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Radiolab believes your ears are a portal to another world. Where sound illuminates ideas, and the boundaries blur between science, philosophy, and human experience. Big questions are investigated, tinkered with, and encouraged to grow. Bring your curiosity, and we'll feed it with possibility.

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Comment on Killing Babies, Saving the World by How many people here belive in global warming - Page 2

[...] [...]

Comment on Killing Babies, Saving the World by Barry

Regarding the parallel drawn between (a) ruining an expensive suit by jumping into a lake to save a drowning girl and (b) sacrificing $1,000 to save a non-specific child in another part of the world: it seems to me that this is a flawed argument. The first scenario pre-supposes that you are the only person who can save the girl in the lake; if you refuse to save her on the grounds that you don't want to ruin your suit, I imagine most people would consider that morally reprehensible. In the second scenario, the survival of the child on the other side of the world is not dependent on you alone. A more plausible parallel is to argue that richer societies, through a sort of collective decision not to ruin their expensive suits, are declining to save the lives of those less fortunate. Still morally reprehensible, but less so at the level of the individual. Plausible, but still not necessarily the whole truth. One final thought. Perhaps our future as a species depends not so much on our growing capacity for abstract thought as on our ability to achieve global consensus on abstract problems? Here is the difference: if you believe that for every problem there is only one, true solution, then it follows that we need to develop our capacity for reasoning to the point that we will all be able to see the truth for ourselves. However, if, as seems more likely, there are often multiple solutions to a problem any one of which could work if it is universally supported, then the challenge in fact becomes to achieve unity in collective undertakings. Jad and Robert, couldn't you do a Radiolab show on the science behind achieving unity?

Comment on Killing Babies, Saving the World by Keith Fail

How do we know that the reason people with the longer number chose the chocolate cake over the fruit salad was because of the struggle between rational and emotional mind? Couldn’t it be more easily explained as a matter of extra stress causing the seven digit rememberers to feel more stressed. Stress is generally recognized as a common contributor to relapse of habit changea. Perhaps we could test this by giving some subjects a 2 digit number to memorize but also stressing them in another way and seeing if they don’t choose the cake even though their memory is not tied up with holding a long number.

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Killing Babies, Saving the World

By Radiolab

November 17, 2009

seeno

To get this podcast started, Robert ambushes Jad with a question … a question we’ve all been dying to ask him since June 10th, 2009, when Amil Abumrad came into the world. But fear not, we didn’t do a whole podcast just to give the new dad a hard time. Robert talks to Josh Greene, the Harvard professor we had on our Morality show. They revisit some ideas from that show in the context of the big, complicated problems of today (think global warming and nuclear war). Josh argues that to deal with those problems, we’re going to have to learn how to make better use of that tiny part of our brain that handles abstract thinking. Not a simple proposition, but, despite the odds, Josh has hope.

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Comments [25] | Posted in: Podcasts | Shorts

Helicopter Boy

By Radiolab

November 03, 2009

helicopterboy

This week, a story about a mom, a boy, and a home-made helicopter. (And no! This has nothing to do with the Balloon Boy incident.) Instead, its about how public radio… literally saved a boy’s life. Well, not quite. But sorta. Kinda. Its a story about why we do what we do: we’re trying to tell stories that move you and make you feel different about the world, even just a little bit.

Please support us in that mission.

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Photo courtesy of Jennifer Babb

Comments [23] | Posted in: Podcasts | Shorts

The Lauras Win!

By Radiolab

October 30, 2009

What are the odds?

When Laura Buxton of Staffordshire, England, wrote “Please return to Laura Buxton” on a helium balloon before setting it free in her yard, she never expected it to reach another human being, much less one also named Laura Buxton. In “A Very Lucky Wind,” the first segment of our Stochasticity episode, we marvel at the coincidence the two Lauras represent, and wrestle with the science of chance.

Now, we are happy to announce that ‘A Very Lucky Wind’ (produced by Jad and Soren Wheeler) has won Honorable Mention for Best Documentary at Chicago Public Radio’s 2009 Third Coast International Audio Festival! To check out more of the winners, including Ira Glass, Nancy Updike and more of the This American Life team, and to hear clips, go to http://thirdcoastfestival.org/.

And you can listen to “A Very Lucky Wind” and the whole Stochasticity episode here.

Photo courtesy of Wikimedia/Mav

Comments [9] | Posted in: Radiolab in the News

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