[Podcast] 99 percent invisible - The Secret lives of color

A lot of my colleagues at the Austin office talk about what their favorite podcasts are, when they have time to listen to them and what not. For some reason, I never really made the time to listen to the podcasts they recommended. That changed yesterday.

I was on my way back from a friend's wedding. On a train that takes 7+ hours. I'd watched all the movies I had downloaded on Netflix and Amazon Prime. And my phone was at < 15% battery so I couldn't spend anymore time browsing the internet. I needed to do something to cope with my boredom which wasn't a drain on my phone's battery. Which was when I remembered the podcasts I had downloaded on my phone, along with the movies.

One of the podcasts my colleagues highly recommended was 99% Invisible.
99% Invisible is about all the thought that goes into the things we don’t think about — the unnoticed architecture and design that shape our world.
I had a bunch of their episodes on my phone and I chose to listen The Secret lives of Color episode which is the latest episode.

Now, I'm going to recommend this podcast highly to anyone with two ears. Or just one ear.

The episode was awesome and super-informational. I too am highly interested in the material side of color i.e. what we use to make the colors we see everyday and how those materials have changed over time. This episode was in conjunction with the author of a book of the same title.

Now I need to get back and finish listening to Atomic Tattoos.

Until next time.

Popular posts from this blog

Farewell to Enthought

I started my professional career at Enthought , at the Pune office in India, on Feb 29, 2016. Over the course of eight long years, I spent time at the Austin office in the US, the Cambridge office in the UK, and I worked remotely from India. I was let go on March 27, 2024 . I had an unbelievably great time. I had three amazing mentors - Pankaj Pandey, Senganal Thirunavukkarasu, and Mark Dickinson. Pankaj mentored me in my first year at Enthought. I started paying attention to the craft of software after working with him. Senganal started mentoring me in my second year at Enthought, and continues to mentor me, even after the both of us have moved on from Enthought. He instilled professionalism in me, ensuring that the code I wrote produced precise scientific results, and that I tackled the known unknown aspects of a project first, to ensure timely communication about project progress. I was eager to manage people at the time and Senganal made me realize that I didn't want to manage ...
Read more

Arxiv author affiliations using Python

So, I wanted to get author affiliation information from papers on arXiv. arXiv provides with an API to bulk query their database and get information. Following that, I look for the attribute 'arxiv:affiliation' in the html data. Here's the code - import urllib from BeautifulSoup import BeautifulStoneSoup   url = 'http://export.arxiv.org/api/query?search_query=all:astro&start=0&max_results=1000'   data = urllib.urlopen(url).read() soup = BeautifulStoneSoup(data) #print(soup.prettify()) #list = soup.findAll('arxiv:affiliation') #for i in range(len(list)): #        print list[i].contents   test = [tag.string for tag in soup.findAll('arxiv:aiffiliation')] Now, the problem I'm having is that I'm getting affiliation of all authors which I want to split into sets of affiliations of authors of a paper, which I'm stuck on at the moment. Once I get that part, I can move on to the next part of this pet project, displaying these...
Read more

Elementary (particle physics), my dear Watson

Ground Control to Major Tom:  Shruti Patel checking in. Since my dear friend and fellow-physicist Rahul Poruri is homeward bound, and shall remain there for a week, I'm stepping in to continue his tradition of daily posts to Astronut . Even as I write, I'm not quite sure what this post is going to be about, so please forgive me for occasional rants and digressions.  By the way Rahul, I totally resent you for the name of this blog- I'm never going to start my own blog because there's no way I'll come up with a name as cool as Astronut! For now, I shall try and be happy with being a guest writer! Before I begin, a little bit on who I am and what I do; so that you can trust that my general views on science- particle physics in particular- are not entirely baseless. I graduated with a masters in Physics from IIT Madras in July this year, and I'm currently working towards (an eventual) PhD with the Theory Group at the Deutsches Electronen-Synchrotron (DESY)...
Read more