Two Bit Geeks

Ped is strangely primed this morning, Tom is strangely immune to poison ivy, and they both take a long, strange slog through software development and language immersion.

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Primed and Ready to Go! [01:53]

• The collected wisdom of Two Bit Geeks:
  • “You never can tell with bees.”
  • “It’s easy to succeed when you don’t know what you’re doing.”
  • “At the end of the day, most people are just people.”
  • “It only takes one fly to spoil the soup.”

Flies, Spiders, Mosquitoes, and Poison Ivy [09:20]

• Australia’s dangerous animals: the top 30
• Are some people immune to poison ivy?

Learn Coding with Grasshopper [22:22]

• grasshopper
• Scratch
• Low-code

Language Immersion [32:00]

• Dual Language Immersion programs
• Neuroplasticity

Getting in the Zone [36:17]

• Flow
• Pomodoro Technique
• Boomerang for Gmail

Getting Started with Coding [48:07]

• Github
• I are Programmer (and You Can Too)
• Should We Really Try to Teach Everyone to Code? (Wired)
• Codecademy
• Coding bootcamp
• Code review
• Pair programming

Music by Lee Rosevere (CC by 4.0)

It’s time to play the music, it’s time to light the lights, it’s time for the A.I. Winter and more followup tonight. It’s time to put on makeup, it’s time to dress up right, it’s time to spoil Infinity War and … [Disk Space Error]

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Music and Memory [00:00]

• It’s The Muppet Show!
• Maria João Pires prepares for the wrong piano concerto

The A.I. Winter [6:40]

• hackernewsletter (Hacker News)
• A.I. Winter Is Well On Its Way (Filip Piekniewski)
• The Hype cycle
• FLOPS
• Self-driving car kills pedestrian (NY Times)
• A.I. is Harder Than You Think (NY Times)

Airplane Door Followup [23:28]

• Atmospheric pressure
• Aircraft Pressurization Beginner’s Guide (AeroSavvy.com)

Ad astra Alan Bean [28:09]

• Alan Bean (1932–2018)
• The paintings of Alan Bean
• The Overview effect
• Photograph of Earth taken by Alan Bean aboard Apollo 12
• Autographed photograph of Alan Bean

Ped needs a new laptop [32:14]

• ‘How to treat the symptom rather than the cause’ (Microsoft Support)
• 10 Best Linux Desktop Environments and Their Comparison (Fossbytes)
• LibreOffice

Avengers: Infinity War (includes spoilers!) [40:11]

• A-Town reviews Infinity War
• Golden Age of Comics Books
• Bucky Barnes

Music by Lee Rosevere (CC by 4.0)

In this guaranteed 100% human-created podcast, Ped & Tom ponder whether humanity was Earth’s first civilization, whether Google chatbots will subsequently replace humanity, whether Irish drivers are the best in the world, and whether your own DNA will implicate your criminal cousin.

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Yanny and Laurel [00:00]

• Original “What do you guys hear ?” Reddit post
• Most people over 18 can’t hear these sounds

Air Travel [06:29]

• SSSS no more
• Square People Pipe
• Answer: Airplane doors cannot be opened during flight due to cabin pressure
• Twilight Zone: Nightmare at 20,000 Feet

Was Humanity the first civilization on Earth? [13:32]

• The Silurian Hypothesis: Would it be possible to detect an industrial civilization in the geological record?
• The Silurians (Doctor Who)
• How the domestic chicken rose to define the Anthropocene (The Guardian)
• Super-Earths can’t have space programs

Artificial Intelligence is calling [26:22]

• Google Assistant calls the hair salon
• Xiaoice
• Universal Basic Income

Irish Drivers [42:09]

• Pass Rates of Irish driver’s test centres (Overall average: 54%!!!)
• Reversing around a corner on the Irish Driving Test
• Reversing into parking spaces
• Conor Pass road above Dingle
• Definitive guide to Irish drivers’ hand gestures
• Continuously variable transmission
• Hill starts

DNA Privacy [55:33]

• The Golden State Killer
• GEDmatch, an open source DNA database

Music by Lee Rosevere (CC by 4.0)

Pondering pure existence, a big reckoning for Big Coffee, coming to terms with archiving our past, possibly #tooMuchMeta on a flight through Ped’s neural landscape, keep those subvocals to yourself and always look up for the Happy Void.

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Recreational Void Staring [00:00]

• The Untempered Schism
• The Two Bit Geeks Official Guide to Void Staring!

Coffee, Cancer and Acrylamide [05:00]

• Is coffee carcinogenic? Some say maybe, some say no
• Caffeine Blues certainly sounds alarmed
• Either way, it’s good to understand the neuro-biology

Archiving the Past [14:11]

• What to look for in your Facebook data-and how to find it (Wired)
• A drop in the ocean: the timescale of a human life

Tip of the Tongue Syndrome [30:33]

• Presque Vu for you
• The jury’s still out on the eye-training benefits of speed-reading

Yet another Borg Implant [46:37]

• Gotcha, subovocalizations! MIT’s “Alter Ego” accidentally invents telepathy

Nifty Einstein Rings [54:57]

• NASA’s Hubble catches the fisheye lens effect
• Keep Looking Up! Jack Horkheimer (1938–2010) aka The Star Hustler is here for you

Music by Lee Rosevere (CC by 4.0)

Ped & Tom ride their hobby horses through some of their favorite topics; such as speeding and safe driving, dumping Facebook and shadow profiles, fitness tracking and smart devices, supervolcanoes and asteroid impacts, and being kind to one another. Plus, a salute to Professor Hawking.

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Safe Driving Followup [00:00]

• The Need for (Safe) Speed
• Relevant Massachusetts Law concerning blocking intersections
• One Way Japanese Drivers Are Polite

Dumping Facebook [22:35]

• Facebook-Cambridge Analytica data scandal
• How do I deactivate my account? (Facebook)
• Station 13 podcast
• Postcrossing.com

Smart Devices [45:03]

• Pomodoro Technique
• Fitbit Versa

End of the World Scenarios [52:05]

• Yellowstone Magma Plume
• Possible asteroid impactor 101955 Bennu
• Space probe OSIRIS-REx
• Gravitational keyhole
• The HAMMER

Egoisitic Altruism [1:03:36]

• A Selfish Argument for Making the World a Better Place (Kurzgesagt)
• Zero-sum world vs. Positive-sum world

Farewell to Stephen Hawking [1:16:30]

• Stephen Hawking (1942–2018)
• A Brief History of Time

Music by Lee Rosevere (CC by 4.0)

Ped & Tom fidget their way through some followup, Ped delights in some unusual athleticism, and Tom makes a move at a board gaming tournament.

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Fidgeting into some Followup [00:00]

• ICYMI: Ped on Two Tims Talking
• LoonyLeader needs to go to Iceland
• March 20, 2015 Total Solar Eclipse in Spitsbergen, Norway
• A hotel at 78° North latitude

Faster, Higher, Stronger? [11:31]

• Pre-link: Best in the world ski halfpipe
• …and then there’s Elizabeth Swaney
• Eddie the Eagle
• Pita Taufatofua the Shirtless Tongan
• In-depth analysis of Swaney’s Olympic halfpipe run

Power Moves [28:11]

• Power Grid
• The Worst Board Games Ever Invented (FiveThirtyEight)
• Carcassonne
• (The Settlers of) Catan

Music by Lee Rosevere (CC by 4.0)

Ped is moonlighting on Tom. If elected, Tom will not serve. They both explore the consequences of convenience, of speeding, of firearms, of bedtime eggs, of sleeping possums, and placebos.

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Moonlighting Pedcast [00:00]

• Ped on Two Tims Talking
• Hello Internet

Electoral Tomfoolery [09:29]

• chuckyc17 on the subreddit is up to some mischief
• Class Secretary
• Shermanesque statement
• Robert’s Rules of Order

The Wikipedia is amazing [15:28]

• Death of a salesman
• Ten Simple Rules for Editing Wikipedia

Reading and Libraries [21:22]

• Typesetting
• How Libraries Are Becoming Modern Makerspaces (The Atlantic)

Consequences of Convenience [29:44]

• “The Tyranny of Convenience” by Tim Wu (NY Times)
• Waiting in Line to See Star Wars: 1977–2000
• Humanity’s future according to Wall-E

On a Lighter Note: Speeding [41:56]

• Traffic Warnings
• How Engineering Decreases Car Crash Fatalities (MrEngineeringGuy)

Consequences of Firearms [49:38]

• The CDC Can’t Fund Gun Research (Wired)
• Dickey Amendment (1996)
• Embrace the Cognitive Dissonance - “Put that on a T-shirt”

On a Lighter Note: Bedtime Story Eggs [59:23]

• Peanut Butter Cookies
• Free-range eggs

Consequences of Wildlife [1:06:37]

• Possums
• Baby Skunks
• Baby Mice
• “This is the part of the job I hate.” (The Simpsons)

Consequences of Placebos [1:14:36]

• Homeopathy is junk science…
• …but the Placebo Effect is real

Music by Lee Rosevere (CC by 4.0)

Pondering the Assistance Invasion, blasting off with maximum coolness with SpaceX, possible microscopic passengers, and this is not a place of honor for six percent of rats. Tick-tock!

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Resistance is futile: you will be assisted [00:00]

• This is your brain on Virtual Assistance

Falcon Heavy launches away [04:03]

• Elon Musk is elated over the SpaceX success
• Set phasers to maximum coolness
• The Arch Mission Foundation ups the ante for offsite backup

Time And Relative Messaging In Space [12:38]

• DNA as alien message-in-a-bottle (so says TNG!)
• Nuclear semiotics and the problem of messaging across time
• The nuclear renaissance as the (climate change) clock ticks closer
• Practical fusion is getting closer
• Tardigrades, the ultimate package format of life

Wifi Follow-up [34:26]

• NIH: 6% of male rats should not make thousands of concurrent cell phone calls
• Epigenetics is waiting to activate your mostly-inert DNA

Music by Lee Rosevere (CC by 4.0)

It’s déjà-vu all over again as Ped and Tom revisit a feast of follow-up, minimize their mobile and soak up the wifi on accident in an episode of time well spent (auditorily speaking). After-party in the Zoof Lot.

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Revisitation Station [00:00]

• Put this Möbius strip podcast on endless repeat (at least seven times)
• Welcome new listeners from Anonymous Proxy!
• Grammar Girl Mignon Fogarty reviews an excellent paper ‘on accident’
• Hometown Zoof archetype makes a pop culture appearance
• High school cliques and the social angst of adolescence (the definitive 80s take)
• Bitcoin mining by hand

Minimizing Mobile [21:08]

• Grayscale life-hack (with how-to links)
• “Time Well Spent” draws lines in the Great Tech Debate

Revisitation Station [27:19]

• A-Town FM reviews The Last Jedi

Wondrous WiFi: you’re soaking in it [31:37]

• Dealing with junk science hysteria
• Drinking from Russell’s teapot and the fallacy of argument from ignorance
• Harmful ionization requires high frequency, high power EM waves
• Scientifically literate news would help (thanks, HTG!)

Revisitation Station [52:28]

• A déjà-Who treat for the holidays
• Jodie Whittaker’s Yorkshire accent

Music by Lee Rosevere (CC by 4.0)

The one where Ped & Tom argue about The Last Jedi for an hour. Spoilers abound. You have been warned!

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Star Wars: The Last Jedi [00:00]

• Hello Internet reviews The Last Jedi (They hated it.)
• A-Town FM reviews The Last Jedi (They loved it.)
• The “backlash” against Star Wars: The Last Jedi , explained (Vox)
• The Emperor’s appearance in The Empire Strikes Back (Original 1980 version)
• Rotten Tomatoes - Critic score vs Audience score
• The Very Best of Nien Nunb
• Palette cleanser - Antiques Roadshow (BBC)

Music by Lee Rosevere (CC by 4.0)