Soonish

The Meigs Elevated Railway—one of the world’s first monorail systems—looked like something out of a Jules Verne novel. But it was very real. In this week’s episode, hear how nineteenth-century Bostonians missed their chance to build a steam punk utopia.

The monorail system was the brainchild of Joe Meigs, a Civil War veteran and tinkerer who had political and financial backing from Massachusetts governor Benjamin Butler. Meigs envisioned a system that would soar above the streetcar traffic clogging Boston’s streets. Beginning in 1884, thousands of people boarded his distinctive cylindrical train cars for 20-mph rides around a test track in East Cambridge, MA. The system was a technical success, and eventually Meigs obtained a charter to build miles of monorail track around Boston. But a fateful attack one winter night in 1887 dashed his hopes—and proved that the best technology isn’t always the one that wins widespread adoption.

Featured guest: Charles Sullivan of the Cambridge Historical Commission. Charlie also provided key historical perspective in Soonish 1.09, A Tale of Two Bridges.

Featured voice: Charles Gustine, producer, Iconography

To browse an extensive gallery of images of the Meigs monorail, check out our show notes.

A full episode transcript is available in the Extras section of the Soonish website.

Related episode: Soonish 1.02, Monorails: Trains of Tomorrow?

We need your ideas to make the show better! Please take a few minutes to fill out our listener survey at soonishpodcast.org/survey.

CHAPTER GUIDE

0:55 Opening

1:58 The Unknown Railway

2:49 Monorail Fanboy

3:37 225 Bridge Street

5:42 Readings from The Meigs Railway

6:42 Untangling the Streetcar System

8:32 Light and Air

10:10 Who Was Joe Meigs?

11:42 One Little Problem

12:18 Building the Demonstration Track

13:09 Four Wheel Drive

14:20 Sausage on a Stick

15:58 Two Ways of Moving People

16:37 Foul Play

18:05 A Stubborn Guy

20:01 Parallel Universe

21:49 How We Choose the Future

22:22 End Credits and Announcement

The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music from Titlecard Music and Sound. For complete details on this episode go to soonishpodcast.org/302-the-track-not-taken.

Soonish is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of smart, idea-driven nonfiction podcasts. Learn more at hubspokeaudio.org.

Don't forget to fill out our listener survey at soonishpodcast.org/survey.

If you haven’t already, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show. See https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/soonish/id1185234753?mt=2

You can also support the show with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish. Listener support makes all the difference!

Give us a shout on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

Can thought-power control the world outside our heads? Thanks to new brain-machine interface technology, the answer is yes. But the real question is whether it can it help us control the world inside our heads. In the Season 3 opener of Soonish we meet Ariel Garten, co-founder of Interaxon, a Canadian startup that’s one of the first to offer a consumer neurofeedback device. Interaxon’s Muse headband reads brainwaves to help people with the sometimes vexing task of meditation. It points toward an era when may be able to control our brain states and share our thoughts directly with our computers, and with each other. And there are startling implications—not just for our capabilities as humans, but also for our privacy and individuality.

Featured guests: Ariel Garten, Sam Langer, Mary Lou Jepsen.

CHAPTER GUIDE

0:00 Opening

0:33 Meditating by the Lake

3:06 Introducing Muse and Interaxon’s Ariel Garten

3:56 Electroencephalography

4:24 Interaxon Goes to the Winter Olympics

8:22 Measuring Brainwaves with EEG

11:36 An Introduction to Meditation, with Sam Langer

14:51 Using Muse to Strengthen the Muscle of Attention

17:02 The Consciousness Club Tries Muse

18:12 A Controlled Study of Muse

18:59 Thinking Through Brain-Machine Interfaces

22:18 The Coming Wave of Neural Interfaces, with Mary Lou Jepsen

25:09 The Center for Responsible Brainwave Technologies

26:28 Extending Our Agency

27:37 End Credits and Announcements

The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Additional music from Titlecard Music and Sound. For complete details on this episode go to soonishpodcast.org.

Soonish is a proud founding member of Hub & Spoke, a collective of smart, idea-driven nonfiction podcasts. Learn more at hubspokeaudio.org.

If you haven’t already, please rate and review Soonish on Apple Podcasts / iTunes! The more ratings we get, the more people will find the show. See https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/soonish/id1185234753?mt=2

You can also support the show with a per-episode donation at patreon.com/soonish. Listener support makes all the difference!

Give us a shout on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram and sign up for our email newsletter, Signals from Soonish.

We can’t predict what kind of music people will want to make or hear in the future. But based on the sounds coming out of today's studios and clubs, it's a good bet that the tunes of tomorrow will be heavily mediated by digital technology.

This week’s show asks how software has changed the way composers and performers make music, and how our tools for creating music will evolve in the near future. You’ll meet people using technology on different scales to create scores for film, television, and podcasts, classical canons, and electronic dance music. And you’ll learn about a project at Google to build “generative music” software that can jam alongside human performers.

We’ve come a long way from the days of analog music engineering. More people than ever have access to advanced music-creation tools—but to make the best use of them, we’ll always need to bring our own creativity to the table.

Guests include composers Joel Roston, Andrew Willis, and Rudi Seitz, EDM producer and DJ Biyeun Buczyk, music educator David Day, and Google senior research scientist Douglas Eck.

The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. Original score composed by Joel Roston and produced by Titlecard Music & Sound. Guest music from Rudi Seitz and Biyeun Buczyk aka DJ Beyun. For full episode details and music credits visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org

The way we picture the future is still based, in large measure, on the visions brought to life at the world’s fairs and international expositions that swept the globe between the 1850s and the 1960s—especially the New York World’s Fairs of 1939-40 and 1964-65, the Seattle World’s Fair of 1962, and Disney World’s EPCOT Center (which is, in essence, a permanent World’s Fair). But the fairs were about much more than technology: they were also about a specific vision of Western dominance, one that treated people from colonized or developing countries as little more than zoo specimens. In this special crossover episode we present “Tomorrow, Today,” a recent story from our sister Hub & Spoke show Ministry of Ideas. Host Zachary Davis tells the story of the world’s fair movement, and of the unexpected critiques and challenges that surfaced within it. Listen to the end for a conversation between Davis and Soonish host Wade Roush.

More information at https://www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2018/7/2/209-tomorrow-today-with-ministry-of-ideas. Subscribe to Ministry of Ideas at http://www.ministryofideas.org

Music in this episode is by Graham Gordon Ramsay, Tim Beek, and Joel Roston and Andrew Willis of Titlecard Music in Boston.

The golden era of “hard” science fiction that respects the rules of actual science lasted from the 1940s to the 1960s. In the 1970s, demand for hard sci-fi fell off a cliff, with a big push from the first Star Wars movie in 1977. But for the last year and a half, Soonish host Wade Roush has been part of a project to revive this underappreciated genre. This week’s episode is all about Twelve Tomorrows, the new short-story anthology Wade edited for MIT Technology Review and the MIT Press. The episode outlines the book’s mission and origin story. And four of the eleven authors who contributed stories to the book weight in on the differences between hard science fiction, fantasy, and other sci-fi sub-genres.

Soonish listeners can get 30% off the book's list price by calling 1-800-405-1619 or writing to [email protected] and using the discount code SOONISH30. And now through July 31, listeners who become new Soonish patrons at Patreon at the $5 per episode level or above will get a free autographed copy of the book! To sign up go to patreon.com/soonish.

The full video of the Twelve Tomorrows launch event, including readings by Elizabeth Bear, Lisa Huang, and Ken Liu is at https://www.soonishpodcast.org/extras/2018/6/21/video-meet-three-of-the-twelve-tomorrows-authors

Music in this episode by Graham Gordon Ramsay and Titlecard Music. Full episode details: https://www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2018/6/18/208-sci-fi-that-takes-science-seriously

Episode 2.07: What's ubiquitous but invisible, versatile yet temperamental, goopy when it's hot yet brittle when it's cold, as old as civilization yet as new as the screen of your smartphone? The answer is glass. This week on Soonish, we ask what glass really is, where it comes from, who's using it in interesting ways today, and how it will fit into our world in the future. We visit the world capital of glass—Corning, New York, home to both Corning, Inc., and the remarkable Corning Museum of Glass—and we spend time with master glassblower Josh Simpson and the directors of the glass labs at MIT and the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In their stories, glass emerges as an adaptable and promising material that still isn't fully understood, but continues to present artists and engineers with new surprises.

The Soonish theme is by Graham Gordon Ramsay. All additional music in this episode by Titlecard Music of Boston. For more information see https://www.soonishpodcast.org/episodes/2018/2/17/205-the-future-is-clear

Episode 2.06: The immersive, 3D environments of virtual reality aren’t science fiction any more, and they aren’t just for video games. In this episode Wade visits “The Enemy,” a groundbreaking VR exhibit about the psychology of war. The creation of photojournalist Karim Ben Khelifa, it introduces visitors to hyper-realistic avatars based on six real fighters from Israel, El Salvador, and the Congo. It offers a vivid reminder that all conflict is grounded, to some extent, in stereotypes and misperceptions. It also demonstrates that VR has arrived as a powerful new storytelling medium. But could that power be misused for mischief? Music in this episode is by Graham Gordon Ramsay, Titlecard Music, Javier Saurez, and Lee Rosevere. Logo photo by Karim Ben Khelifa. For more information visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org.

Episode 2.05 of Soonish, the podcast, is all about Soonish, the book! Host Wade Roush interviews Kelly and Zach Weinersmith, the husband-and-wife team behind the new book Soonish: Ten Emerging Technologies That’ll Improve and/or Ruin Everything. Kelly Weinersmith is a parasitologist at Rice University and co-host of the podcast Science…Sort of, and Zach Weinersmith is the creator of the wildly popular Web comic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. Their book is a funny, fast-paced, loving-but-skeptical look at coming engineering advances that could transform domains like space travel, robotics, and medicine. The episode also features a story about Space Shuttle Atlantis, performed live by Wade at a December 9 storytelling showcase event in Boston. Music in this episode is by Graham Ramsay and Tim Beek. For more information visit http://www.soonishpodcast.org.