I was delighted yesterday to discover that Ed Brayton, who used to host one of my all-time favourite political podcasts, Declaring Independence Radio, has recently started hosting a new show: Culture Wars Radio.

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Time for another podcast recommendation!

This time it’s for Robert M. Price’s show The Human Bible. It’s a show where theologian Dr. Robert M. Price discusses topics in biblical criticism and answers listener questions using his vast knowledge of biblical and Christian history. Best of all, he comes from a secular perspective, understanding the text as a human creation, not one inspired by a god. And yet as a former Baptist pastor he has insight into the biblical literalist mindset.

In my formative years I was a great fan of Reginald Finley Sr.'s The Infidel Guy Show. Robert Price’s “Bible Geek” episodes of that show were some of my favourites — his great voice, his quiet sense of humour, his breadth of knowledge. His new show here is much the same, though unfortunately without Reginald Finley’s irreverent co-hosting.

I’ve only got an amateur interest in biblical criticism, so I’ve got no way to assess whether this guy knows what he’s talking about or is respected in his field, but he sure sounds like an expert.

What with the way the world is at the moment, I’ve been thinking a lot about social justice. I find myself confronted with sexism, homophobia, and even racism, with increasing frequency both offline and online. Possibly it’s just because I’m becoming more conscious of these things as I become more educated about the world, myself and the power dynamics therein. But even empirically it seems like the dark forces are massing.

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A commenter on an old post recently asked if I’d share my copies of Ed Brayton’s old podcasts. I’ve put them up here. I’ve mentioned before how much of a fan I am of these shows.

The list is an awful mess right now as I just copied the file names and regexp’d a page together, but it’s better than nothing.

I just mentioned Conway’s Game of Life as an example of a Turing-complete system.

Though it’s called the “Game” of Life, and some people describe it as a zero-player game, it’s not really a game in the traditional sense of the word.

For an unexpected example of an unambiguous game which is also Turing-complete, check out Magic: The Gathering. It has been shown that a Universal Turing machine can be constructed inside Magic, and hence that it is Turing-complete.

I played a lot of Magic in high school, though it’s too expensive of a habit to keep up for long. If, like me, you remember Magic fondly, but don’t play it so much any more, might I recommend Mark Rosewater’s Drive to Work podcast?

A nice surprise to read yesterday that Ed Brayton is back on the air with a relaunch of his old radio show Culture Wars Radio.

[I am a long-time fan of Ed’s writing and particularly his radio shows. (So much so that I mirror episodes of his old shows to make sure they remain available.) Intelligent, informed, non-partisan discussion of American politics and law, particularly constitutional law. This time he has a co-host, former professor of constitutional law Dan Ray. The first episode is a discussion of the recent Masterpiece Cakeshop ruling, and a bit about Trump’s legal troubles.

I’m super pleased to hear Ed on the radio again.

Check out the podcast via iTunes, or subscribe to the feed directly. It looks like Ed is supporting production of the show through Patreon, so go take a look there too.

I made a tool to convert a podcast’s RSS feed into a webpage on which episodes can be easily streamed.

When you visit the page, you’ll see a box in which to paste the RSS feed’s URL:

Stick in a feed’s RSS URL, and you get all available episodes in a list, reverse chronologically by release date:

Titles are links taken from the feed’s metadata. Images are hotlinked from the host. Click-to-listen links bring up an embedded player:

The feed is stored in the page’s URL, so it should be sharable. Currently no way to identify a given episode, but you should be able to do that with the episode title links, which should go back to the source.

Source code is released to the CC0 public domain, and can be found on Codeberg, where you can also report bugs or help me make it better.

If you use it, let me know!