Stephen Fry's address at Oxford University (2015) [video] | Hacker News Reader

Stephen Fry's address at Oxford University (2015) [video]

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52 pointsthunderbong19 comments

Thanks for the link. Man, I love listening to him speak. For anyone who didn't know, he has a really nice podcast called "Great Leap Years"(2018)[1] you should listen to. Its a podcast about how technology has changed our lives over the years.

[1]https://www.stephenfry.com/greatleapyears/

Great Leap Years is an excellent podcast.

Less technology oriented but also a good listen by him: 7 Deadly Sins.[1]

[1] https://www.stephenfry.com/7deadlysins/

I love Stephen Fry's outlook on technology, as he's an intelligent user of technology, and not a creator of technology. He often looks at things in a way I can't, because you get blinded by the creation of the stuff, and he is an a technology enthusiast, which funnily enough I am not. I am not a gadget person.

My wife got the Harry Potter audiobooks years ago. He narrates them brilliantly.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=r84pbPbBAFY

The Harry Potter audiobook is great, too. Fry has very good, very different voices for even minor characters.

He is also speaking Sherlock Holmes. At some point I will probably give in and simply buy every audiobook with him.

Thanks for sharing! For anyone trying to find it on Apple Podcasts, the show is called "7 Deadly Sins" and "Great Leap Years" is the first season of it.

IMO, his Cambridge Union lecture from last year was even better:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpSIhD7_zz0

Can't understand the appeal of Fry. I had to bail from this talk around 20 minutes in. Even at 1.5x speed, it was tedious.

I've tried his technology talks and he waffles on about generic sleepy things. So why would I make such a critical remark? Because I always see comments specifically praising this man as an intellectual giant we must listen to. The comments under the youtube clip are a good example. He could sneeze and people would say "I could listen to this man sneeze all day, you must listen to his sneezing podcast". No thanks!

What about a podcast called "Ideas to be sneezed at" that has a collection of failed inventions and ideologies, and after an in-depth history lesson on each he sneezes, to signify that indeed was an idea to be sneezed at?

One would that Frye were more Wilde. Or that someone were. Some people have to be heard!

He did play him in a film (1997). And made his acceptance speech for the Harvard humanist award in honor of Wilde too, I think he's a big fan.

I love this guy. On a slightly related note: I'm thinking of starting a newsletter where I send one "public science" video out every other week. This will include speeches and discussions by people like Carl Sagan, Richard Dawkins, Stephen Fry, etc.

Would anybody be interested in this? If yes, you can already send me a quick email and I'll add you to the newsletter when I start it: canolcer@hey.com

I don't know how I stumbled upon them, but I am glad to have gone through his audiobooks Mythos, Heroes, and Troy. Absolute treat to listen to the stories and the narration is just perfect.

I'm reading Mythos right now (in German translation) and… it's tedious. Hundreds of minor God's names within a dozen pages, all the time Fry refers back to some God, nymph or story he told several dozen pages ago, but where exactly?

There is no index at all! Why on earth would the publisher leave that out?

My partner is reading Heroes, and says it's much more like a novel, with a contiguous narrative structure. Maybe I should just skip forward to that one.

I think he mentioned in the foreword that there’s no need to remember all the names.

The important ones are going to recur over and over again. No need to pay much attention to the identity of minor Gods.

Sure, but he's constantly referencing back like "$Deity, as we remember from the earlier event with $X, …", and I simply don't remember.

It isn't absolutely necessary to have that story in mind, but if it were completely irrelevant, he wouldn't call attention to it.

I also feel that the book would work better if Fry, for example, narrated Prometheus' story in one go, instead of diverting to unrelated stories for quite some time, and only then return with no connection to what came in between.

I fully concede that it may simply be a matter of preference.

I've had the great pleasure to attend his reading of Mythos in person at the Sage in Newcastle, and it was every bit just as enjoyable.

(2015)

Added. Thanks!

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