I published the fourth episode of the Festival of the Spoken Nerd Podcast: Extra Time For Questions podcast today.
Hosted by Helen Arney, Steve Mould and Matt Parker, Festival of the Spoken Nerd is a live monthly show that is a…
…celebration of science, comedy and unashamed geekiness, with live experiments, audience participation and specially selected guest scientists and comedy headliners. There’s always time for questions at the end, and extra marks are given for showing your workings.
This episode follows the live ‘Money Show’ and includes Steve explaining how the inconvenience of carrying around great lumps of gold has led to the current financial crisis, Helen conducting research on the link between happiness and money and Matt tackles some tough listener questions and heckles. Plus Matt and Steve explain the science behind their non-transitive dice (available from mathsgear.co.uk).
The podcast is published via the Festival of the Spoken Nerd website and iTunes. The fourth episode is hanging out on iTunes just begging for a listen.
This podcast was recorded using a Marantz on location at the live show and my portable studio for the podcast recording. Interestingly, now we have improved the quality of the show recording in the podcast, more people are complaining (in the nicest possible way) that these segments are quite hard to hear, or seem quieter than the rest of the podcast. I have checked (and double checked), and these segments are in fact the same volume as the rest of the podcast, they are just slightly indistinct because of the room acoustics at the live show. My speculation is that when the was an obvious quality difference in the live show recording, people ‘expected’ to need to listen more carefully – the obvious quality difference subconsciously acting as a cue. However, now there is a much less prominent difference in quality, as a listener you expect to be able to hear the audio just as with the studio recording. This is a curious conundrum, and any other perspectives on this problem would be very welcome!
