Documentary Stupid

[lil_shepherd]

Yesterday at 8pm the BBC showed what purported to be a programme in the Natural World series on The Wild Places of Essex (I am not going to link to it in iPlayer for reasons that shall become clear.) It was a personal view by someone called Robert MacFarlane (who has just written a book) and it was, to be frank, absolute crap. It ought to have

Comments

[aunty_marion]

I 'WTF?'ed rather a lot at that Natural World thing. Still, I got a lot of knitting done while it was wittering on in the background. (I'd hoped for better, but it ... didn't.)

And the Horizon was also somewhat crap. Who thought that Steven Berkoff with an echo voice on all his 'pronouncements' was a good idea? Got another three rows done during that, too.

The answer is '42' anyway. As we all know.

[aunty_marion]

Oh, and Happy Birthday as well!

[lil_shepherd]

Thank you.

[mevennen]

Happy Birthday!

What a shame, because MacFarlane's book WILD PLACES was really excellent.

[lil_shepherd]

I must admit that after that pseudo-poetic known-nothing performance (full of near-lies about the Essex environment) I wouldn't trust a word he either spoke or wrote

Oh, and much thanks for the birthday wishes. Sorry if I sounded snappy, but this was one of the most boring and inaccurate natural history documentaries it has been my misfortune to see. He plainly knew almost nothing about the formation of the Essex landscape or about the hard work being done by a dozen organisations to encourage wildlife in Essex. There were only three creatures that I have not personally observed! It seemed to me that it was another of those occasions where if you knew nothing about the subject it might pass, but if you did, it was very, very annoying.

[bellinghwoman]

I may be wrong, but I have the feeling that Horizon's slide into dumbing-down began as soon as the BBC started making the programmes in conjunction with the Discovery Channel.

[lil_shepherd]

Possibly, but it must have been at least twenty years ago, which was when they started prattling on about the Gaia theory, Cold Fusion, and that chap who believed oil was formed by meteorites hitting the Earth. There were a lot of people who claimed, "They laughed at Galileo," which is my personal test for "this person is a looney."

[starcat_jewel]

At this point, "They also laughed at the cold-fusion guys" is a fairly withering comeback for that nonsense. But they had to have their 15 minutes of fame first.

[lil_shepherd]

The thing is - they didn't laugh at Galileo. They took him all too seriously, partly because they actually knew he was right.

[purplecthulhu]

Actually infinity has quite a number of useful non-philosophical uses in mathematics, and there is a very clear distinction between aleph-0, the so-called countable infinity which can eb equated with the number of integers, and higher infinities like aleph-1. Cantor's diagonal proof shows clearly that you can have a number larger than the number of integers.

So no, this is not just a philosophical concept.

[lil_shepherd]

Well, I would argue that both numbers (unless allied with a physical object) and infinity are abstract concepts, and that theoretical, as opposed to applied, mathematics is itself a philosophical concept and not a scientific one.

You can have as large a number as you like, but it is still an abstract concept and not a physical fact. Until you have an infinity of atoms or bananas it remains a concept, and, I would argue, a philosophical rather than a scientific one. Furthermore, until you can design an experiment that proves infinity exists, it cannot be a scientific concept. Rather like the supernatural and god(s), in fact.

[purplecthulhu]

You don't need a physical object for something mathematical to be more than abstract. Issues of different infinities come up in algorithmic complexity theory about when (and if) computational tasks finish. All encryption systems are based on these results. So the fact that I can't crack your bank's passwords and steal all your money is reliant on the nature of infinity.

And does the square root of -1 exist? It's used throughout physics, electronics, signal processing etc. but other than giving it a symbol, i you can't touch it.

[lil_shepherd]

And does the square root of -1 exist?

Who knows? I would say not, except as the aforementioned abstract concept. This all comes down to the philosophical question as to whether something that cannot be detected but is thought about actually exists. Furthermore, things do not have to actually exist to be of use.

For instance, anger exists only as a behaviour pattern resulting from a flow of hormones and as a human mental concept - an emotion. It can, however, be of great use within human societies...