Latest NOVA show is good, but flawed

I watched this week's NOVA last night. It was called "Earth From Space". As always, I was mightily irked by the slowness of the show. The narrator says something...and then there's silence while some idiotic graphics are displayed. I assume this is so dimwits can ingest what's been said. I wish I had a filter that would join all the sentences together and skip the filler. Alas.

That aside, it was a good show with one major drawback. I'll get to that. It was largely an advertisement for the usefulness of NASA's satellites, and a plea to fund new satellites. There are 20 NASA satellites operating right now, but they're aging out. Within a decade, there will be less than 10. Allowing these satellites to fail is what insanity looks like. They give us vital information about our planet. Without them, we're blind.

The show did an (almost) bang-up job of explaining how the planet, life, water and air are related and interdependent. Change in one area causes change in the other. This aspect of the show was magnificent. I imagine many viewers learned for the first time about the global conveyor belt, the system of currents that drives the ocean down in Antarctica as heavy water dense with salt, and causes it to course around the planet, moderating temperatures and weather wherever it goes.

However, the show (which is funded in part by David Koch) completely ignored the Arctic end of the gyre, and the threat that melting ice poses for the continued circulation of the ocean current. In other words, they gave half the story -- the feel-good part.

In any case, the show is two hours and much of it was marvelous. See it if you can. It will bring Gaia to mind. Everything is connected in this universe of ours.

NOVA on the Japan quake

After giving a heads-up here about the show being on, I did watch it. Twice, in fact. It was called "Japan's Killer Quake" and it was fascinating. I don't know how they gathered so much information in that short a time -- it was the kind of thing you hope to see many months after a disaster. Yet it was only a couple of weeks after the quake when they made this show. Amazing.

There was quite a bit of new footage of the tsunami striking towns and farms. The power of this tsunami was unimaginable. As one observer said, it's not even water by the time it hits you. It's a moving debris field, carrying houses and cars and boats and entire villages. It's not water you're facing; it's more like a bulldozer coming at you. You can't survive.

For me, there were two highlights in the show. One was the tourist's video of the liquifaction that was occurring all around him. The ground was literally liquifying, and this steady amateur videographer recorded it all, including the ground opening up fissures, and then closing, and opening, etc. I think the guy deserves a reward for being a stalwart person. His camera didn't even shake.

Another highlight was Chris Goldfinger, a marine geologist from Oregon State University, who lived through the quake at a Japanese airport and reported ever so calmly about what it is like to live through five full minutes of the ground shaking. That's a very long quake. This one just wouldn't stop.

They revealed new scientific data on the show, including the surprising fact that the ground literally dropped as much as three feet onshore because of the quake, making the oncoming tidal wave taller in comparison and enabling its passage over the many, towering sea walls Japan had built for just this eventuality. This lowering of the ground paved the way for the enormous destruction that followed.

It was an amazing show and I hope you saw it. Please free to add your own comments. What did you think?

NOVA earthquake show

Annie tells me that although her local listings said there would be a NOVA episode last night on "Japan's Killer Quake", when she tuned in, the show was about birds instead.

I don't know why this happened because in my area the Japan quake show was indeed aired. It was very good, too. It hardly focused on the nuclear repercussions, instead centering on the quake and tsunami. There was quite a bit more footage than we've seen on the news and it made me understand the violence of the quake itself, which never really came across in the news footage. Same with the tsunami. They covered the effect on various villages and you got a good sense of how unstoppable the water was. There was also some, but not that much, coverage of the human devastation. Mostly it focused on the physical aspects of the quake and tsunami. There's only so much you can show in an hour.

If the show wasn't on in your area last night, keep an eye on your listings. It's bound to air soon and you don't want to miss it.

Heads up

I just saw that NOVA tonight at 9 will be about "Japan's Killer Quake". Gotta tune in.

Cartoon science

(Note: on the graphics version of my blog, this post is accompanied by a very silly-looking cartoon image. You can see it here).

I just watched a short video called, "Brian Greene: the Search for Hidden Dimensions". Hit the title to visit the 8 minute video. It's very basic but not bad. That's a screen shot from it on the left.

I love the topic (and Brian Greene too, for that matter) but whenever I watch these things, I'm horrified that they illustrate their points with cartoons. Why do we have to have a typical buffoon cartoon character (look at him) in a discussion of extra dimensions? And this is a video produced by the Richard Dawkins Foundation. 

I don't get it. Same with shows like NOVA on PBS. Why do they show us cartoon images while explaining complicated things? I can see using images that illustrate the point, but why use stereotypical cartoon characters? And by this I mean tripping, stumbling, idiot-type cartoon characters. Yeah, like that guy.

I find these images distracting, disheartening and dumb -- heavy on the dumb. I mean, I know the current public are a bunch of ignorant gits. But must we dumb everything down to reach the slowest of them? This is educational TV. That means relatively intelligent people will be its likeliest audience. So what's with the children's cartoon characters?