Tim Wu and Cory talk networks, policy and the future —

Slate's "Stranger Than Fiction" podcast has just aired its second episode: a discussion between Tim Wu (a cyberlawyer, Internet scholar and good egg) and me (MP3)! Future installments will include talks with Kim Stanley Robinson and Margaret Atwood (as well as others) -- the inaugural episode featured Tim in discussion with Neal Stephenson. — Cory •

I'm going nuts with podcasts. Here's the latest: Cool Tools' "Show and Tell" videocast and podcast. Last week, Kevin Kelly and I did a video hangout with Joshua Glenn and Michael Pusateri. We showed each other 18 different things we love, including books, kitchen tools, games, apps, and gadgets.

Subscribe: RSS | iTunes. Listen on Soundcloud. Watch Video.

Here are the show notes.

Last week I sat down for an interview with Rick Kleffel at KQED in San Francisco. He's put the whole interview -- a long one! -- up in his Trashotron podcast feed. We talked about Homeland and other things. Rick, as always, was a very astute interviewer.

MP3 link

In this special Superb Owl Sunday Family Channel podcast my daughters Jane (9), Sarina (15), and I shared a pan of Jiffy Pop and talked about books.

What we are reading now:

Mark: Game of Thrones, by George R. R. Martin

Sarina: The Postmortal, by Drew Magary

Jane: Frederick Douglass: Young Defender of Human Rights, by Elisabeth P. Myers

Favorite books:

Mark: The Treasure of the Sierra Madre, by B. Traven

Sarina: The Outsiders, be S. E. Hinton

Jane: By the Great Horn Spoon! by Sid Fleischman

"Punk Voyager" is this week's story on the Escape Pod podcast, and it is fucking amazing. It's Shaenon Garrity story about punks at the twilight of the 1970s who are drunkenly outraged to discover that the Voyager probe has been launched with classical music records for aliens. They build their own Voyager probe out of garbage, razor-blades, beer cans and a surfboard some douchebag left on the beach, filled with all the most important human artifacts that they can find in their van. They forget about it as the 80s roar in, and then the aliens come to Earth and cockpunch Ronald Reagan.

Fuck yeah.

Punk Voyager was built by punks. They made it from beer cans, razors, safety pins, and a surfboard some D-bag had left on the beach. Also plutonium. Where did they get plutonium? Around. Fuck you.

The punks who built Punk Voyager were Johnny Bonesaw, Johnny Razor, Mexican Johnny D-bag, Red Viscera, and some other guys. No, asshole, nobody remembers what other guys. They were Fucking wasted, these punks. They’d been drinking on the San Diego beach all day and night, talking about making a run to Tijuana and then forgetting and punching each other. They’d built a fire on the beach, and all night the fire went up and went down while the punks threw beer cans at the seagulls.

Forget the shit I just said, it wasn’t the punks who did it. They were Fucking punks. The hell they know about astro-engineering? Truth is that Punk Voyager was the strung-out masterpiece of Mexican Johnny D-bag’s girlfriend, Lacuna, who had a doctorate in structural engineering. Before she burned out and ran for the coast, Lacuna was named Alice McGuire and built secret nuclear submarines for a government contractor in Ohio. It sucked. But that was where she got the skills to construct an unmanned deep-space probe. Same principle, right? Keep the radiation in and the water out. Or the vacuum of space, whatever, it’s all the same shit to an engineer.

Fuck that, it wasn’t really Lacuna’s baby. It wasn’t her idea. The idea was Red’s.

“Fucking space,” he said that fateful night. He was lying on his back looking up at space, is why he said it.

“Hell yeah,” said Johnny Bonesaw.

Punk Voyager

Rick Schertle is the creator of one of our most popular projects in MAKE: the compressed air rocket launcher, which uses PVC pipe and a sprinkler valve to blast a paper rocket high into the air. Rick is also the creator of the folding wing rocket glider, which takes the standard balsa wood glider and turns it into something that flies a lot higher and longer. And most recently, Rick wrote a project that shows you how to make a catapult launcher that sends the rocket glider even higher. I spoke to Rick about these projects and more.

Make: Talk 020 - Air Rockets and Folding Wing Gliders: RSS | iTunes | Download MP3

An excellent recent episode of the BBC Radio 4 math/current affairs show "More or Less" dramatized "The Parable of the Ox," a short article by John Kay originally published in the Financial Times (paywalled, alas, or I'd link to it available from Kay's site). Fans of James Surowiecki's Wisdom of the Crowds will know the first part of this story -- wherein the average of several guesses about the weight of an ox was more accurate than the guesses of any of the experts in the crowd. What this podcast and the article adds is a coda about how the use of "guesses" (or stock trades) as a way of weighing the ox quickly departed from guesses about the weight of the ox (or the value of a firm) and turned into guesses about other peoples' guesses about other peoples' guesses -- a financialized system that soon has no connection to the real economy or the real ox. And it ends, predictably enough, when the ox dies.

The Parable of the Ox [More or Less]

MP3

The parable of the ox [John Kay]

Our maker this week is Matt Richardson. Matt's a video producer, a writer, a maker of things, a technology consultant, and a student at New York University's Interactive Telecommunications Program. Matt wrote two articles for MAKE volume 32. One of them is a BeagleBone tutorial and the other one shows how to make his awesome -- I mean -- wonderful Awesome Button. Matt also co-wrote (with Shawn Wallace) a new MAKE book called Getting Started with Raspberry Pi, an introduction to the business card sized $35 Linux computer.

I spoke to Matt from his workshop in Brooklyn.

BBC Radio 4's great math and science show "The Infinite Monkey Cage" did a great (and very funny) episode on crypto and Bletchley Park, with Robin Ince, Brian Cox, Dave Gorman, Simon Singh and Dr Sue Black.

Secret Science

MP3

(via Schneier)

Tony Smith from the StarShipSofa science fiction podcast sez, "Spider Robinson will share the sofa for a confidential live online talk full of anecdotes and insights about science fiction, the publishing industry, and his lifelong journey as a reader, writer, and voice of the genre. Don't think of this as a lecture; think of it as a cosy chat with an old friend, one who just happens to be a shining star of contemporary science fiction and who knows all the juicy, meaningful stories you can't find in 'how to' books. See the genre as you've never seen it before, through the eyes of a gifted and generous storyteller and professional. There's room on the sofa for you. Join StarShipSofa as it welcomes Spider Robinson for this one-time-only live event!"

How To Write Science Fiction with... Spider Robinson (Thanks, Tony!)

I did an interview with The Geek's Guide to the Galaxy, which they've published in both text and MP3 form. We talked about Pirate Cinema, Rapture of the Nerds, the Humble Ebook Bundle, the future of publishing, the Disney/Star Wars merger, and lots more:

Wired: Do you ever get letters from kids who have been inspired by your books to become hacker anarchists?

Doctorow: Yeah, all the time — at least to become hackers, and political activists. My first young-adult novel Little Brother had an afterword with a bibliography for kids who want to get involved in learning how security works, learning how computers work, learning how to program them, learning how to take them apart, learning how to solve their problems with technology as well as with politics. And the number of kids who have written to me and said that they became programmers after reading that, I couldn’t even count them. I’ve had similar responses to my second young-adult novel, For the Win, and I’ve also heard from kids who’ve read Pirate Cinema. In fact, we published an editorial by one of them on Boing Boing — an anonymous reader who makes her own movies out of Japanese anime, and who talked about what drives her and how the book resonated with her.

With Pirate Cinema, Cory Doctorow Grows His Young Hacker Army