'The Shipping Forecast may provide vital weather information to sea captains and sailors, but some of the most devoted fans are those who listen to it for its poetic quality.
'"Only recently, some Americans came in, listened to the broadcast and said, 'Well, we don't understand a word of that but it was terrific. Could we have a recording of that to go back and play in our office? No one would believe us otherwise'."'

[[ These new technologies are "challenging our Constitutional categories in really dramatic ways," says George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen. "And what's so striking is that none of the existing amendments give clear answers to the most basic questions we're having today." ]]

"This is our flat, bright friend, even as our flesh and blood brothers and sisters sit beside us, each set of eyes shining with the glow, illuminated by the blue light as flat as the world once was. We can see past the Screen. We can see out into the world, but the Screen wants us, wants our eyes to return."

"Signals from GPS satellites now help you to call your mother, power your home, and even land your plane – but a cheap plastic box can jam it all." It's interesting how quickly GPS has become part of life- and how easy it is to mess up.

'The Modernist station, built in the 1960s, replaced the original station of the early 19th century, demolished along with the iconic Euston Arch. Whilst Stamp laments the “gratuitous destruction” of the old Doric gateway, Hatherley thinks that the new complex is “unspectacular but reasonably decent.”'

"I want Today to be good. I want it to be in-depth and have an interesting agenda. I want it to be the radio equivalent of, say, the very best of broadsheet newspapers (not the highest bar in the world, but you’d think it might be possible). Instead, it all too often ends up as the radio equivalent of mid-market tabloids."

"London: Another Country? will explore what happens when 7.5 million people, speaking over 300 languages, try to live together in a city that has a population density ten times higher than anywhere else in the UK, but is the greenest city of its size in the world."

"Mike Parker, author of Map Addict, will present the ten, 15-minute programmes. They will go out on Radio 4, Monday to Friday at 3.45pm in the weeks beginning 22nd and 29th March. The series looks at maps and map-making since the beginning of the twentieth century and will cover the use of maps for everything from leisure and motoring to propaganda and story-telling."

"Tom Rees has conducted research into religion and personal insecurity in 50 countries. He claims to have found evidence to show that the most religious societies are the most unequal, and concludes the inequality leads to religion." Complete with special reference to the US (and also comparing Ireland and Finland).

"As Web content becomes easier to share and distribute, and search and social media have become important drivers of audience engagement, archival content -- whether in the form of stories or transcripts -- has an entirely different value than it did in the past." Hurrah. Text is good.

I'd much rather listen live in Realplayer than in Safari; I'm much less likely to accidentally close the window, for one thing. The WMA links are handy for FStream.

Iain M Banks gets adapted for radio. I thought it worked fairly well.

Lots of goodies, but particularly "5 Mar 2009 14:15: The State of the Art - Dramatisation of an Iain M banks story in which the Culture, a spacebound utopian civilisation, encounters Earth" Also Rendezvous with Rama, The Death of Grass.

" The scientist Graham Farmelo argues that Dirac has been overlooked due to his extreme distaste for publicity, which may have been a manifestation of his autism." A day left to download. Also that week, Ben Goldacre.

"[The BBC] still sometimes treats the web as a supporting medium for broadcast programmes when it can be so much more than that." An interesting read from one of the members of the team at the Future Media and Technology group.

A really interesting interactive visualisation of the radio spectrum at the Curve (so it's free, and open late).

"Over half of all the world’s Pandora users are iPhone users" leads this story, which also says that iPhone users have doubled usage (not necessarily true: they could have always used Pandora on their PCs). Notable to me is the fact that both the iPhone and Pandora are US-focussed (one due to rights, the other because Nokia blew launching phones there). (Edit: looks like the headline's been amended.)

Unfortunately I couldn't get the Erlang to work - maybe I was trying with too new a compiler? - but this writeup makes it look like I should perhaps give it another go.

"Most of the 159,000 weekly audience from OneWord have listened [to Birdsong] and now, because it has caught the public's imagination, at least 340,000 have come on board as well." I have run across this and listened for a while...

If you miss the premiere at the NFT you can watch The City Speaks "films for radio" and, presumably, listen again after the broadcast at the Radio 4 site.

"a unique portrait of London for radio, cinema and television. Responding to a narrative framework by writer Peter Ackroyd ... the film portrays London through an array of images and locations"

A nice programme about Trafalgar from Radio 4 (despite being hosted by Michael Portillo, but then he seems much nicer nowadays). The Spanish apparently came off very badly, but nobody knows.

On "active" SETI, namely sending radio transmissions to the stars in hopes someone else will be listening. Should we be doing it?

A lovely three-page comic, via Pete Ashton. Great visuals on the second page.

Transcript of a Nightwaves show from Radio 3 earlier this year. I haven't read it yet, but I'm linking to it partly because I never run across randomness any more, and nobody else seems to have bookmarked it.

As used in Webb's social DAB radio prototype. Wonder how hard it is to get working.

A great interview in the Independent. I agree with a great deal of what he has to say about the BBC and radio, but then maybe I would; I don't have a TV either and far prefer news online or on the radio.

So that's what all those Flickr photos of breadboards were about: Olinda is a prototype, standalone DAB radio with a novel (easier to use) interface, built-in social listening, and a hardware API.

"For SomaFM, this means our royalties for 2006 will be increased retroactively from about $20,000 to about $600,000. That's more than 3 times what we made in 2006."

The final show went out on Friday. Boo.

Sounds like a nice device, this, but I'd rather not buy one through BT. Also makes me wonder if it's another nail in DAB's coffin.

what "rising slowly" actually means

Someone else likes Radio 4.

"The Magazine's search for Britain's greatest unsung landmark is over. The thousands of votes have been counted and Jodrell Bank in Cheshire is the winner."

Seen on the (new) delicious front page. Interesting partly because of the worse is better aspects (interesting that the champion of AM was also the inventor of the (rubbish) NTSC) and also for the IP aspects (do patents ever work for the little guy?)

"Little Atoms is a live discussion show, produced and presented by Neil Denny and Richard Sanderson. Little Atoms explores the science of politics and the politics of science"

In case Tom Coates thought the BBC News Magazine were the only people drawing Christ-Superman parallels ( http://del.icio.us/url/3b20e7db3428cdafdded4023cc369664 ) - they're not. Interesting points about the moral absolutes.

A comment on StreamRecorder, which I confused with the half a dozen other StreamRecorder apps out there. This one converts RA streams to MP3. Could be handy.

"iTrips can be used in the US without disturbing the airwaves, so [Ofcom] must provide compelling evidence why they can't be used here."

Home Taping ^W Recording Is Killing Music. Again. (Sigh.)

Tiny battery-powered random iTunes share player. Very nice hack from andym there.

Apparently the format is a bit wacky; looks a lot like an RDBMS dump. Ho hum.

Pretty nifty

The *other* DRM, also uses aacPlus (unlike DAB, based on MP2, but like XM)

(not new but) needed to play aacPlus on Mac OS X until iTunes gets its finger out. A really good Unix app port (unlike so many others)

Interesting US station (somewhere in the 6music/XFM space) that uses aacPlus

aacPlus aka HE AAC, which looks pretty interesting (via interconnected/mini)

:(