https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/beware-tech-tycoons-with-piranha-tanks-with-katie-prescott Mike Lynch was often lauded as Britain's answer to Bill Gates. Born into a working-class family, Lynch's incredible intellect and passion for computers...
It may seem strange to celebrate, but let’s hear it for oil-price shocks. Admittedly, there is little reason to rejoice in a disruption to the world’s energy system. The price of oil is linked to the price of all sorts of essentials, including food, so this crisis...
Well, it's been a long road since I raced the dinosaurs at a New Year's Day parkrun. I've managed various niggles (knee, glute, achilles... yawn). I've run around the amazing Ladybower Reservoir, across St Mark's Square, even chased Alistair Brownlee down Regent's...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/finding-grace-in-a-burger-bun-an-incrediburgible-quest Dick and Mac are content with their lives: they enjoy making burgers by day and stargazing by night. Ray Kroc is a workaholic chasing success at any cost....
Bobby Bonilla is known to baseball fans of a certain age as one of the best batters in the sport back in the 1980s and 90s. To grumpy fans of the New York Mets, he is known as the man who fooled the Mets into agreeing to one of the worst contracts in the history of...
https://omny.fm/shows/cautionary-tales-with-tim-harford/run-switzer-run-the-women-who-broke-the-marathon-taboo-classic Until the 1960s, women couldn't compete in Olympic events any longer than a sprint - and commentators declared that a marathon would kill them, or...
Among the many steps along the road to high-performance AI, one of the most important was taken in 2007 by Fei-Fei Li, then an assistant professor in Princeton’s computer science department. Using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service to amass many millions of small acts...
Comrade Lysenko has seized control of Soviet agriculture with his radical ideas about genetics. He disdains traditional scientists who learn everything from books and nothing from the land, and those who question his methods soon find themselves in trouble with...
On 26 April, I plan to be on the start line of the London Marathon. I’m in my fifties, I’ve only been running for a few years, and this will be my first marathon. I’m doing it to raise money for the Teenage Cancer Trust (TCT). Cancer is brutal for anyone. For...