https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/can-you-make-a-sherman-tank-float? It’s D-Day and the Allies are about to invade Nazi-occupied France. For the landings to succeed, American soldiers on Omaha Beach will have to break through some formidable...
There is a gap between the calm, rational decision-makers we often aspire to be and the overwrought, sentiment-tossed creatures we often are. Rarely is that gap wider than in the political arena. Policy seems like it should be a matter for cool, evidence-based...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/the-inventor-who-almost-ended-the-world-classic Thomas Midgley’s inventions caused his own death, hastened the deaths of millions of people around the world, and very nearly extinguished all life on land. ...
In these pages, and in my last book, I’ve written about the lessons we should learn from Richard Doll and Austin Bradford Hill’s investigations in the 1950s into the link between cigarettes and lung cancer. There is one lesson I failed to draw. I wrote that in 1954...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/the-queens-astrologer-the-price-of-prophecy-part-1 https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/angels-gold-and-lust-john-dee-and-the-philosophers-stone-part-2 Part Two: When Tudor polymath John Dee...
It was one of the most astonishing displays of persuasion I have ever seen. In the audience, a group of Midwestern agribusiness types, who by profession should have been well attuned to climate change, but by culture were deeply sceptical. On the stage, a Germanic...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/the-queens-astrologer-the-price-of-prophecy-part-1 https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/angels-gold-and-lust-john-dee-and-the-philosophers-stone-part-2 In Tudor England, the line between...
Almost 51 years ago — when I was still a toddler — a gaming and science-fiction enthusiast named Lee Gold put together the first edition of an unusual collaborative role-playing-games magazine, Alarums and Excursions. This time last year, after 593 monthly editions,...
Brand new submarine HMS Thetis is the pride of the British Navy. In 1939, she sets out for a test dive with 103 men on board. But a tiny flaw in her construction has gone unnoticed, and the crew of Thetis is soon racing against time to stop that flaw from spiralling...