"Where you decide to put your time and attention says a lot about who you are." 2007

That's what Merlin Mann said in a great recent lecture at Google which he's kindly made available as part of his Inbox Zero series of posts.

So I was thinking about that, as well as the good practical email management advice from his talk, and I realized that one thing I really care about is science. But I have not been investing a proportional amount of my time into science compared to my interest in it.

I thought "Where do I have room in my day to fit in some science without pushing out something else that also matters to me or which I choose to make important in order to pay my bills and have some sort of career?"

Hello, commute!

And hello again, cute pink 4gb iPod which was a present from my friends Edmond & Shannon a few years back when they shared my place while escrow on their place cleared. I'd been neglecting it and only remembering about it when I was on the bus next to some incredibly banal and annoying conversation - usually one side of a cellphone conversation at that.

I'm now subscribing to a whopping 10 new podcasts in addition to the lovely 60-Second Science which I had already been enjoying on my laptop. And boy do I listen to them! Somehow even though my brain is sick of email and articles by the end of the workday (or in anticipation of it), listening to even fairly complex discourse is thoroughly enjoyable.

I've signed up for
- NOVA scienceNOW
- Ockham's Razor (the August 5th piece on Abolishing Weapons of Terror was very good)
- Point of Inquiry
- Science @ NASA Feature Stories
- Science & the City (from which I particularly enjoyed last Friday's episode with Alan Walker on The Search for "The Missing Link", a really top-notch ramble through physical anthropology. Highly recommended!)
- Science Friday
- Science Talk: The Podcast of Scientific American (and now I will out myself as a new huge admirer of Steve Mirsky's writing/delivery, both when he's seriously sharing knowledge and when he's barely restraining his sarcasm on, for example, people who play the lottery & their understanding of probability </fangirl>)
- Science Times
- Science Update Podcast weekly edition
and
- This Week In Science

You can get all these, as well as Merlin Manns 43 Folders podcast and They Might Be Giants podcast (my other subscriptions) most easily through iTunes, but you can also download them from some website somewhere, no doubt. Google is your friend in need for that.

What do you love? Go fit a little more of it into your otherwise idle moments and get reconnected.

And if you love science too, and have recommendations for more good podcasts, please share them in the comments.

Yum! Science!