People have probably completely forgotten about the furor over it by...

Blurb from Original 2011 Website This New Year’s weekend, Krista Tippet is interviewing the Dalai Lama, whom I’ve never met but whom I have heard speak at a couple of different conferences. They will probably be discussing his latest book, Beyond Religion: Ethics for a Whole World , in which he draws a marvelous analogy, one I really liked. We like tea, but we need water. He’s using it to compare...

Happy Friday. rh Get full access to Doctor Eclectic at randallhayes.substack.com/subscribe

Stuff going on; website updates later. Same with tomorrow’s episode. Thanks for your patience, rh Get full access to Doctor Eclectic at randallhayes.substack.com/subscribe

Original Website Blurb (November 2011) Yesterday was gorgeous, the kind of 60-degree November day that makes you glad to live in a Southern state.  I sat on my porch, drinking a Hell's Belle (brewed here in NC), when I realized from the freshness date printed on the side of the label that July August September October November in acronym form spells JASON... Somewhat more relevant, I got to thinki...

Original Website Blurb (November 2011) Here's the talk I gave a couple weeks ago for the Audubon Society (suitable for framing, or for a long car ride, like the 8 hours to Kentucky my son and I are doing on Wednesday).  It turned out OK, although I was a little disappointed that the kids in the audience were outnumbered by the fossils ( sorry, TGPAS, but as the least elderly member of the board, i...

Original Website Blurb (November 2011) Last week I posted about an episode of The Daily Show devoted to science. In that episode, in an interview with Aasif Mandvi , Republican stragegist Noelle Nikpour (great name) made a fairly ludicrous case that scientists are not to be trusted, so much so that they didn’t even have to cheat by re-editing the interview the way they usually do. But she did have...

Original Website Blurb from 2011 Psychopathy is a perfect example of what biologists call frequency-dependent selection. As long as they are rare, they prosper. As soon as they become too common, they crash the population and lose out to more cooperative types. Much more on the evolution of reason as an arguing strategy: http://evolution.binghamton.edu/evos/seminars/fall-2011/mercier/ which includ...

Original Website Blurb from 2011 We left off with Barbara Oakley, talking about personality as a compromise between nature and nurture. We didn’t address last week’s topic of homosexuality, but I want to remind you of something she said on the general topic of nature vs. nurture: that where we admit multiple causes at all, we want it to be 50/50, whereas in reality the causal mixture is different...

Original Website Blurb from 2011 The general theme of the NABT talks was variation, particularly variation in the climate driving human brain size and cultural variability. I didn’t get to see all of the talks because of a departmental reception for Homecoming weekend. Supposedly they’ll be up on the web later, and I can do a more detailed commentary then. For now, though, this idea of generally i...

Original Website Blurb from 2011 Relative quiet. My loving family went outside so that you, my loyal listeners (all 27 of you) would not be disturbed by the clicking of dog claws or the piping voices of the neighborhood moppets. Then the doorbell rang, of course. It was the fundraiser girl, delivering me my dozen doughnut gift certificate from Krispy Kreme. I wish I could remember what she was rai...

Original Website Blurb from 2011 Today is the first part of a three-part interview with Barbara Oakley. I was on the phone with her for about two and a half hours, and I still didn’t get to ask nearly all the questions I wanted. In fact, she did some kind of interview aikido on me and got me talking. I met Barbara Oakley at the Contact Conference at NASA Ames a couple of years ago, where she was p...

Original Website Blurb from 2011 My roommate Corbin introduced me to Jorge Cham’s strip while we were in grad school. I was always a fan of comic books over comic strips, but this was clearly the work of a guy who had been where we were. He made a point of doing the movie version with actual grad students because he wanted to underline the fact that these are multifaceted individuals, not cardboar...

Original Website Blurb from 2011 Don't ask me why; I just really like the phrase "Shelter B***h."  I think it'll catch on. I hit the National Institutes of Health’s PubMed database and found that Belyaev’s work on the silver fox continues in Russia.  Most of today's episode came as a result of reading this paper: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19260016 and another about a separate project on t...

Episode Blurb from 2011 This episode grew out of a coincidence.  I had taped the parts with my kid months ago and never got around to editing the audio.  I thought it would become some comparison between Pokemon (good show, good morals, bad science) and BeyBlades (stupid show, but surprisingly interesting in terms of evolution).  This week was Science Fair submit-a-project week, and I got to think...

Blurb from Original Website (2011) Here's John Stewart making a correction: http://www.thedailyshow.com/watch/thu-august-4-2011/moment-of-zen---dancing-birth-control-pills No, I don't have any idea why the wacky birth control ad has a Bollywood soundtrack.  But it's a good example of one of the many things I love about John Stewart.  He makes fun of everybody.  He rags on atheists and Planned Pare...

Original Website Blurb from 2011 This one is a hog, folks.  Almost 40 minutes long, and that’s after I cut an hour of us talking about other stuff.  Just the upload gave me time to read my son his bedtime chapters of Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy .  We’re up to where the giant computer Deep Thought gives the philosophers Majikthise and Vroomfondel another 7.5 million years to argue about Life,...

This episode also has a little glitch of repeated tape in it. Dang. Never noticed that before. Or else I uploaded the wrong version of the file … Several of my NCSSM kids have in fact signed up for the newsletter, which is exciting. Original Website Blurb from 2011 This one's a little late.  I won't go into why, beyond saying the next time you're stuck in a slaver's camp outside the walls of Meree...

This one had to wait until I finished my first online class for Science & Math . The number of students who were unwilling to appear on camera, who wanted to interact wholly through voice and chat, even when video was available, makes me think the opening of Governor’s School tomorrow is going to be extra-awkward. I’ve used Oliver Sacks’s The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat in my GS classes for...

Original Website Blurb from 2011 It's been a busy week.  My niece and nephew have been visiting.  In between being interviewed by the Border Collie Rescue people and replacing light fixtures and watching elephant dissections and disrupting one of the Mandrill 's pheremonal feminazi cells at a posh French spa, we found time to record a podcast.  I swear to you, as soon as I turned the recorder off,...

Original Website Blurb Poking around the Podbean lists yesterday while I was tagging and categorizing episodes (there's a lot of this social media cross-promotion stuff that I've so far been too busy to deal with), I was struck by how many of these podcasts only have two or three episodes.  Even some that looked really cool, like the rebuilt  HMS Beagle , sailing around the world.  Allow me to ass...