Something funny happened to me last night. I was reviewing some television programmes that my system had recorded earlier, by fast-forwarding through them. In particular, I was skimming (I’ll admit) through an episode of a series that I was wondering whether to do a quick blog post about, in order to remind you to watch it. It’s the History Channel’s venture into science programming called “The Universe”, which has been running for some time now. Well, I was zipping through the one about stellar evolution called something like “The Life and Death a Star”…. and someone familiar popped on and off the screen. It was me. Took me a few beats to register full recognition, which was amusing.
I’d forgotten that I was to appear in this episode. Or, better put, I was not aware I would be in this one. I thought the ones I contributed to would air later, like next month or something. I thought there was a separate episode on neutron stars, but I see now that they included it all in an episode about the whole life of a star, which makes sense. (I chatted a bit about the filming of it in an earlier post.)
Anyway, as I was going to say (whether or not I was in it) was that it’s a nice series so far, and so consider having a look at it. If you have not been watching it, I imagine that they’ll repeat it a number of times, so that you can get to see the earlier episodes on such subjects as the Sun, Jupiter, the Solar System, and so forth. It is not just trudging through the usual stuff – They’ve actually gone to some effort to talk to people about lots of the latest things that people have learned about, and incorporated them in various places.
As I’d mentioned some time ago late last year, I’ve been hearing behind the scenes that there’s a lot (relatively speaking) of good new effort to produce some educational science programmes, and this is just one of them. You’ll recall that I reported on the fact that three programme makers were in fact competing to make programmes for a slot on PBS, for example (Wired Science won the competition, by the way. I’ll have more to say on that later.) It’s a very good sign.
-cvj
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Well, me seeing me is not that important. After all, I pretty much knew what I said already…. More important that others get the message of the show, which overall is pretty well made – it gives a sense that the research on many aspects is alive and well, and that it is fun.
There was one thing I was curious to see though… see next post.
-cvj
Good thing you recorded it so you didn’t miss yourself.