Numbers

So a couple weeks ago there was a great story on This American Life about a chimp that was raised as a human. This story was actually from another radio show called Radiolab. After listening to the story, I immediately signed up for the Radiolab podcast on iTunes. But, as often happens, this new podcast was overshadowed by new episodes of my other favorite podcasts.

Fortunately, this morning while I was just beginning my first day of spring break by working (the opposite of what one should do with a spring break) my friend Rich recommended I listen to a particular episode of Radiolab. After listening to Morning Edition and a couple old episodes of This American Life that have been sitting on my Must Listen list, I decided to give the episode a go. The title of the episode was "Numbers" and it was probably the most fascinating hour of radio I've ever heard. They spend the hour discussing how number influence our lives.

This may sound like something only someone who loves math could get into, but that's not the case at all. One of the two hosts is very skeptical of how useful numbers really are, and he provides a voice to all those non-math lovers out there. The topics on the show range from how babies start out thinking in logarithms and how when it comes to math the counting song we all listened to from our parents and from Sesame Street is the only thing that separates us from the rest of intelligent life living on Earth to how math saved a man from going insane during the Holocaust and almost destroyed a friendship between a teacher and a student.

I recommend everyone give this episode a listen, so I'm going to post it as the song of the day even though it's not a song. If you don't have a lot of time, just listen to the first story. Enjoy.

http://www.wnyc.org/shows/radiolab/episodes/2009/10/09