gross OT, bbc news, collider rant

[dave]

Reporting on the large hadron collider at Cern, bbc comrade reporter D. Schukman stood by one of the beam tubes and reached out to grasp the graphics superimposd beams travelling through it. He takes the two shining balls that emerge and smashes them together dramatically. Then, cut to the part about the new Grid computer with its "massive" amount of data processing "thing" - this is the cue for some rap chanter to start up and rhyme-it about something also called the "grid".

BBC - science for children and the unintelligent. Being interesting and presentable is one thing ? ?soap-news? is quite another.

Case 2: The liquid bomb! The bbc get some explosives bloke to blow a hole in a dummy aircraft section to show how dangerous these explosives are. So far so good. Then they play, play and play again the shot of the explosion, each time strategically interjecting verbal comment - like some kind of dramatization. eg "And then", [bang], the entire aircraft [flash], "breaks into millions of pieces" [hole appears in aircraft] "and hundreds of people are [bang again] etc ad nausium.

I'm not being elitist or anything (don't know much about these things myself I admit). But their presentation of just about anything (esp. science and tech.) is, I find, so patronizing and thick. Patrick Moore - ah that's much better.

bbc news: puerile in the extreme.

Footnote: not the bbc, but today I received an advertisement/document from Oxford univ. inviting me to a public lecture about the *hardon* collider. Oh ? the date for this orgy, sorry lecture, was Oct 2009 (meant to be 2008 ? but timewarps and all that)

Thanks for reading - have a nice day.

[Bob Mannix]

Too fussy - it's only popularisation and dramatisation on an entertainment medium, after all!

The thing that annoys me is that "every* time they mention the price of gas, they show someone turning on a cooker ring or a fire, like people might forget what gas was without a moving picture.

Very good!

[sm_jamieson]

I was reading the comments (from the public) on one of the daily mail articles on the LHC. Hysterical. The ignorance people have. Aparently nothing will happen (yep) until in four years time there will be a ray of light from the Indian ocean, and the earth will be eating itself from the inside out. A number of people profess to be terrified when they switch it on, nevermind the colliding will not even happen for a few days, and only be ramped in power later than that. Stephen Hawkings comments about black holes did not help in the terror stakes ! But a girl in india apparently committed suicide since she thought the world would end. I think folks failed to spot the tongue in cheek in the original statements. Simon.

[Another Dave]

It's the old physicist's joke:

Is that a hadron you've got there or are you just pleased to see me?

Another Dave

[Mary Fisher]

...

That's the second reason we don't have a tv - unnecessary pictures are shown just because they can be. Presenters wear brightly coloured or patterned clothes and horrid make-up because we now have colour telly.

Mary

[Rod]

How do you know they didn't before colour telly? :-)

[stuart noble]

Especially the men

[Tim S]

Mary Fisher coughed up some electrons that declared:

I remember the days when they actually apologised when something went wrong. Showed they aspaired to the highest service. Not anymore though.

[Tim S]

Tim S coughed up some electrons that declared:

^^^^^^^^

I apologise for that gratuitous typographical error.

:-O

[The Medway Handyman]

And why, whenever there is a political 'crisis', do they cut to a reporter standing outside 10 Downing St? Nothing happens, nothing will happen, they just ask the reporter daft questions, then cut back to the studio.

[Tim S]

The Medway Handyman coughed up some electrons that declared:

And most of the time, he's probably actually standing in a blue screen studio with library footage of no 10 being superimposed behind him - double mockery.

[Derek]

They did. Otherwise the early B&W camera tubes would render everything as soot & whitewash. (Use colours that is, not patterns)

Derek

[Mary Fisher]

Oh, they still apologise on Radio 4.

If "We're sorry that some of your listeners found some of the contents of the programme ..." an apology. They go on to emphasise that most of the responses they had were positive.

Hmm.

Mary

[Dave Plowman (News)]

It was common where things were under control (like in a studio) to use light blue or yellow instead of white, to reduce the contrast ratio. But of course you couldn't do that for lots of things - cricket, for example. Luckily most cricket outfits are not bright white.

And it still happens today - soaps like The Bill have the white shirts greyed down slightly. The camera/TV set combination still can't cope with the contrast ratio that can exist naturally - and LCD sets make things even worse. However, the image chips used in cameras these days are very much better than tubes which allows gamma alteration within the camera to bring the ratio down to something suitable.

[Dave Plowman (News)]

That's for programme content - not a technical fault. What annoys me is when they say 'some listeners' may have experienced problems when it's obvious all would by the nature of the fault.

[Rod]

When New Labour was launched (or thereabouts) the media kept flapping about the background colour - which was meant to look white but was actually something else, light green?

Would the white shirts on The Bill need to be greyed down if they weren't washed in the soap powders with optical brighteners that paid for so much television?

[Rod]

I stopped believing any such announcements a long, long time ago.

Used to have radio on time switch - early morning medley, "This is BBC Radio 4 broadcasting on long wave, and FM in parts of England" (wording might be slightly adrift). I listened to that many times in Cardiff and 'parts of Scotland'. (Yes - I know, in many cases the actual transmitters might have been in England - but that wasn't what mattered to listeners trying to tune in.)

[Dave Plowman (News)]

Not so - there was one I heard recently. R4 went into what sounded like severe overload - rather like you'd get if you switched in far too much gain in a circuit. First time I heard it I thought something here had gone wrong - but not when it happened again. After I'd heard about 3 or 4 such instances (which only lasted a few minutes) 'they' obviously heard the next one as I did and apologised afterwards. And they said 'some listeners'. But as I discovered later the fault would have effected everyone listing to the network.

[The Natural Philosopher]

affected. Is unusual for a fault to *create* listeners..

[Owain]

But not impossible. Falkirk High station has frequent breakthrough of Radio 4 into the public address system.

Probably the closest some of the inhabitants come to a bit of highbrow.

Owain