OT book review

Brideshead Revisited is what you would give an overeager teenage boy at the library when he says he wants an "adult novel."

I haven't read it, why not "Portnoy's Complaint" ?

I recently reread "Double Star" by RAH. It's a wonderful 'Shakespearean' story. And tightly written... in my top ten at the moment.

George H.

I have traumatic childhood memories of expecting "Great Railway Journeys of the World" to be showing on PBS but mixing up the days or something and finding out the made-for-TV version of Brideshead was coming on at 9 pm, instead. Unnnngggh.

If you want to bore any red-blooded American boy to tears give him a story about effete English aristocracy fopping about in their manor-homes.

And a trifle prophetic, in that Reagan was an actor posing as a president - though he did get elected in (more or less) his own right.

Trump is the opposite - somebody who can't actually play the role, despite all the coaching he gets.

--
Bill Sloman, Sydney

Railway Journeys? Never tried it, but I didn't like Sesame Street either. I called BS when it claimed we were running out of clean water.

It's a shame you were too young to watch Danger UXB when it was on Masterpiece Theatre long before Downton Abbey.

In each episode the Germans develop a new fuse and the British figure out how to disarm it.

It was on youtube a couple of years ago. Maybe it's still there.

I can't understand why DA became so popular when so many other things on PBS were ignored by the masses.

Most people are people-people. They care most about social interaction, emotions, loving and hating, tribalism, belonging or not. Like most of the posters here.

A good engineer deliberately puts that stuff aside so he can make proper judgements about things.

DA is mostly about people, and UBX is mostly about bombs.

A lot of red-blooded American boys (including this one) went through a Sherlock Holmes phase as teenagers. Sherlock would have made a good engineer.

I tried to read Brideshead a couple of months ago. Made it about 20% through. Boring. Henry James, ditto.

PG Wodehouse is brilliant.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

Science teaches us to doubt. 

  Claude Bernard

Some of them like most things are available on YT, Railway Journeys was a much more interesting show for 8 year old me that's for sure:

Yeah say what you want about Seasame Street but the 1980s were the Golden Age of educational programming/public television for children I think. No corporate sponsors to please so when the actor who played the kindly old man who ran the Sesame Street Store, "Mr. Hooper" passed away in reality they didn't just write him out or find a replacement, the story is just what is, Mr. Hooper died (often a novel concept to 3 and 4 year olds), and Big Bird or whoever plays the audience-insertion is made to understand by the human characters that sometimes people go away, and they don't come back.

That is to say they refused to insult the intelligence of the audience even though the audience was mostly 4 year olds.

Over on 3-2-1 Contact this was considered age-appropriate material for

8-9 year olds, a time trip 1 billion years into the future:

Again they figured that age group was mature enough for it

Yeah the British royalty and aristocracy and all that seems pretty popular subject among many Americans I can't say I understand it much either.

And there's the type of leftist who lives in a million-dollar spread in San Fran and loves "the classics" so much they put 'em all on their stairs and names their first daughter like Aurelia Skye Emily Dickinson Mackenzie-Worthington or something and the type that tends to roll their eyes at that ah, "lifestyle"

Upstairs Downstairs (the original) was similar to DA but most didn't know it existed. I Claudius was also about people, and was also ignored, so I don't understand why the masses suddenly discovered PBS when DA started.

You weren't a teenager any more when Jeremy Brett played Holmes but I hope you saw that series. The Sherlock Holmes Society in London agreed with me that Brett was the best ever.

I could never have made it to 20%.

I never even discovered him until the Jeeves and Wooster series. That's another example. It should have been more popular that Cheers or Seinfeld.

Maybe they thought the conservative audience would be interested in conservation a common misunderstanding, lol. I expect it's hard to write a show aimed at 4 y/os and conservatives in the third or fourth decade of life and manage to please everyone you know!!

I find the J+W series to be sort of slapstick. The Pig books are great. A Damsel in Distress is maybe the best-written book in the English language. The last chapter is the best, and it's a short phone call.

As a socially-impaired (somewhat austistic, according to my wife) engineer, I like books with strong discriptions of the physical surroundings, things I can visualize. PG was good at that. So was Jane Austen. A Room with a View is good that way.

Nero Wolfe is very Sherlock-y and very visual. We have the cookbook too. The excellent Timothy Bottoms series is on Youtube.

--

John Larkin         Highland Technology, Inc 

Science teaches us to doubt. 

  Claude Bernard

It is a lot of slapstick, but the most witty slapstick ever made. Like the scene where the Brown Shirt bully chases Wooster.

I'll get A Damsel in Distress. I assume it's ok to start with that one.

Speaking of the physical world, I was just reading the wikipedia article on Feynman. He was not exposed to religion as a Jewish kid, but later he visited a Jewish academic society and looked at the Talmud for the first time. He was impressed by the tradition of question and comment, but disappointed that none of the rabbis had any curiosity to ask questions about the physical world. Rabbis must be people persons.

You mean Timothy Hutton. Maury Chaykin was one of those character actors who could out-act any movie star.

Wodehouse tended to tell the same story many times, and he knew it. Damsel is just the best.

Right, Hutton. Another thing that's fun about that series is that they had an acting troupe and people played different roles in different episodes. A guy would be a thug in one and an FBI agent in the next.

Oh, it had Michael Wood. He made In search of the Trojan War. I wouldn't have watched either when I was 8 though.

He made the Trojan War series when it was still not known if it really happened. He started the series not believing it, but changed his mind after seeing the evidence. After that every documentary that mentioned it assumed it was reality, so it seemed as though Wood discovered it or at least was the first to present it as fact.

Mr Hooper was the one who claimed we were running out of clean water, while washing dishes in a basin so he could re-use the water. (Why a store keeper would need to wash dishes in front of his store didn't make sense either.)

I was 5 when I called BS on that. "Don't they know there's a water cycle?" That was the same year my grandfather died too.

Good animation.

I watched Nova since it started in 1973. Two years later a dimwitted teacher suggested that I should watch The Big Blue Marble because she hadn't noticed that I wa beyond kids' science shows.

Nova was college material back then. Now it's high school. I call it Nova Dumbed Down.

In high school Mr Crivelli explained antigens, and it was not only simplified, but flat wrong, with the cause and effect sequence reversed! I didn't want to embarass him so I waited until after class to say, "but I thought antigens work this way..." He said, "you're right but we simplify it for high school." Today's Nova wouldn't offer the complete exposition like they did back then.

Hmm, Yeah I see the same thing. (And why can't someone make nature documentaries as well as David Attenborough? We have beautiful photography but no story. Or worse some made up story.)

Part of it is 'science as entertainment for the masses'. So Sci Am changes from what it was ~1980 and before... to what it is today.

I think there is another part, (of why nova is dumber) that reflects how science is kinda broken. You risk much (as a scientist) if you step outside the excepted dogma of your field. So we on the outside will not hear any controversy... or you have to dig more.

Hey if nova stinks (I still watch it.) Do you know any good science videos/ podcasts?

I offer this, "The roots of evolutionary dentistry"

(~2 hr video.) (I mostly just listen while doing other work.) George H.

Backreaction is OK, though I only look at the transcripts.

To see good popular science writing, nearly anything in SciAm during the Gerard Piel era (post WW2 up do 1989) is applicable. The mag was sold off in the mid-80s and Piel was replaced as publisher in the late '80s. After awhile, the new people started chasing the audience of Omni Magazine. SciAm and Discover squeezed Omni out of business from above and below, but then SciAm became Omni, and now seems to have become Discover. :(

I learned a lot of science and engineering from SciAm back in the day. I own every issue published in my lifetime up to December 1989. I subscribed up to about 1994, but the quality never came back out of the tank, so I pitched the last five years' worth when I cancelled my subscription. A great pity.

Cheers

Phil Hobbs

--
Dr Philip C D Hobbs 
Principal Consultant 
ElectroOptical Innovations LLC / Hobbs ElectroOptics 
Optics, Electro-optics, Photonics, Analog Electronics 
Briarcliff Manor NY 10510 

http://electrooptical.net 
http://hobbs-eo.com

Yeah, More guest postings would be nice. After several years and her book I feel I mostly understand Sabine's physics point of view.

I like triton station by Stacy McGaugh (sp) if you are mond curious*.

The Lex Fridman podcast is good.. but no transcript.

Yeah I have a similar story.. but my subscription started sometime in the mid 70's. And I placed my collection at the curb years ago.

George H.

*I read D. Merrit's MOND book.

I'd give it a B. For me not much new, since I've been reading triton station for years. And a bit tedious in spots. (Various Popperian definitions of science.) What I hadn't realized was that cosmologists had to tweak (factor of 2) the baryon density to get lamda-CDM to fit the CMB anisotropity data. And this has led to the current day 'missing baryons problem' and 'lithium problem'.