"7000 horses are being flown across space..." - Cautionary Questions #2

09/29/23 • 35 min

4 Listeners

Why are board games so popular in Germany? What’s Tim Harford’s top tip for productivity? And where do all those sound effects come from?
Tim is joined by Cautionary Tales’ very own wizard of sound Pascal Wyse, to read your emails and answer your questions.
Do you have a question for Tim? Please email any queries you might have, however big or small, to [email protected].
Please note that some emails in this episode have been edited for length.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Previous Episode

Cautionary Tales Presents: Getting out of Dodge from Revisionist History

The longest running television series of the 20th century was Gunsmoke, a western set in the notorious Dodge City, Kansas. Malcolm sweeps away mountains of legal scholarship to make a bold claim: The simplest explanation for the Supreme’s Court’s puzzling run of gun rights decisions may be that the justices watched too much Gunsmoke when they were growing up. Enjoy this episode from Revisionist History, another Pushkin Industries podcast.

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Next Episode

DOUBLE BILL: A Monkey For Mayor / A Screw Loose At 17,000 Feet

1 Recommendations

This week, we've twice the storytelling fun for you: two Cautionary Tales shorts, previously only available to Pushkin+ subscribers.

A Monkey for Mayor: It was supposed to be a publicity stunt, but when the man who dressed as Hartlepool United’s monkey mascot stood in a mayoral election... he won. Actual politicians predicted disaster - since thousands of workers and millions of dollars were now in the hands of a complete novice.

But H’Angus the Monkey proved to be a more effective leader than anyone had predicted, raising interesting questions about how we select the best people to be our managers and our mayors.

And

A Screw Loose At 17,000 Feet: Can you tell the difference between an A211-7D bolt and an A211-8C? Well, nor could the tired and stressed engineer fitting a cockpit windshield to Flight 5390. The difference is tiny, but the consequences of muddling them up - which played out at 17,000 ft - were dramatic.

Such design flaws are common - and result in far more loose aircraft windows than you would imagine.

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - "7000 horses are being flown across space..." - Cautionary Questions #2

Transcript

Speaker 100:00:15.369

Pushkin. Hello and welcome to our second Cautionary Questions episode. I'm Tim Harford. You are our loyal listeners. You have sent in your questions and we are going to try to provide some answers this episode. I am delighted to be joined by composer, sound designer, representative of you, our listeners, representative of the people, Pascal Wise. Pascal. Hello, Tim. This is very exciting, isn't it. It's it's so exciting because you were with Caut