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Here’s a list of the top 5 podcasts that I am listening to now.

5- Phedippidations. An excellent podcast about running. It offers plenty of good advice and inspiration.
4- Skeptoid. This podcast offers a skeptical view of a lot of common phenomena.
3- Common Sense. Dan Carlin produces this political podcast. He is not divisive like most talk radio hosts and he has an independent view sometimes liberal sometimes conservative.
2- Listen to the Lancet. This weekly podcast is the podcast of the Lancet journal of medicine. Each episode focuses on some new interesting areas of research. The podcasts often include interviews with the researchers themselves.
1- The Thomas Jefferson Hour. The performer Clay Jenkins portrays Thomas Jefferson and answers questions, in interview form, on a variety of topics.

Los Angeles is an interesting city because you can go there and see familiar faces everywhere you go. The city has so many actors, musicians and other people seen in media that you always recognize someone. Most of the time it may be someone very random, like say the right hand man of a tertiary villain from Babylon 5, but it is unusual compared to any other city I have visited.

I have often heard it lamented that as children become adults they lose their curiosity of the world around them. The blame is usually laid at feet of the parents or education system who tell the kids to “Be quiet and stop asking questions!” But I wonder if there is another explanation. What if curiosity is instinctual but only lasts long enough for a child to learn the basics of survival. Young children are very curious and are constantly asking questions. Besides the attention this garners them it also seems to have a useful evolutionary purpose. Children are dumb and if they do not quickly learn survival skills then they will not last long. So it makes sense that young children would have a strong desire to learn. But once the basics are known there is less reason to keep being curious. It could even be problematic, it could be better to spend time getting things done instead of trying to understand the world. Perhaps, the scientists of the world are just a bunch of mutants, who by some accident never had their sense of curiosity hit puberty.