gross OT, bbc news, collider rant

dave · 2008-09-11T15:06:30+00:00

Reporting on the large hadron collider at Cern, bbc comrade reporterD. Schukman stood by one of the beam tubes and reached out to graspthe graphics superimposd beams travelling through it. He takes the twoshining 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 rapchanter to start up and rhyme-it about something also called the"grid". BBC - science for children and the unintelligent. Being interestingand presentable is one thing ? ?soap-news? is quite another.Case 2: The liquid bomb! The bbc get some explosives bloke to blow ahole in a dummy aircraft section to show how dangerous theseexplosives are. So far so good. Then they play, play and play againthe shot of the explosion, each time strategically interjecting verbalcomment - like some kind of dramatization.eg "And then", [bang], the entire aircraft [flash], "breaks intomillions of pieces" [hole appears in aircraft] "and hundreds of peopleare [bang again] etc ad nausium.I'm not being elitist or anything (don't know much about these thingsmyself I admit). But their presentation of just about anything (esp.science and tech.) is, I find, so patronizing and thick. PatrickMoore - ah that's much better.bbc news: puerile in the extreme.Footnote:not the bbc, but today I received an advertisement/document fromOxford 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.