Radio, Amateurishly

Author's note: This article was originally published on April 1, 2021. I might have had a little fun toward the end of the last paragraph, and with the last link. The rest of the article is legit, and I genuinely find it mind-blowing that sound waves played a decisive role in shaping our universe.  If you haven't yet discovered PBS Space Time , you're missing out on a treat. Each week, host Matt O'Dowd chooses a physics topic—usually astrophysics—and presents it in a way that is accessible without being condescending. You don't need to be a physics major to follow his presentations, but O'Dowd does assume a reasonably intelligent audience and then challenges that audience week after week with subjects that are complex and often mind-blowing. A particularly memorable episode described the baryon acoustic oscillations . There was a time shortly after the Big Bang when the universe was dense enough for sound waves to propagate across the entire universe. Over time,

What makes good music good music One in an occasional series   The first season of AMC's Halt and Catch Fire  tells the story of how Cardiff Electric, a fictional Dallas-based tech firm, reverse-engineered the IBM BIOS to produce their own IBM clone—a thinly disguised and highly fictionalized version of the real-life story of how Compaq wrested away IBM's PC monopoly in the '80s . The show has a cast of delightfully fucked-up characters and, for those of us old enough to remember the '80s, it stands as a period piece that does a good job of capturing the zeitgeist without becoming cliché. There's a charming sequence in the second episode where the staff of Cardiff realize that they're all about to become incredibly rich. Hardware engineer Gordon Clark (Scoot McNairy) is seen driving home in his beat-up compact car, banging on the steering wheel and singing at the top of his lungs with Boz Skaggs' Lido Shuffle . A few scenes later, after the staff of Cardiff