By the way, did anybody notice the sequence at GPS headquarters (minutes 24:00 to 27:00), where the air force guy couldn't even name a commercial GPS manufacturer? It is amazing how much indifference there was towards civilian use of GPS, contrasted with the vast commercial usage built upon them providing the service.
It's not really his job to care what the private sector does with GPS. In fact, if some kind of combat ever broke out inside the borders of the USA, civilian GPS would be shut off in a heartbeat.
How is easy - all the GPS satellites belong and are operated by the US air force (see video segment above).
I think the EU is/was trying to get a competing network up there in order not to be so totally dependent on the whim of the US President. I don't know what the status of that is.
I find myself at odds with how I feel about celebrity physicists. On the one hand, I really really enjoy all of the shows that Brian Cox has done, along with Michio Kaku and others from the past like Carl Sagan. Cox is such an engaging speaker, and I have absolutely nothing negative to say about any of them.
On the other hand, way to often the content of these shows is designed towards an assumption of a dumb general audience. I find the incredibly frequent use of flashy graphics to demonstrate ideas glosses over the really interesting truths about the subjects being discussed. That's definitely not to say that the visualizations aren't needed and aren't helpful, but I would love to see more actual data visualizations instead of artists glossy renderings of important and deep topics.
Its just that personally, I want to be mentally challenged. I want to be introduced to new concepts that make me pause and rewind, then pause again to really think about it. 99% of these kinds of shows fail to do that because they don't go deep enough.
The biggest thing is that these kinds of shows are often to generalized, and so they bore the scientifically-inclined minds while having nothing to really grasp the attention and interest of people who don't have normal exposure to scientific concepts.
Broadcast has to reach a massive audience to stand any chance of reaping a return. And there just aren't many topics that _enough_ people want to see deeply explored, to cover the costs of creating 'deeper' programs.
But with broadcast going away, costs plummeting and every niche flourishing online - i think the paucity of 'challenging' material --in any discipline-- will be soon be remedied.
FWIW, this is exactly why the BBC exists. It doesn't have to 'reap a return'. IMHO it's one of the best things the UK has (Along with the NHS).
It exists to make the widest range of high quality programs available, and I think it does a pretty cool job. Obviously some programs will be deeper than others, with different target audiences.
>> "But with broadcast going away"
Really? have some data on that? I remember hearing the same thing 10 years ago.
"Broadcast has to reach a massive audience to stand any chance of reaping a return"
While I sympathise with geuis's complaint, I agree that that this is a limitation of the broadcast format. This is a particular problem with children's (semi-)educational programming - every Blue's Clues episode has to work for the 3 year old that just switched on for the first time, and can't build up so that by 5 the child is still being challenged.
I hope you are right and this is a problem that can be addressed by the move to on-demand services.
It's really frustrating; as science and physics particularly progress, the metaphorical explanations become less and less effective. Intuition isn't enough, and the public isn't willing to accept math into their lives.
During the space race, people were emotionally involved, and it didn't seem like a hardship to understand a moonshot trajectory --- it was a patriotic duty ;)
Now, the math is a thousand times more arcane, and the emotional connection is gone. I think that it could be possible to get a small subset of the science-show public interested in actual understanding, rather than "The quantum world is bizarre/watch this computer graphic that doesn't explain tunneling." But there is no royal road to math, and without math, the intuition is hard to handle.
I think what you're talking about is what Feinman describes as follows:
When you're thinking about something you don't understand, you have a terrible uncomfortable feeling called Confusion. It's a very difficult and unhappy business. And so most of the time, you're rather unhappy, with this Confusion, you can't penetrate this thing. Now the Confusion is because we are all some kinds of apes that are kind of stupid working against this... trying to put the two sticks together to reach the banana, and we can't quite make it yet, the idea. And I get that feeling all the time - that I'm an ape trying to put the two sticks together, so I always feel stupid. Once in awhile, though, the sticks go together on me and I reach the banana. [1]
Everyone is terrified of feeling stupid, of being perceived as stupid. Only the most brave among us have enough courage to admit our collective stupidity and go out and learn something.
well I was just watching it think I heard that and the reflector on the moon was placed by buzz and Armstrong....
so now tat does mean the apollo 11 did land on the moon
:P
