Podcasts FTW

I recently got some good headphones (Anker SoundCore Q20) so I've been listening to podcasts as I bike to and from work. I was introduced to the world of podcasts on one of my trips to the Enthought Austin office and I got hooked.

I used to listen to 99 % invisible earlier and now i'm listening to a lot of NPR's Planet Money . A few episodes that listened to recently are -

The working tapes of Studs Terkel - Stud Turkel toured the United States in the 70s recording people's descriptions of their jobs and their lives. This reminded me of P. Sainath's book "Everyone loves a good draught" which is a collection of stories about rural India. I wonder if someone is doing something similar now.

The Chicao Boys - Part I and Part II - The story of Chicago trained Chilean economics and the role they had in a Chilean revolution. In the story, there is a mention of how the United States/CIA sponsored Chilean newspapers/weekly magazines to influence the election and it reminded me of how other nations are trying to influence the United States' election process. I guess powerful countries will always try influencing each other - the only difference is the mode of communication.

Antitrust - Part I, Part II, Part III - These episodes cover how the United States started enforcing antitrust laws to protect competition, how the understanding of the law changed to protect customers instead of protecting competition and how led to current Tech giants, which are now under investigation.

I picked up a few more podcasts today - most related to business or Indian news. I'll comment on those later.

Popular posts from this blog

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

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

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