Geek Counterpoint
Geek Counterpoint
Your own personal geek-to-English translator, in handy Podcast form! Equal parts topical science background, correction/explanation of poorly reported science and tech issues, and just plain interesting points to ponder. A 20 helping of critical thinking every week, presented in conversational ...
GC060 Climate Change Impacts
Now that we've gone through the science behind climate change, and knocked down most of the kooks surrounding the issue, it's time to talk about what we're up against. In this episode, I spend a bit under 30 laying out the most likely future impacts of ...
GC059 Climate Change Proponents
Since the opponents of the climate change consensus have had their turn, now it's time to give the supporters of the consensus a little working over. Since this is the seventh episode in a series, I'd recommend that before listening to this episode, you ...
GC058 Swindled!
A Geek Counterpoint listener (thanks, Travis!) pointed me to a show recently aired on BBC channel 4 called "The Great Global Warming Swindle." It purports to be a documentary, and is uniformly critical of the science behind climate change and the global ...
GC057 Climate Change: the Skeptics (part 3)
Now that we've simplified things by covering the more common arguments made by climate change skeptics, this episode is devoted to discussing some specific climate change skeptics and their arguments. Since this is the fifth episode in a series, I'd ...
GC056 Climate Change: the Skeptics (part 2)
A continuation of episode 54's treatment of general points used by climate change skeptics. Since this is the fourth episode in a series, I'd recommend that before listening to this episode, you first listen to episodes 45, 47, and 54.
GC055 Space Weapons
When the Chinese government demolished one of its aging weather satellites a few weeks ago, they did more than just test out a potentially useful technology. They also cluttered up low Earth orbit with a huge amount of debris, and stirred up a comparable ...
GC054 Climate Change: the Skeptics (part 1)
It's taken some time to do a reasonable level of fact checking, but my climate cats have now been successfully herded, so it's (finally!) time for another climate change episode.Since (at least in the media) the discussion over climate change has been ...
GC053 Sergey Korolyov
Today is the 100th anniversary of the birth of a giant of space exploration -- Sergey Korolyov (sometimes also transliterated as Sergei Korolev). For much of the 20th century, Korolyov was the prime driving factor behind the Soviet space program. He led ...
GC052 Antikythera Mechanism
Sure, it's not much to look at -- but this humble lump of corroded bronze completely demolished our previous understanding of the history of mechanical inventions. The Antikythera Mechanism was built late in the 2nd century BC, and is the earliest ...
GC051 Stardust Preliminary Results
Yes, I know -- I just talked about Stardust in episode 50. But in the meantime, the first batch of preliminary science papers was released on the 15th of December in the journal Science. There's a full set of material available (currently, at least, ...
GC050 News Grab Bag #5
Yes, it's time for another "grab bag" episode to get everybody caught up on recent and semi-recent developments in topics I've covered in past episodes. This week's fodder includes updates on the following subjects:
Mars -- see episode 41 (September ...
GC049 Reactionless Drives
It's the holy grail of flight -- propulsion without the expenditure of reaction mass. A practical reactionless drive system would render wheeled vehicles (flying cars, anyone?), aircraft with wings, and rockets as we know them obsolete. But is it real? ...
GC048 A Tale of Two Caves...
I talked at length about the Neanderthals just a few months ago, and then as often seems to happen, a bunch of new Neanderthal news popped up shortly afterwards. Listen in this week, and you'll get caught up with some really interesting recent ...
GC047 Climate Change and Logical Fallacies
This episode, the in a series on climate change, is intended to give everybody a little background in logical fallacies. In particular, a number of logical fallacies seem to be particularly prone to use in news reports, political debates, and various ...
GC046 Flying Aircraft Carriers
A few weeks ago, researchers finished the first exhaustive study performed of the wreck of the USS Macon, a U.S. Navy airship. What's unique about this particular wreck is that the Macon isn't alone on its piece of ocean floor off the California coast -- ...
GC045 Climate Change 101
At least in the U.S. (and judging by material on the net, increasingly in Canada and Australia as well), debate about climate change long ago left the scientific arena, and entered the world of politics. As a result, if you're trying to figure out for ...
GC044 The 2006 U.S. National Space Policy document
A few days ago, the White House released an update to the United States' "National Space Policy" document. In a sense, an update is overdue as this document hasn't been tweaked since 1996, when Clinton was president. It's release got a number of folks ...
GC043 Social Darwinism and Eugenics
So-called social "Darwinism" and eugenics are two intertwined topics that always seem to come up whenever somebody wants to insult, or at least disparage, the scientific community in general. Realistically, though, neither one is really "Darwinian," and ...
GC042 USAF Museum Tour
We recently had a family reunion of sorts in Ohio, and after some pretty stiff negotiations, I managed to finagle some time at the "National Museum of the U.S. Air Force" in Dayton. Anybody who's even slightly interested in military aviation, or the ...