Doctor Eclectic

This was one of the strangest educational experiments I’ve ever done. Saudi Arabia sends its teachers abroad for education. This includes both college professors, which seems more or less normal to us, and high school teachers like my one-time student Sondous Khan. I’m sorry to say that at the time, her English was not really good enough to do college-level work in the US. She came to me more or l...

Found the audio on an old backup drive! So this one, and tomorrow’s episode, which translates this episode into Arabic , are out of order. Blurb from the original website Here's our very first podcast.  I'll be premiering it at the North Carolina Academy of Science meeting this Friday.  Check back next week for a new episode with our first movie review. REFERENCES from the first show Thomas Jeffer...

Speaking of science fiction, you know I never actually saw this movie as a kid? Original Blurb from 2011 Ever see  The Fly?   Not the gross-out Jeff Goldblum version, the original one where the guy has the head and hand of a fly.  No?  Just asking. This was a long episode, and even so, I had to cut the venerable  Saga Morinda , wherein your heroes drive from Greensboro to Florida in search of the...

My one trip to northern Arizona, described in this episode, entailed not only a “death hike” through the mountains, but a 1400-mile car loop through the high desert, an environment I loved , visiting various Pueblo ruins and the Painted Desert. We never made it as far as the Grand Canyon. The Iron Chef reference was driven by this quote from the interview, on being a lab bench scientist vs the fie...

Original Blurb from 2011 Finals week is brutal.  Not only are my students turning in exams and papers to be graded, this week the Biology dept. was interviewing job candidates and doing our annual performance reviews.  So this is a short one, just the first section of my interview with Corbin Jones, Ph. D., an actual card-carrying evolutionary biologist.  I know, a shocking departure from our firs...

Original Blurb Following on last week's geektastic tour of inclusive fitness, I compare the parenting strategies of two incarnations of  Iron Man : the Favreau/Downey movies and the gamey Nicktoons show  Armored Adventures . And I never got to mention my favorite running joke from  Armored Adventures , where Happy Hogan keeps greeting the very reserved Gene by yelling, "Khaaan!  KHAAAAAAAAAAAAN!" ...

Before we get started, today is the LAST day for the Mohs 5.5 Mars e-book . After today, it will only be available as a paperback. I would love to hear any feedback about this story, and the book overall, as I am considering submitting something to their next effort, which will be themed around asteroids. Is there an asteroid story you’re just dying to hear? User’s Note: The GoT website is now a l...

This episode switches gears but keeps the speaker. This is something that will happen from time to time throughout the podcast, because scientists are often multi-dimensional people with varied interests, just like everyone else. Here’s the blurb from the original website . We pick back up EXACTLY where we left off last episode with compu-geek entrepreneur and theme park enthusiast Len Testa.  Thi...

This 21-minute episode is from April 2011. Len Testa (@LenTesta on Twitter) of TouringPlans.com I met because he was a friend of my wife’s. She’s not an academic, but instead a Disney nut. I ended up cutting his episode into two because we just had two such great conversations. This was the blurb on the original website . This episode wrote itself.  Len has done lots of interviews (his show has do...

This short 17-minute episode was originally recorded in 2011, blurbed this way on the original website . There is a short glitch about 2:50, which I never caught in the original version (I was very new at audio editing then), and which I may get around to correcting at some point. This is the first one recorded on my new toy, a Sony digital voice recorder with an Olympus noise-canceling microphone...