Science for the Car Ride?

qaffle asks: "Being a commuting college student I've been putting many hours on the road recently and have gotten sick of the repetition of regular radio and music in general. I've been trying to listen to talk radio but all that is ever talked about is sports and I can only listen to Bears updates for so long. I'm curious if anyone knows of any sites online where I can find good science, computer related, or physics audio discussions online that I could listen to on the drive. This should give me a good variety and the ability to listen to something interesting during mid-late morning and early afternoon drives."

Here

[Anonymous Coward]

here [sciencefriday.com]

Feynman Lectures?

[QuantumWeasel]

I think they're available on tape? :-)

Re:Feynman Lectures?

[Fantanicity]

You're either right or wrong. You won't know until you click this link [amazon.com]

Re:Feynman Lectures?

[iago]

If you are patient and look hard enough you can find them on one of the P2P programs. I think I got them off of LimeWire

Enjoy it

[Vinum]

Having the self-disiplin to be able to drive hours at a time and not complain about it builds character. Something that will help you far more in life than a college degree. Unless you are running for president (for which character doesn't matter).

You're Calvin's dad, aren't you?

[therealmoose]

Your son, Calvin, doesn't agree. Especially with regard to shovelling the drive...

San Francisco Chronicle

[rubinson]

Just a couple of days ago NPR did a story on how the San Francisco Chronicle (the major newspaper in SF) is beginning a pilot project of daily audio news. Basically, every night after they complete the morning edition, the email the stories to a recording studio (in Atlanta, I believe). The stories are recorded and then you can download them to your computer and burn them to a cd.

Their main selling point is that you can customize what sections you want to receive. So, if all you want is sports and science/technology, you can get just that. However, it is a pay-for service (but there aren't any ads).

Science Friday on NPR

[Calaf]

NPR does a show on fridays where they talk about science and interview scientists. Kind of lightweight, but it's the only science show I've ever heard on the radio. Check your local affiliate.

Or you could tape record your class lectures and listen to them again.

Sports talk is entertaining

[leviramsey]

As long as you get that it's the radio equivalent of a site like adequacy.org [adequacy.org], in that the hosts are basically just trolling for callers and they end up getting a surprising number of bites. Listening to sports talk is like reading slashdot comments at -1, without the goatse links or page wideners, in other words.

Audio Books

[rubinson]

I used to do a 1.5 hour car ride (both back and forth) at least once a week for a couple of years. I found that audio books made fantastic companions. Major publishers make many (most?) of their books available on tape or cd -- both fiction and non-fiction.

Speaking for myself, audio books allowed me to delve into genres that I generally don't read very much, such as mysteries. The BBC radio adaptations of Agatha Christie and Sherlock Holmes are simply fantastic. (As an aside, I would recommend looking for radio adaptations rather than straight readings -- the radio adaptations are simply a lot more fun and engrossing.)

I also got a chance to listen to a bunch of the old radio programs -- Superman, Batman, The Shadow, and a bunch that I can't recall off-hand.

And I'm sure that you can find audio books on science -- I just suggest that you also take the opportunity to expose yourself to a wide variety of texts. Since you're stuck in the car anyway, it's not like you're losing anything if you accidentally pick up a crappy story.

Also -- a good way to save money is to find a used bookstore that will allow you to return your audio books for credit. And there are also some stores that rent audio books.

(p.s. You should also engage in the occassional guily pleasure. Mine were the William Shatner "Star Trek" novels -- you haven't heard "Star Trek" until you've heard William Shatner do all of the voices. Yes -- Spock, Uhura, Scotty; it's absolutely fantastic, truly phenomenal.)

Alien Voices

[rubinson]

I forgot to mention in my above post -- if you're into science fiction, definitely look up the "Alien Voices" series by Leonard Nimoy and John De Lancie. They got together with a bunch of other actors (generally from the various Star Trek series) and did live audio adaptations of classic science works (e.g. H.G. Wells). Truly, truly wonderful stuff. Well worth the price of admission.

NPR and Cringely

[rubinson]

NPR has archives of many of their programs. I don't know it you're able to download them or not (and I think that the format varies from program to program), but it might be worth looking into.

Also, Bob Cringely just announced that he'll be doing a new interview program called "NerdTV." The full article is here: http://www.pbs.org/cringely/pulpit/pulpit20020912. html [pbs.org].

The kicker is that he's going to GPL the raw footage so that people can create their own programs. I expect that it would be trivial to extract the audio stream and burn it onto a cd or download it onto an mp3 player.

Re:NPR and Cringely

[adolf]

In the same article, Cringley tells us that he will also be releasing MP3 and ogg of the audio portion of the finished programs, in concert with the video.

I expect it would be trivial to download the files and burn it onto a CD.

Your saviour: Books on Tape!

[khodsden]

Books on Tape saved me during my long Los Angeles commute. It's a rental service: you rent tapes, listen to them, drop them in the mail when you're done (postage is already paid). You get a month to listen to them before they're late.

The books are unabridged, so they tend to be 10 - 20+ hours long. They have a frequent renter program (rent 10, get one rental free), and an online discount - rent 3 at once and you get a 5% discount. What else - you can space when they arrive - one big shipment, one every other week, once a month, whatever. And, once you're hooked, you can refer a friend, and get another free rental!

I often order 10 books at a time, delivered every other week for 5 months. Very handy.

You can rent CDs, too. They have two types of CD recordings: high quality & mp3 (resulting in 5+ discs, or one).

They're located at http://www.booksontape.com/ They have samples online so that you can hear the readers voices. I have my favorite readers - resulting in listening to authors that I would never have read normally, but I liked the reader so much I thought I'd give them a try.

I recommend the service very highly! If you decide not to use them, but listen to other tapes or CDs, be sure to get unabridged tapes. The abridged ones are short and miss a lot.

the linux show?

[agnosonga]

computer related

have you heard about the linux show [thelinuxshow.com]?

also, I dont want to be redundant, but NPR always has something interseting

The best source of books on "tape"

[Polo]

audible [audible.com] is the best source of audio. The monthly fee gives you 2 downloads a month. Some of the books are 36 hours of audio. I need a longer commute.

Audible.com

[balamw]

A friend who has a 40 minute communte each way swears by audible.com [audible.com]. You can get a subscription for $15-$20/month, download books and serials including some science oriented stuff like "Sceince Friday", "Scientific American", ... Downloads are apparently in MP3 format, so you can use an MP3 player or burn to CD.

Personally, I listen to "Morning Edition" and "All Things Considered" on my 45 minute commute, with an occasional does of Tom Leykis for a change...

Balam

Quirks and Quarks from the CBC

[Boiotos]

Sure enough, they've got an audio archive [cbc.ca]. Best thing is, individual interviews are downloadable mp3s or oggs. (Check out the 'what's an ogg' link beside each of the latter!)

Teaching company

[jbolden]

I'd recomment the teaching company [teach12.com]. They aren't really online, you'd be ordering tapes or CDs for the car but they are an excellent value (about $2 / hr). They have enough science for any cross country trip but the focus in on the social sciences.

old time radio mp3s, or XM radio

[tachyonflow]

Most of this doesn't meet your requirement for science programming, but I've spent hours in the car being entertained by radio dramas from the Old Time Radio Vault [oldtimeradiovault.com]. (free downloads from a slow, user-limited ftp server, and a small charge for better access to the vault.) There's *tons* of good stuff there. Who knows, maybe even some old science shows. :)

Also, if you're willing fork over the cash, XM Radio can be entertaining. There's a Discovery channel with sciency-type stuff.

BBC Radio 4

[biglig2]

BBC Radio 4 is a somewhat more complex Talk station than just Sports and phone-ins. Science, Comedy, Drama, History, Politics, Philosophy, all sorts of things at high quality.

I don't know if there's a way to get downloadable versions of their shows (bbc.co.uk/radio4) but I'm sure the slashdotters know a dozen technical ways.

The Harrow Report

[Isao]

I should get commission for this.

Jeffery Harrow used to do an online advanced-technology journal for Digital (then Compaq, then he was laid off). He continues to do a great job at his own site [theharrowgroup.com] now. It's available in web and various downloadable audio formats. If you haven't read/listened to him before, you can grab a bunch of back issues and listen to them on a road trip.

Free newsletter subscription, too. This guy is a web treasure, no idea how he makes his living these days.

He has a nice summary [theharrowgroup.com] of what's he's doing with the newsletter.

Dartmouth Chance Lectures

[frenchgates]

These [dartmouth.edu] are audio/video, but you don't really need the video. A lot of fascinating discussions of probability and statistics including many colorful topics like meteor strikes, magic, and gambling.

Books on tape/cd from Library

[markwusinich]

Just be carefull what you check out, the FBI can and will use it against you.

In my county all the libraries have some books on tape/CD but they went out of their way to build one big collection at the main branch. So if your neigborhood library does not have a good selection, make sure and ask if there is another branch that might have more.

XM!

[jrwillis]

I had the same problem, but then I got an XM radio and now I never get bored. As much as that sounds like a cheesy tv ad, it's true. Be it comedy, the discovery channel, talk radio, news, or just diverse music, there's ALWAYS something to listen to. They've also added a channel in the past few weeks that does audiobooks, though I've not had a chance to check it out yet.

audio books

[Scaebor]

Last year (when I still had a car to drive) I had much the same situation, where the sameness of every radio station was really getting to me. I found that audio books worked quite well. I ended up "reading" both Stephen Hawking's A Brief History of Time and one of Feynman's series of lectures on quantum physics (though these were semi-incomprehensible at times for a layman like myself). When I finally ran out of tapes and went back to the radio, there was also an added bonus in that many of the songs being played were new to me. Of course, that only lasted until the end of that week.

Music and News Are Better

[mikemcg]

First I should mention that I think well-roundedness is vital to what one does with his technical knowledge, but is often cast aside as foolish and irrelevent by many in the tech industry.

Although the following doesn't answer your specific question, it responds to your general situation. I too am a commuting student, yet I am almost greatful for the commute. It provides me a time during which I can enjoy good music and catch up on news, social commentary, and american culture.

By good music, I mean independent, eclectic music, not the manufactured 2-dimensional garbage that's on every commercial radio station. Check out your college radio station. Also Crud Music Magazine [2-4-7-music.com] and College Music Journal [cmj.com] are both pretty good at identifying intelligent interesting music in the indie scene. The benefit of intelligent music is in terms of social education: enriching your knowledge of humanity and culture. Which of course, is very relevent when considering how you want to use your degree once you've graduated. Also, it sets you apart from the multitudes of geeks that <strikeout>don't understand</strikeout> "cannot be bothered with" culture.

Regarding talk/news radio, you should try listening to NPR. You might not agree with their website linking policies [slashdot.org], but in general, they provide a free, high quality service.

<plug type="shameless">And if you live in L.A., you should check out KCRW [kcrw.com]. I haven't changed my radio dial since discovering them more than 2 years ago.</plug>