Watchification » science

Blood & Guts: Into The Brain

Steve Bowbrick — Sat, 23 Aug 2008 17:08:55 +0000

Part one of a very promising-looking history of surgery that seems to share only its name with Roy Porter’s excellent short history of medicine, published in 2002. Lots of excellent close-up brain surgery…

Freeman Dyson: Let’s look for life in the outer solar system

Steve Bowbrick — Fri, 25 Jul 2008 23:16:17 +0000

Why didn’t I think of this before? At TED.com they’ve got hours of really good ‘long-form’ telly—brainy people explaining their passions, mainly, but also some passionate people explaining their brains. Here’s a favourite: Freeman Dyson talking about the obligation on humans to look for life in the outer solar system. Freeman, you had me at ‘let’s’.

Richard Feynman: The Pleasure of Finding Things Out

Steve Bowbrick — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 22:17:21 +0000

Here he is: Feynman. Sooner or later he was going to show up wasn’t he? Here’s a famous Horizon about the legendary physicist/communicator from 1981, the year I did my A-levels. Why didn’t anyone show me this video at school? Why did his name never even come up? Did I choose the wrong school? The wrong subjects? (I chose Technical Drawing and English, by the way, so I guess that might explain it).

Anyway, about half way through this programme Feynman talks about the difference between scientists who know things and people who write about stuff but know nothing and I realise, with some pain, that I’m in that second group. Bugger.

Warning: the picture quality will have you banging on the top of your computer and leaning out the window to twiddle the aerial. Careful you don’t fall out…

Horizon: What on Earth is Wrong with Gravity?

Steve Bowbrick — Mon, 07 Apr 2008 22:08:45 +0000

I’ve been trawling the BBC channels at YouTube for stuff to put up at Watchification but it’s a pretty unsatisfying experience. As far as I can tell there are just clips from shows you’ve already seen (or would like to have seen) and trailers. Nothing special, nothing made for the platform (somebody will correct me if I’ve got that wrong).

I find myself feeling slightly resentful that I can get clips from excellent, licence-fee funded programming but not the shows themselves. The whole thing feels provisional and half-baked. I genuinely wonder what’s stopping the nation’s broadcaster from making the shows we pay for available to us (and to Johnny Foreigner for that matter) indefinitely.

I’m a big admirer of the scope and ambition of the corporation’s digital effort but it’s hard to read this as anything other than a failure of will somewhere up in the executive suite. And with Kangaroo’s commercial offer and 30-day catchup (whatever that is) just over the horizon things are unlikely to get much simpler any time soon.

Anyway, in the meantime, here’s a nice four-minute clip from a January Horizon about gravity that I missed.

Update: it’s worse. It looks you can’t even embed this stuff (”embedding disabled by request”, it says) so you’ll have to nip over there to watch this one.

The Sky At Night

russell — Tue, 04 Mar 2008 12:09:31 +0000

I can imagine Watchification turning into a bit of a BBC4 niche, so it’s with great pleasure that we present a programme from that home of the mainstream – BBC 1. Though admittedly it’s The Sky At Night, a monthly programme that struggles to get on before midnight. What a lovely piece of telly though, and, despite all the CG gubbins, the most effective bits are still with two astronomers in Patrick Moore’s garden explaining orbits with the aided of painted footballs. This edition discusses British plans to head to the moon, slightly late, in the same way, we didn’t bother with the World Cup for the first few years. It’s also worth noting that there’s a ton of interesting stuff and archive here.