Probably Science

Go visit the full podcast site at ProbablyScience.com

Hey guys,

Just writing because I just donated a few sheckles to your cause.   You guys rock! I saw one of you guys live at Steve Benaquist's Big & Tall show a while back and I havent missed an episode since.  Keep on casting!

Hey Guys,

I really enjoyed your discussion of Gravity with Karen Gillan, and appreciated the link to my post about fact-checking, criticism and realism. I just wanted to make clear that the point I was making was absolutely not that fact-checking has no place in criticism or that one should just "shut up, it's only a movie."  My point was that fact-checking isn't criticism. And in an age of "10 Things That When Harry Met Sally Gets Wrong About The Natural History Museum" style blog posts, I want to fight to restore consideration of what a work of art is trying to do, and what its choices mean as two of the primary goals of writing about art.

For example, I actually think the point about The Clooney Drift Problem is a good one. It reveals a way in which the film is betraying its own rules in order to cheat narratively. But it's important to stress that it's the film's rules the film is breaking in that moment, even though those rules are the same as the laws of physics in our world. In fact, a science ignorant friend of mine figured out The Clooney Drift Problem simply from following the film's internal logic. 

Your discussion of the film actually fits very well with something I say fact-checking can be good for in the post itself, namely "discussing the differences between art and life that illuminate rather than reduce. That ask the question "what does it mean that they changed this thing about our world?" rather than assuming some kind of cheating or bad faith. Or ways that treat these differences not as a form of criticism, but rather a form of interesting trivia.  Or, in the case of Mythbusters, edutainment."

You may know Nate Craig from truTV's World's Dumbest, Comedy Central's Mash Up, or from his new album Infinity, and he joins Matt, Andy and newly anointed third host Jesse Case to talk about fake IDs, flushing out brain toxins, fast-aging breasts and farting into tissues. Check out our new site over at ProbablyScience.com, by the way!

http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-087-nate-craig

Karen Gillan, star of Doctor Who and the upcoming Guardians of the Galaxy, was kind enough to join Matt, Andy, and Jesse this week to talk about this year's Nobel Prize winners, fact-checking the movie Gravity, reading your own obituary, and Karen's freshly shaven head.

Stream directly via Libsyn here

Listen/subscribe via iTunes here

This week's episode comes to you from the second annual LA Podcast Festival, with Matt and Andy welcoming Rhys Darby and Brandon Fibbs to talk about sea serpents, Sasquatch whisperers, space lawyers, astronaut reality shows, and the technological prowess of the New Zealand Army.

http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-085-live-from-la-pod-fest-with-rhys-darby-and-brandon-fibbs

Podcasting pioneers Keith Malley and Chemda of the long-running show Keith and The Girl join Matt, Andy and Jesse this week to talk about die-hard fans, Brooks's Saturday Night Live debut, tomato/potato plants, having babies after menopause, and why Popular Science decided to disable their comments.

http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-084-keith-and-the-girl

It's sports week at Probably Science, as Matt and Andy welcome David Epstein, a Sports Illustrated journalist and the author of the outstanding new book The Sports Gene, along with college basketball player-turned-comedian Paul Morrissey, to discuss the burgeoning field of sports genetics research and try to get to the bottom of how elite athletes are made.

http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-083-david-epstein-and-paul-morrissey

Matt, Andy and Jesse are joined this week by USC paleontology PhD candidate Kathleen Ritterbush to talk about teaching science to boatloads of evangelicals, 201 million-year-old sea snail and sponge fossils, being the third man on The Dating Game and having your wedding ring made out of fossils.

http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-082-kathleen-ritterbush

Matt and Andy are back this week, welcoming the very funny Humphrey Ker and Bryan Cook to the program to talk about going on strike against Joan Rivers, moving someone else's hand with your mind, getting fooled by a fake story about testicle-biting fish, and a lengthy explanation of the British phenomenon of pantomimes.

http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-081-with-humphrey-ker-and-bryan-cook

Matt's been out of the country, Andy's been out of town, and Brooks just got hired to write for Saturday Night Live -- those are our excuses for the delay in getting a new episode up, but luckily Matt was able to do a remote recording with the very funny Nick Doody, his co-writer on the BBC radio show Bigipedia. We'll be back soon with more new episodes, and congratulations, Brooks!

http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-080-nick-doody

Matt's been in the UK and Andy's been in Portland, so rather than leave the audience twisting in the wind for a few weeks, they decided to record some remote bonus interviews. These weren't supposed to be very science-y, but in the course of talking with Jesse Case, Dr. Richard Flower, Dr. Anna Collu, Jeff Mounts and Emily Mounts, the discussions actually ended up having a fair amount of legitimate science, and a bit of history as well. Keep your standards low, and enjoy!

http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/summer-bonus-episode

This week Matt and Andy welcome comedy/science sibling duo Hank Thompson, a comedian and producer at TYT Comedy, and Dr. Chris Thompson, a post-doctoral fellow at Scripps Research Institute in the Department of Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience, to talk about songbirds, sibling rivalry, albino African clawed frogs, and taxi drivers with giant hippocampi.

http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-079-hank-and-chris-thompson

Matt and Andy ventured back to the Caltech campus this week for a mind-bending talk with theoretical cosmologist and author Dr. Sean Carroll about dark matter, dark energy, Boltzmann brains, the arrow of time, multiple universes and consulting on the production of Thor.

http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-078-dr-sean-carroll

It's a week of Portland-to-LA transplants, as comics Virginia Jones and Auggie Smith join Matt and Andy to talk about using sound waves to make things levitate, controlling stem cells with magnets, a blue planet that rains glass, and the stranger who wanders into Andy's house during the recording to take a shower.

http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-077-virginia-jones-and-auggie-smith

San Francisco-based comedian Colleen Watson and Portland-based festival producer/podcaster Charlene Conley herald Matt's triumphant return from Convergence Con this week, digging into meaty topics including the vegan/goth Venn diagram overlap, Portland-based Sasquatch clubs, cutlery's effect on flavor, and the possibility of unlimited teeth.

http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-076-colleen-watson-and-charlene-conley

This week's episode was recorded live at the 2013 Convergence Con in Minneapolis, with Matt welcoming The Physics of Superheroes author Dr. James Kakalios, Comedian Tommy Ryman and Dan Schlissel from Stand Up Records to discuss superconductors, solid state physics, things with "nano" in their titles, telescopic eyes, quantum computing, and how to transport science on a boat.

http://probablyscience.libsyn.com/episode-075-live-from-convergence-con