The Tower of Babel

Aleks Krotoski introduces the programming language that people probably interact with on a daily basis more than any other. 

Basic is the little language that could. As language of choice for home computing in the 1980s, it became iconic. 

Inefficient, verbose and ugly, yet by the 1990s, 80 per cent of the world's business software was written in Cobol. Aleks Krotoski explores why. 

<p>An ancient people build a tower to touch the heavens. A vengeful god disrupts the project through the splintering of human language. Everyone’s left to pick up the pieces. The Tower of Babel myth resonates out from the Mesopotamian cradle of civilization, but what does it mean ... Show More

The Tower of Babel 

<p>There are 7,000 languages spoken on Earth. What are the costs — and benefits — of our modern-day Tower of Babel?</p><br/> <p>Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See <a href="https://pcm.adswizz.com">pcm.adswizz.com</a> for information about our collection and use of pers ... Show More

<p>The Tower of Babel story is iconic. Featured in the Book of Genesis, it explains how different languages came to be across the world. But what are its origins?</p><br><p>Join Tristan Hughes and Prof. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones in this special episode of The Ancients - recorded live ... Show More

Thousands of languages thrive across the globe, yet modern speech technology -- and all of its benefits -- supports just over a hundred. Computational linguist Kalika Bali dreams of a day when technology acts as a bridge instead of a barrier, working passionately to build new and ... Show More

In Jorge Luis Borges' masterful short story "The Library of Babel," librarians and cultists wander a vast honeycomb library of hexagonal rooms -- rooms that contain not only all books but all possible books, from unwritten masterpieces to tomes of typographical nonsense. In this ... Show More

What is happening to us, now that we have access to all the world’s knowledge at our fingertips? If the headlines are to be believed, we are swimming upstream through relentless waves of alternative facts, drowning in an ocean of misinformation. And the internet? It’s the culprit ... Show More

Offline, we as individuals present different sides of ourselves in different situations. We behave very differently with friends, employers, parents, lovers and strangers. But as Social Media Giants like Facebook and Twitter became ubiquitous, suddenly all those different facets ... Show More