Just been watching the last instalment of a new three part mini-series on BBC2 about stargazing with Professor Brian Cox and Dara O Briain and I'm loving it! It's such a novelty to have a serious (reality based) program of any kind on TV before 9pm (that's not about DIY, ego-crazed chefs or talentless wannabe's) and one focused on science to boot!
The only sun-spot on this otherwise twinkling effort was Jonathan Ross who appeared briefly yesterday to explain how his wife bought him a computerised telescope (£££) and how he hasn't been able to figure out how to use it, Wossy then went on to be shown how trivial it is to stargaze by one of the professional astronomers in the program. Today he answered a few questions (or attempted too) about what he had learned and engaged in a bit of banter with the presenters, at the end of his segment he couldn't resist a little dig about how underwhelmed he was at what he'd seen through his telescope. My take away was that he's as thick as two short planks (to an embarrassing degree), then again, that's probably not any revelation to anyone it's just a shame the BBC couldn't have gotten someone more interesting and enthusiastic to be the token newbe, maybe someone with an O-Level or two?
*the picture shows the International space station (ISS) passing across the sky, a spaceship the size of a five story house 250 miles above our heads, simply awesome. It goes to show what can be achieved when people are inspired to discard their crippling solipsism from time to time.
2 comments:
We watched for about 20 minutes and then reached the conclusion that it was science-lite and didn't exactly tax the mind of anything more advanced than a 12 year-old (and he wasn't particularly interested, having received an Android touch-pad for Xmas). However, it nonetheless is a start in the right direction.
CB, the fact that it was (almost) prime-time was what excited me, I understand and can put up with a little bit of dumbing down for that.
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