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Comment by arethuza | Hacker News Reader

The History of Rome Podcast: http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-history-of-rome/id261...

I've listened to all 112 episodes so far (and still quite a bit to go) - once this finishes I'll probably go back and listen to the "12 Byzantine Rules" again - which is also very good.

Although not purely a podcast, I can also strongly recommend the BBC Radio 4 series "In Our Time" - which is available as a podcast:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/features/in-our-time/

This is an informal "history of ideas" and is the kind of thing the BBC does extremely well.

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IMO 'In Our Time' is less useful than it appears at first. Melvyn Bragg invites a few University professors to discuss a topic in every episode and things go straight to the deep end with everyone trying to sound smarter than everyone else. It's an intellectual knife-fight where the listener hasn't even been told the rules.

ABC Radio National's Philosophers Zone http://www.abc.net.au/rn/philosopherszone/ is way better and covers much the same topics. Great interviewer; talks clearly and slowly and summarizes key points periodically. It's the Mixergy of philosophy.

things go straight to the deep end with everyone trying to sound smarter than everyone else

Yeah, that's the degenerate case, and is why I'm less keen on IOT than I used to be. The Indian Rebellion (20100218) was the worst one this year (although I'm almost two months behind now).

Still, when it's good, it's really good. Fortunately, you're rarely compelled to listen to an episode: if it's no good, just move on.

At least they are short, mercifully.

I think I lost the ability to take this sort of arrangement seriously after having watched this little 'bit of Fry and Laurie' sketch...

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZFD01r6ersw

"The Indian Mutiny". Here's a link, since I went through the trouble of searching for it: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b00qprnj

But I agree, IOT has a lot of podcasts that I've liked (e.g. the one on The Great wall of China), while others are just academic catfights.

Thank you for referring me to The Philosopher's Zone. I had not heard it before. I listened to 4 programs last night. I did not get as much from it as I do from most of the In Our Time episodes. Having just one person to interview does not seem to lead to the same quality of discussion as the panels of experts tha Melvin finds. I am not saying every IOT is a gem, but I learned from and enjoyed IOT more. But, I have listened to most of the IOT episodes and I can't get any more back episodes. They now hide IOT behind Flash and I have better sense than to install that program. Good day

The History of Rome looks good. Here's the link for their home page, for those of us who don't use itunes: http://thehistoryofrome.typepad.com/

I was going to write a perl script to download all these but after I discovered that the naming scheme wasn't consistent throughout every file, I gave up and installed iTunes to download everything. I then promptly removed all hundreds of megabytes of it. An advantage is the naming scheme is pretty good; nothing that a novice shell-scripter can't fix.

I don't understand why you "removed all hundreds of megabytes of it".

At any rate, this is a simple python script to list all mp3 files in those posts (I like to use wget do do the actual downloading):

http://pastebin.com/cbhEgt6E

It uses the cool lxml library: http://codespeak.net/lxml/

(I use something similar to download all posts of a blog I want to read offline on my kindle).

I then promptly removed all hundreds of megabytes of it.

I think he was referring to Itunes.

I came here to say this - the History of Rome is a phenomenal podcast, and easily the most interesting history text I've read or listened to. The narrator does a good job of trying to reconcile the sometimes wildly varying accounts of the source material, and he's clearly extremely passionate about the subject. It's very to interesting to hear about the progression from early kingdom, to republic, to empire, to military dictatorship with a very thin republican veneer.

I just started listening to "The History of Rome" podcast, and I love it. He tells a story rather than deliver a lecture, it's great fun.

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