https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/liar-bigamist-brute-how-isaac-singer-liberated-women The sewing machine was once thought to be an impossible invention. It was such a complicated contraption that it would take more than one inventor, with more...
In the 1630s, Adriaen Pauw was the closest thing Holland had to a prime minister; he was also fabulously wealthy. To display his wealth and good taste, Pauw commissioned a tulip garden filled with cleverly positioned mirrors. The heart of the garden was a sprinkling...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/fritterin-away-genius-classic Claude Shannon was brilliant. He was the Einstein of computer science… only he loved “fritterin’ away” his time building machines to play chess, solve Rubik’s cubes and beat the...
It’s the time of year to ponder self-improving resolutions, and I find myself consulting one of my favourite 87-year-olds: the visionary author Stewart Brand. But if Brand is right, perhaps self-improvement isn’t quite the right term; self-maintenance might be better....
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/photographing-fairies-classic Sherlock Holmes is known for approaching all mysteries with cool logic – and yet when his creator Sir Arthur Conan Doyle saw photographs taken by two young girls purporting to show...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/they-fall-behind-and-are-slowly-crushed-board-games-and-economics-with-richard-garfield Christmas is the time of year to worry about two things: running out of money, and playing board games. To mark the festive...
The first line of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women is “Christmas won’t be Christmas without presents”, while Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1850 short story The Good Fairy is about Christmas presents and, specifically, women trying to help each other figure out how best to...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/flixborough-the-factory-that-was-wiped-off-the-map A megaplant near the small village of Flixborough, England, is busy churning out a key ingredient of nylon 6, a material used in everything from stockings to...
Swiss psychiatrist Elisabeth Kübler-Ross suggested that there are five stages of grief, but nobody has the attention span for that any more. We have leapt instead from stage one, denial — “there is no AI bubble”, to stage five, acceptance — “AI is a bubble and bubbles...