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From Leviticus to the Kilogram: Honest Scales
Episode 5886
Honest scales, honest weights, honest measures — Leviticus says it, Athens enforced it with a board of ten Metronomoi, and the kilogram depended on a…
2 days, 12 hours ago
The World's Oldest Software Still Running
Episode 5885
Software is the only thing we build that we expect to throw away — yet some programs from the 1950s and 60s are still running the same jobs today. Th…
2 days, 12 hours ago
The Machines That Take 5 Years to Replace
Episode 5884
What happens when critical infrastructure breaks and there's no warehouse to call? This episode digs into the strange category of machines that are a…
2 days, 12 hours ago
What Happens to Water Between the Plant and Your Tap
Episode 5883
Every litre that leaks is a litre somebody already paid to treat, pump, and chlorinate. This episode digs into the buried network between the treatme…
2 days, 13 hours ago
Half of All Energy Becomes Heat. Now What?
Episode 5882
Roughly half of all global energy input ends up as waste heat, and the headline numbers say it's the world's largest untapped energy source. The hone…
2 days, 13 hours ago
How the Grid Loses Half Its Power — and How Delhi Fixed It
Episode 5881
Losses scale with the square of current, which is why the grid runs at high voltage and why a crackling wire is money on fire. But the World Bank's l…
2 days, 13 hours ago
Why Suburbs May Be a Bad Deal
Episode 5880
Suburbs are sold as the ideal place to raise a family, but what does the evidence actually say? This episode digs into the research on children's ind…
2 days, 15 hours ago
Why Experts Don't Follow Their Own Advice
Episode 5879
We've all met the doctor who skips the gym, the dentist who drinks soda, the tech worker who thinks his own product is garbage. The lazy answer is "p…
3 days ago
How a Sloth Learned to Talk: Corn's Origin Story
Episode 5878
Twenty-three hundred hours of audio, and the hosts have never once explained how three animals ended up hosting a podcast in fluent English. This epi…
3 days ago
A Sloth Diagnoses Human Civilization
Episode 5877
Daniel handed the microphone to a sloth and asked for a diagnosis of human civilization in 2026. What came back is a slow, careful reading of the yea…
3 days ago