Peering over the Shoulder of a Giant

In Our Time this week is about Archimedes. It’s a good panel with Serafina Cuomo, George Phillips and Jackie Stedall. What I particularly liked was they they were happy to say how little is known about Archimedes. One of the problems with history of science in ancient Greece is the ancients tendencies to attribute all sorts of things to a big name to get them taken seriously.

Also downloaded this week: Alan Cann’s MicrobiologyBytes is back with another plague edition. Exactly what form of bug caused the plagues of medieval Europe and when did the Bubonic Plague arrive? Analysis by microbiologists is giving some unnerving answers.

HBO is putting out some more Rome podcasts. You can subscribe at http://www.hbo.com/apps/podcasts/podcast.xml?a=1 if you don’t want to use iTunes, but that would be pointless as they’re in .m4v format. They’re brief video clips rather than the audio snippets used for Season One. The topics are interesting – so far it’s been Slavery and Worship in Rome – but it’s a lot of bandwidth. I’d have preferred more of Historical consultant Jonathan Stamp’s snippets.