Numbers -- Radio Lab

The Episode

Generally:
This is a review of the Radio Lab podcast "Numbers" which I listened to on my drive back home for winter break. Overall it's pretty good--Radio Lab doing what it does best, which is pleasantly tickle your ears while delivering radically simplified science in fairly effective (occasionally poignant) narrative form. This week is four stories/pieces about "Numbers"--something I get the sense Jad and Robert believe is anathema to their listeners. Dig the promo: "Radiolab dedicates this hour to an exploration of numbers. Those pesky little things on the chalkboard. Where do they come from and what do they really do for us?" Ick, math. They keep it simple though--can they do anything but?--and managed to tell me interesting things I didn't already know. There's no big revelation capping the episode, nor do the stories/pieces really add (ha ha) up to anything. But the show managed to keep my attention pretty much the whole way, and only do one thing that pissed me off, so good on them. Onward to the specifics.

Introduction:
So, the job of an intro, as far as I understand it, is twofold: hook the listener's interest, and justify the importance of the topic. In typical Radio Lab fashion, the hook is a purely sonic one, the scratch of old vinyl. Robert's voice enters, telling Jad to listen, and we hear the beginning of the Johnny Cash song "25 Minutes to Go": "Well they're building a gallows outside my cell I've got 25 minutes to go," Cash sings. Jad identifies for the less musically-versed that it's Cash singing the song, and Robert tells us why we should care: because it's "a song about the deep importance of mathematics in your life." Grand. Jad, rather densely (but hey, that's the role he has to play sometimes) disagrees that there's any math in the song, and Robert says something nice to the effect that Cash is calibrating the move towards his own extinction. Jad wonders, somewhat aghast, whether they're going to have to listen to the song all the way down to minute one. They are, and to fill this space they have a rather inane argument, with Jad insisting that he could live without numbers (Jad says he just trusts the clerks behind the counter to make proper change when he buys his m and ms). It's real nice of Jad to be a voice for bored 8th graders in geometry asking "Why do we have to know this?" but it's a little patronizing as a justification for a whole show on numbers. I found myself in the rare spot of finding Robert's stance spot-on, and being annoyed at Jad. Oh well, it's their model, and I guess they have to stick with it. But it would have been nice to hear a slightly more interesting argument about the role of numbers, one, maybe, with some kind of grounding in reason. Anyway, Robert and Jad finish their tiff, the Cash song ends with Johnny swinging at the end of a rope, and Robert tells us this was all made possible "by the disciplined use of numbers". Cue sound effect for emphasis (some kind of low engine-y scraping), cue introductions, show preview, and onto the break. A pretty mediocre intro--well produced as always but short on punch.

Piece 1:
Hey it's a baby! Gurgling sounds from Jad's month-old baby Emile (Emille?) greet us, and Robert asks if Jad thinks his baby "has a numeric sense at all." Jad says no. We hear an insistent "wellllll" from their producer Lulu Miller. As is often the case, it's difficult to know just what "sound-space" we're on. I'm sure Emile/Emille was recorded separately--but are Jad Robert and Lulu in the studio at the same time. I need to know! Damn you RL for distorting my sense of space and time. Anyway, Robert gets us into the meat of the piece by saying how they sent Lulu off to find out where number sense comes from and how soon it arises in a person.

Sounds of baby toys, a "Hello?" The subject is a mathematician named Stanislas Dahen (sp?). It begins with typical RL-style pre-interview noises presented in the context of the reporter (Lulu) giving background to Jad and Robert. It's all very precisely edited to give the effect of casualness. I feel like this is an RL trademark(--ever see Space Ghost: Coast to Coast? It kind of reminds me of that, but replace absurdity with earnestness.) What it does, I think, is keep us grounded in the Jad-and-Robert host space as home base, so to speak, from which we venture out to hear the stories. Unlike a This American Life style piece, in which each piece creates its own world, in RL the host-space usually stays foregrounded. This necessitates a higher degree of management over the audio, but it has the advantage of coddling the listener, who never has to worry that his/her familiar hosts are ever far away. Anyway, the piece, or at least Stanislav, contradicts the "blank-slate" idea that babies are born without any pre-existing concepts in their minds. When Stanislav asserts his disagreement we get an avant-garde-y snippet of plucked violin to draw our attention to the fact that this is AN INTERESTING MOMENT, followed by single bowed note reverbed out into the void and then back to the host-space. After this it's a cute, well-scored, excursion into the logistics of baby-experimentation, sonified pretty interestingly, capped off with the revelation that babies can discern a difference between 8 ducks shown on a screen, and 16 ducks shown on a screen. Sounds effects abound, clips of baby laughter. It's classic RL and it's pretty well done, because in this case it serves to make an interesting point--namely that babies come into this world with an understanding of quantity. After some more explanation, scene-setting, the piece delivers it's payload information, which is that babies understand quantities logarithmically, whereas humans understand quantity in terms of integers. In other words, to a baby, the difference between 1 and 2, is far greater than the difference between 9 and 10, because 2 is twice the size of 1 whereas 10 is only 10/9 greater than 9. And this logarithmic sense of quantity is also present in human cultures that don't have very many numbers (in experiments they consistently say 3 is halfway between 1 and 9...) There's a pretty good sound moment, where Lulu Miller says that, for babies, the distance between 1 and 2 is "huuuuuggeeee" and there's some reverb and some light echo and a little bit of wind--and I feel like it actually reinforced the meaning in a pretty interesting way. This is getting long so I'll wrap up by getting to the end. (I'm glossing over another expert who is introduced, who basically states that, when it comes to numbers, babies don't really know shit past one until they're like 3 years old). Anyway, it all concludes in this pretty effective moment at the end, where Lulu and Jad and Robert sort of simmer in this idea that integer number sense is "artificial" compared to our inherent logarithmic sense, and from there reach the idea that there's something sad in learning numbers, because it means leaving behind something we were born with. Robert, continuing his role of the one with reason on his side, points out all the great things we can do with our acquired number sense, like build rocket ships, and play with "deeply abstract, beautiful thoughts" and Jad and Lulu have to concede. Jad says it's comforting to know that numbers are "made up" and reaches out to the audience of "logarithmic people". A pretty rad number-spouting futuristic chorus of women backed with a hip-hop beat comes in and brings us to the first break.

Wow! That took a really long time. I hope it wasn't boring to read. I'm going to be way more condensed from now on. Promise.

(Dig their transition music)

Piece 2:
Robert promises us that if "we learn to embrace numbers and give them a hug wonderful things can happen." We meet a South African named Mark Nigrini, a business professor. More pre-story casualness. We learn that he's a "number detective." Brief PERSONALITY-REVEALING story about finding stories at the gas pump. Flashback co-told with Mark and Robert about the discovery of Benford's Law, which basically says that across a random distribution of numbers, there will be more 1s, 2s and 3s, than 7s, 8s, and 9s. I don't understand why, but apparently it's true. So, this held my interest for a while, but just when it (my interest) starts to give out, after all this back-story, Jad chimes in to ask "So what?" Thanks Jad. Robert laughs, and gives us the gravy, or the meat, or whatever: Benford's Law can be used to detect accounting fraud. Cue Dragnet music. Pretty exceptionally well-used music throughout this segment. Varied, subtle, thoughtfully-placed. Less on the sound FX-yness worked well in this piece. Soon we meet a Darrel Durrel (?) who uses Benford's law to bust fraud-doers. A few minutes on this aaaannnnddd....not much else going on in this piece. Onward.

Piece 3:
Reporter Ben Calhoun goes to a math conference at CUNY and learns about a special kind of number called the Erdős (not sure what kind of punctuation mark that is) number. Basically it's like 6 degrees of Kevin Bacon but with this mathematician. If you published a paper with Paul Erdős, the most prolific mathemetician ever, your number is 1. If you published a paper with someone who published a paper with him your number is 2. Etc. We get back story on Erdős, his traumatic, mostly dysfunctional life, and his mathematical promiscuity (he would do math with anyone, even if they sucked at it (or, I guess, sucked for a professional mathematician)). History, history, history. Close with "touching" thought about how many lives he touched. Kind of like how when you have sex with one person, you're having sex with everyone that person had sex with. Well, it's like that with Paul Erdős except with math, and I don't think any fluids are involved in that. Anywyay, all in all, there are like 200,000 people with Erdős numbers, blah blah blah, one person making a big contribution. Hopeful post-rock in the background. I feel tears gathering in my upper eye-corners. Onward.

Piece 4:
Catch Jad's groan when Robert reminds us that the topic is "mathematics, mathematics, mathematics"!

So this last segment is a story that doesn't go anywhere! This is the piece that pissed me off. Lots of promise, a good set-up, and...falls flat. The story involves mathematician and friend of the show Steve Strogatz's correspondence with his high school math teacher. The piece is really heavy on nested sound-space, as in Jad and Robert bring their producer Soren Wheeler in, to tell the story of his interview with Strogatz. So, (as with Lulu Miller and Ben Calhoun) we're constantly shifting between layers. I don't know what effect this has on you, but I think my liking it is contingent on a factor I can't yet identify. More thoughts to come in future posts. Anyway, the story as it emerges is that Strogatz develops a friendship with this teacher of his, Strogatz goes off to college and exchanges letters with this teacher that consist almost entirely of math puzzles; at several points, the teacher makes gestures at introducing topics from their real lives into the letters but Strogatz always ignores it, ignoring the death of the teacher's son; finally, after hearing that his teacher has had a stroke, he goes to visit him, where he finally asks him about his son; we go deeper, sound-space-wise, hearing a tape-recording that Strogatz made of the occasion; the teacher touchingly reflects on his son's life; Strogatz and teacher go off to the beach, where they discuss waves and a certain particular problem whose solution relies on something about waves that don't repeat, and Soren says that "to deal with those kinds of waves, you need a different kind of infinity, not the kind where you just keep adding and adding and adding numbers, but the kind that just sits in the space between two numbers" and Strogatz adds "this higher kind of infinity than Don [his teacher] had thought about before". Cue up ambient melody as we reflect on...what? I can't kind figure out how that last image relates to the story, but whatever, Strogatz has a book to sell, called "The Calculus of Friendship." Yawn. Dud. If anyone wants to enlighten me about why "higher kinds of infinity" is anything but a cop-out, half-baked lyricism to end a story with little point (other than a maybe...mathematics was the core of their friendship and in the end they returned to it sense), I would be happy to be enlightened.


So that was "Numbers." Not the strongest RadioLab piece, but definitely somewhere in the middle of the pack. Onward, to the Grip-O-Matic.

The Grip-O-Matic give "Numbers" a....

QUITE OFTEN GRIPPING.

Keep checking back in for more reviews of your favorite podcasts.

Out,
Charlie