The last episode - and a great way to go out. By taking the ultimate trip on the Z-axis and exploring the sea. We fuss so much about exploring outer space and going to Mars when a whole other planet exists just beyond the beach. Olive Heffernan has been researching the ocean for most of her life. She has written a brilliant book - the high seas about the wonder of life there, and what threatens it. Because guess what, humans are Never Not At It. And that's it then for The Function Room for the time being. I'll be back. I just need some help! In the meantime, A Few Scoops, the podcast I do with Aoife Moore is 6 episodes in and going strong. (after only 5 weeks, It would have taken me 5 weeks to write the intro to one function room episode before :). Thanks to all of you for listening and the lovely messages.
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52 This Number Could Save Your Life One Day with Lewis Dartnell
The penultimate episode before an offical hiatus. (the last year was just me hiding and ghosting) .This is a cracker though. Lewis Dartnell author of The Knowledge - which tells how you rebuild a civilisation from scratch, talks about the key numbers that keep us alive.
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51 Great xPectations with Paul McDonald.
This week I do some basic drills, some shuttling runs on the massive world of statistics in sport. Former accountant Paul McDonald has many hats, but he is now a sports stat specialist, company founder and originator of the expected transfer values algorithm, trying to bring some sense back to crazy world and numbers of football transfers fees.He talks me through xG – the expected goals phenomenon that you may have heard thown around, expected Threat and expected Transfer Value.Along the way we discuss players as different as Juan Riquelme and Denis Irwin and whether stats will kill football.
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50 Talking Ballots with Adrian Kavanagh
This week I’m joined by another returnee to the function Room, a lecturer at the Maynooth University Department of Geography and we’re talking about voting systems and the numbers they generate. We catch an STV, - single transferrable vote, FPTP -first past the post and the second chance of the French system.We find out why Eurovision is a giant democratic experiment and ultimately why a vote in Ireland goes on an adventure.
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49 The Hole Shebang - Black Holes with Dr John Regan
This week in the function room, the hole shebang. A bit about Black Holes with Dr John Regan. Royal Society - SFI University Research Fellow in the Department of Theoretical Physics. we caefully scrape the surface of the topic of black holes without hopefully getting sucked in and destroyed by the weight of the topic. John tells me how he got into black holes why he can't really get out, how Einstein nearly got it wrong and then got it right with a little help from his friends, what the LIGO saw, what it's like as a black hole expert to look at the first photo and is there a black hole in the room with us right now? There's the usual whiteboard nosing and of course I ask about time travel.
A podcast about the big numbers, the hard sums, the mathematics that defines, runs, shapes, changes, begins, ends, every things our lives and the world around us. Hosted by Colm O'Regan. An award-winning radio broadcaster, comedian, novelist and it turns out lapsed engineer who is trying to feel useful again. Each episode sheds light on a tiny corner of a giant subject with entertaining guests and accessible talk.
Ireland