I just read on the crap blog (using the catless feed, of course) that Professor John Lienhard’s amazing radio series The Engines of Our Ingenuity is now available as a podcast! This as great news for those of us who can’t always manage to listen to KUHF at 7:35 AM or 3:55 PM. (One of my other favorite radio series, Stardate, is already available in podcast form. I used to dub Stardate episodes from reel-to-reel onto carts when I worked at WEGL, Auburn’s Best FM.)

True story: back about 1992 or 1993, I discovered a gopher archive of Engines scripts at the University of Houston where Prof Lienhard teaches and produces Engines. I had been surfing this newfangled thing call the World Wide Web using a browser called Mosaic and a more recent version of Mosaic called Netscape. I emailed the professor to ask whether he would consider making his scripts available in this new “Hypertext Markup Language”, as it would make browsing the scripts so much easier. I even converted a couple of his scripts to HTML so he could use his browser to see what they would look like. I was surprised when Professor Lienhard not only mailed me back, but called me so I could tell him more about it.

That was back when there were fewer than 1,000 Engines scripts. There are now over 2,500. My favorite episode (though I can’t say I’ve heard them all): Number 833, about Andrew Wiles’ famous proof of Fermat’s Last Theorem… and coming down from the mountain top.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 6th, 2006 at 5:13 pm and is filed under Stuff. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.