Nerds Having Fun! (#5)

Contact Information

Music Director: Sybil Augustine – musicdirector@wortfm.org (for music submissions, charts and tracking, promotional exchanges for music events and following up on volunteer applications or other requests. Please include specifics in your subject line, such as “Hiphop Music Submission” etc, )

Music Assistant: Aaron Scholz – musicass@wortfm.org (for record donations and sales, promos recording volunteers, etc.)

Music Calendars: Submit your events online here or send by email to calendar@wortfm.org

How do I get my music played on WORT?

We accept submissions in most genres and styles of music, focusing on noncommercial, out-of-the-mainstream, independent releases (check out our playlists and music charts for more information.) It may take up to a few weeks for us to review and process your submission so we appreciate your patience, and feel free to contact us to follow up. Please send your music, indicating any tracks with language that needs to be aired after 10 pm and including a one-sheet description and any biographical and tour information, to WORT Music Director, 118 S. Bedford St, Madison, WI 53703 and/or to musicdirector@wortfm.org.

We do accept digital files on .wav or mp3, but currently we still prefer CDs to digital submissions because it’s the quickest way to get it into the hands of our programmers and onto the airwaves, though we have a growing digital library. Digital submissions should be .wav or other lossless files, or high quality mp3s [128-320 kbps.]

You can follow up or “track” your submissions by email, or call 608-256-2001 on Wednesdays between 1-4 pm CST to ask if we received it, has it been reviewed, has it been added to our library, and what kind of airplay it’s getting—e.g. light, medium, heavy or charting. Thanks and we look forward to hearing your music!

WORT Music Playlists

What was that song I heard? Who was the artist, what is the album title, where can I get it? Where can I find the entire playlist for a show?

Click on the Playlists button to bring up a calendar where you can choose any date to find the playlists for that day. If you can’t find the right playlist or the song you’re looking for, your best bet is to call the station the next time that program’s on and ask the host yourself. If that’s not possible we may be able to help you, but please have as much information as possible at hand when you contact us, such as: approximate day and time the music was played, what type or genre of music it was, who hosted the show and any other information you remember about the selection and we’ll do our best to track it down.

Once you figure it out, there’s a “Buy It!” link next to each track in online playlists that leads you to a place where you can buy songs and albums, and by doing it that way a small portion of each purchase goes to support WORT.

Some of us Perpetual Notion Machine nerds like to have fun reporting and commenting on recent science stories in the news. But tonight’s episode, discussing the recent Ebola outbreak in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, isn’t much fun. PNM’ers Josh Mitchell, Ary Clarke, and Kelly Schwartz, along with PNM engineer Kevin Lauterjung, describe the outbreak, but also discuss some other dangerous diseases like Lyme disease, Zika, and the 1918 Spanish flu, which killed around 10 million people worldwide. This Ebola outbreak is rather tame by comparison, with about 3,000 cases and over half in deaths. And this is still less than the Ebola outbreak in West Africa about 5 years ago. But the World Health Organization (WHO) is concerned enough to issue a PLEIC or a Public Health Emergency of International Concern. The PNM team discuss the microbiology of Ebola, how it’s transmitted, and why it’s so lethal.

Also discussed is the fact that an Ebola vaccine has been developed for use, even though, at least in the U.S., it has not been approved by the FDA. But despite its potential, there have been social ramifications and obstacles from widespread delivery.

For more information, check out this webpage from the CDC and this one from the WHO.

On November 5, 2015, the Perpetual Notion Machine talked with UW-Madison epidemiologist Tony Goldberg about what the next deadly pandemic would look like. Here’s the audio of that show: