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

[steamshovelmama]

I gave up watching Tv docs quite a while ago. It's such a shame - Horizon used to be the Beebs flagship science programme and now it's frequently embarrassing.

Also... by definition you can't count to infinity because when you reach "infinity" there will always be "infinity" plus one. That's not even that difficult a concept...

Oh dear.

[lil_shepherd]

Also... by definition you can't count to infinity because when you reach "infinity" there will always be "infinity" plus one. That's not even that difficult a concept...

To be fair, that was explained - but, apart from one gentleman who believed (and it has to be just a belief, as there is no experimental evidence either way) that when you eventually reached infinity it would reset to zero - they all talked as if it was possibly to keep on counting forever. Honest. After Destiny has closed his book and Death has put the chairs on the table and turned out the lights, we can still go on counting, heat death of the Universe and everything.

And yes, I know that was simply a way of explaining the concept, but the fact remains that it is still just a concept.

[steamshovelmama]

I suppose, theoretically, in the future it might be possible for an ultra-super-hyper-fast computer to do the counting but I agree with you. Infinity is an idea - one that can do some very useful things, but still an idea.

I have a friend who has been trying to get me to start watching Horizon again. Hde has been telling me that this series is Good (although I think this mostly means there are less acted out bits and fancy graphics...) I shall have to see what he thought of this one.

[lil_shepherd]

Hi.

I do, occasionally, actually complain to the Beeb, when it is something that actually matters. The last time it was an official complaint about references to Goths on Sunday. Quite a lot of us wrote in to protest about the equation of Goths with Nazis, and the idea that a Vatican investigator is an impartial witness about what he referred to as "black magic".

In this case, the posters on the PoV messageboards have already made my points extensively...