Geek Pop: October 2012 (Dead Scientists)

As it’s nearly Halloween, we’ve gone for the slightly morbid theme of Dead Scientists. And you’ve all done a grand job of bringing the best Dead Scientist songs to our attention. EXCELLENT WORK, TEAM GEEK! We’ve compiled an extended Spotify list including some of the suggestions we had to leave out.

So. Along the twisty twiney turns of this podcast we stumble across: a lady who wants to make love to Nikola Tesla (presumably whilst he was still alive), Einstein’s mum and dad, and a man driven to murder by linguistics. Plus, Geek Pop’s first ever stab at some sort of Poetry Corner, thanks to Lara Charles.

Some links for this month: Helen Arney off of Geek Pops past is on tour with Festival of the Spoken Nerd – tickets on sale now. If you want to read more about the whole Tesla / Edison pantomime go to this excellent Oatmeal cartoon thingy. And here’s the whole sad story of Feynman and his wife.

There are now well over 100 tracks on our all-time podcast list. It’s here or on Spotify.

Nikola Tesla – 8in8 (Amanda Palmer, Damian Kulash, Ben Folds & Neil Gaiman)

Hermann Loves Pauline – Super Furry Animals

A POETICAL INTERLUDE! Moments of Great Importance by Lara Charles

What Do I Care? – Johnny Cash

The Death of Ferdinand De Saussure – The Magnetic Fields

LIVE SESSION: Sailing Back to Spain – Intercontinental Music Lab (Cambridge, 2009)

Click here to choose from iTunes and other podcatchers. Subscription is free – it just means that whenever you open iTunes, it will automatically check for updates and download new podcasts. The online archive is here.

Intro/outro music by Intercontinental Music Lab. Image: The rather dashing Nikola Tesla sits in his Colorado laboratory in around 1900, apparently oblivious to the CRAZY HUGE sparks flying from his “magnifying transmitter”. It turns out this photo is a double exposure, so Tesla wasn’t actually there at the same time as the sparks. In Tesla’s notes was written: “I did not like this idea but some people find such photographs interesting. Of course, the discharge was not playing when the experimenter was photographed, as might be imagined!”