Coffee and Crazy Ramblings

Hey, did you know archive.org has a bunch of free 90s shows you can stream?

The problem is finding them, since no one's organized them all in one place with covers and episode info. I'm trying to fix that with my new website.

It's in BETA right now, and all the content was just added today, so I've barely scratched the surface of what's out there.

Submit shows and request here

Watch party with synchronized video and chatrooms

Novelty Books: Area 51 by Nick Redfern Los Alamos by Joseph Kanon Unleashing Oppenheimer by Jada Yuan Oppenheimer: The Complete Screenplay by Christopher Nolan Copenhagen by Michael Frayn The Oppenheimer Alternative by Robert J. Sawyer The Manhattan Projects by Jonathan Hickman

Books by others: The Advisors: Oppenheimer, Teller, and the Superbomb by Herbert F. York The Real Dr. Strangelove by Peter Goodchild The Tragedy of Edward Teller by István Hargittai Judging Teller by István Hargittai Martians of Science by István Hargittai Wisdom of the Martians of Science by István Hargittai Edward Teller: A Giant of the Golden Age of Physics by Stanley A. Blumberg and Louis G. Panos Energy and Conflict: The Life and Times of Edward Teller by Stanley A. Blumberg and Gwinn Owens Brotherhood of the Bomb by Gregg Herken The Making of the Atomic Bomb by Richard Rhodes Atomic Spy by Nancy Thorndike Greenspan The Spy Who Changed The World by Mike Rossiter Physics and Philosophy by Werner Heisenberg The Meaning of Relativity by Albert Einstein Now It Can Be Told by Leslie Groves (With introduction by Edward Teller, who tried to be nice.) Oppenheimer: The Story of a Friendship by Haakon Chevalier The Man Who Would Be God by Haakon Chevalier (This is weird.) American Prometheus by Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin Feynman by Ottaviani and Myrick Fallout by Ottaviani Trinity by Jonathan Fetter-Vorm Easton Press: Day of Trinity by Lansing Lamont The Man From The Future by Ananyo Bhattacharya The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut Big Science by Michael Hiltzik Forks In The Road: A Life In Physics by Stanley Deser A Sense of the Mysterious: Science And The Human Spirit by Alan Lightman Pandora’s Keepers by Brian VanDeMark J Robert Oppenheimer by Abraham Pais An American Genius by Herbert Childs Lawrence and Oppenheimer by Nuel Pharr Davis The General And The Genius by James Kunetka J. Robert Oppenheimer And The American Century by David C. Cassidy Atoms In The Family by Laura Fermi Genius In The Shadows by William Lanouette Beyond Uncertainty by David C. Cassidy An Atomic Love Story by Patricia Klaus and Shriley Streshinsky 109 East Palace by Jennet Conant The Strangest Man by Graham Farmelo The Night of the Physicists by Richard von Schirach Oppenheimer and the American Century by David C. Cassidy Alvarez: Adventures of a Physicist by Luis W. Alvarez Oppenheimer by Isidor Isaac Rabi and more. Bomb by Steve Sheinkin Fallout by Steve Sheinkin Surely You’re Joking Mister Feynman by Richard Feynman The Feynman Lectures by Richard Feynman When We Cease To Understand The World by Benjamín Labatut Enrico Fermi: His Work And Legacy by Enrico Fermi Suspended In Language by Ottaviani

Oppenheimer: The Open Mind Atom and Void In The Matter of J. Robert Oppenheimer (By everyone else.) These are the transcripts of the trials. Robert Oppenheimer Letters and Recollections edited by Alice Kimball Smith and Charles Weiner Science and the Common Understanding City of the End of Things by Northrop Frye, J. Robert Oppenheimer, and Edward Togo Salmon Uncommon Sense Lectures On Electrodynamics

Teller: Critical Choices for Americans: Power and Security by Edward Teller, Hans Mark, and John S. Foster, JR. In Search of Solutions for Defense and for Energy Arbeitsgemeinschaft Für Forschung Des Landes Nordrhein-Westfalen Heft 147: Die Situation der modern Physik Proceedings of an AAAS Symposium on January 8, 1980: How Much Does The Defense Department Advance Science - contributions by Edward Teller Nuclear War Survival Skills by Cresson H. Kearny, foreword by Edward Teller Instrument Engineers’ Handbook Vol. 1 Process Measurement edited by Béla G. Lipták, contributions by Edward Teller Einstein: A Centenary Volume, contributions by Edward Teller Reader’s Digest, November 1982, contributions by Edward Teller Reader’s Digest, April 1962, contributions by Edward Teller Arms Control, Disarmament, and National Security edited by Donald G. Brennan, contributions by Edward Teller Memoirs (Both normal and signed version) Edward Teller: Centennial Symposium edited by Stephen B. Libby and Karl A. van Bibber Edward Teller Lectures: Lasers and Inertial Fusion Energy edited by Heinrich Hora and George H. Miley Energy: A Plan For Action The Structure of Matter by F. O. Rice and Edward Teller Energy and Man A Symposium, contributions by Edward Teller The Raman Effect and Its Chemical Applications by Hibben with contributions by Edward Teller Science and Technology in America Légiposta by Teller Ede and Zeley László The Reluctant Revolutionary Conversations On The Dark Secrets Of Physics (This book is so much fun.) Our Nuclear Future Energy From Heaven And Earth Fusion Vol 1 Part A Fusion Vol 1 Part B Legacy of Hiroshima The Pursuit of Simplicity Better A Shield Than A Sword Encyclopedia of Telecommunications, contributions by Edward Teller The Conservative Papers, contributions by Edward Teller Üzenetek egy marslatótól by Teller Ede, LiLLI Kiadó (LILLI Press) To Meet The Communist Challenge

This is brilliant, I love it!

Losing confidence in Himself, G-d became an atheist. He decided to go down to Earth, to walk among humans and see how they found meaning.

He wandered the world until he came to a town, where he happened upon a pastor. "Come to our church this Sunday!" said the pastor. But G-d shook his head. "I don't believe in G-d anymore," he told the pastor sullenly. "And besides, I really shouldn't be working weekends." . . .

It’s so relevant to today. The social discomfort with women seeking advancement. The genial, “we need more of that sort of thing!” attitude towards Actual Hitler. It was published in ‘38, so you get these peeks into the attitudes of the commons at the time and it’s just astonishing how truly modern this book feels.

Dorothy L Sayers was a phenomenal author, but also an incisive critic of her society.

Fr there’s a moment in Gaudy Night when Harriet returns to the (women’s) college and passes by a couple night porters and one of them says something about how useless it is that all the wimmen are wasting their time and money getting educated and then the other fellow says something to the effect of “What we need here is a chap like those German’s Hitler. He’d straighten out these gels.”

And that haunts me.

Did Sayers hear that line IRL? Probably not, but she likely heard the sentiment repeated both in conversation and in print. Facism was *cool*. They had neat clothes, and fit young men, and summer camps! They had optimized trains! They were scientifically advancing society for the betterment of all!

The first book in the Wimsey series has Lord Peter encountering not just bald-faced anti-semitism, so common as to be wholly unremarkable by the entirety of the cast (if not the narrative), but also entire charitable societies based on eugenically cleansing the populace to create a Better Britain. They’re handing out pamphlets and hosting fundraisers in Polite Society!

We have so romanticized the Good vs Evil narrative of WWII that we have largely forgotten that the distance between Us and Them was a matter of millimeters, not miles. The portions of the populace of both the UK and the States that favored the Germans was, like, REALLY HIGH, you guys. There’s a reason why Chamberlain tried appeasement, why FDR chose isolationism. Because everyone thought that well, you know. Those guys over there? They’ve got A Point.

The Lord Peter Wimsey novels are hilarious. They’re charming. The mysteries are delightful and something I, at least, was genuinely caught wrong-footed on multiple times. The romance between Peter and Harriet is swoon-worthy. Bunter is my gold standard for the valet/assistant. The insight into the way she’ll shock aka PTSD was viewed at the time is frankly fascinating and nuanced.

But these books’ real staying power, for me, is how deftly Sayers captures and critiques her society and her world in these mysteries. I didn’t walk away from a single one without feeling like I’d just been transported into a specific period of time and been exposed to sentiments that are are once familiar and foreign.

I devoured these books during the dark ages (aka ‘20-‘21) and I am still thinking about them weekly three years on. Everyone knows Christie and Doyle, Higgins Clark and Grisham, but almost no one (except @amarguerite) knows Sayers. No one told me about Sayers, even my avid mystery reading people. And that makes me sad. I have yet been able to convince any of my IRL people to pick up Whose Body?, the first book in the series.

Anyway. Read Dorothy L Sayers, everyone. Reread it. Listen to the audiobooks. Tell Your Friends.

The avoidance of the puddle would be precisely the kind of superb detail that, say, Tolstoy might flourish; War and Peace has an execution scene very close in spirit to Orwell’s essay, and it may well be that Orwell basically cribbed the detail from Tolstoy. In War and Peace, Pierre witnesses a man being executed by the French, and notices that, just before death, the man adjusts the blindfold at the back of his head, because it is uncomfortably tight. The avoidance of the puddle, the fiddling with the blindfold—these are what might be called irrelevant or superfluous details. They are not explicable; in fiction, they exist to denote precisely the inexplicable. This is one of the “effects” of realism, of “realistic” style. 

But Orwell’s essay, assuming it records an actual occurrence, shows us that such fictional effects are not merely conventionally irrelevant, or formally arbitrary, but have something to tell us about the irrelevance of reality itself (…) There was no logical reason for the condemned man to avoid the puddle. It was pure remembered habit. Life, then, will always contain an inevitable surplus, a margin of the gratuitous, a realm in which there is always more than we need: more things, more impressions, more memories, more habits, more words, more happiness, more unhappiness.