My surprise gift for Christmas 2010 was from Scott, it was an iPod Nano to replace my dead iPod Touch that died months earlier. I’ve been chugging along with my podcasts since then and when I got the iPod Nano, I moved all the podcasts onto that device and started to chew through the backlog of programs.
One of those programs, actually a series of them are the Scientific American series of 60-second science podcasts. They publish a main feed and then sub-feeds according to various disciplines. I’ve been catching up, so I created a playlist and I’ve been nabbing down these 1-minute shows on my drive in to work and my return home at night.
Today I can say that I think I may have had enough with Scientific American. Yes their podcasts are of excellent quality and their reporting is beyond reproach. The quality is absolutely there, however the content and message is about as selective as a berserker with a sledgehammer. Scientific American has a monomaniacal preoccupation with climate change and evolution. 60-second Earth is pretty much 60-second Climate Change Whining, and their main podcast 60-second Science almost pushed me to dump the entire series altogether when they brought up the dire concern of anesthetic gas and it’s relationship to climate change. That the gas that doctors use to put their patients to sleep in order to perform surgery is 1600 times worse per unit of CO2 when it comes to climate change. Really? We really need to start nitpicking THIS? I damn near got to the point where I was going to march into my office, attach my iPod to my Mac and just dump the entire podcast series. I still may. After a while and a thousand miles being beaten over the head about climate change and evolution starts to have the opposite of the intended effect. I’m getting to the point where if I hear another whining voice carrying on about millions of tons of CO2 this and Methane that, that I very well may start rooting to leave this planet a burnt smoking husk when I die! Yeeearrrggggh!
There, I feel better now. 🙂 If they don’t get some new violin strings for their orchestra I’ll be flushing them down the toilet. I can’t wait for the podcast where they discuss the carbon footprint of a bowel movement. Gah.