Connections
1978 · TV series · documentary · 3 seasons
Created by James Burke
Taking an interdisciplinary approach to the history of science and invention, Connections explores an "Alternative View of Change" that rejects the conventional linear and teleological view of historical progress. To demonstrate this view, Burke begins each episode with a particular event or innovation in the past (usually ancient or medieval) and traces a path from that event through a series of connections to a fundamental and essential aspect of the modern world.
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This article starts off well enough and covers some things I had been thinking about myself: exploring the many-dimensional space of an LLM. But then I think it veers into good old human hallucination (buzz-words disconnected from realities).
It even mentions my favorite show "Connections," but gets it wrong: it wasn't showing obscure or unlikely ideas, it was highlighting under-appreciated historical paths of developmnent. The one I remember (and have seen repeated on youtube since) was how the lathe boot-strapped the industrial revolution, crude ones at first helping to build more accurate replacements for themselves.
I want to give the author some credit for exploring some of the new possibilities that the LLM constructs offer. But the second half just veers into unreal territory. Typically, the author takes the words "latent space" and divorces them from their actual meaning to just make up stuff.
"Retro latents": nobody except historians will want to revisit the uncanny valley.
"simulate all possible latent spaces": that's just n-dimentional random matrices, for n trending to infinity, computationally infeasible. "computationally sweep through the space of all possible latent spaces, in a sense mapping the nature of latent space itself": no for the same reason. A "latent space" is only significant because it is based on a reality. It makes no sense to us to make a random "latent space" and ask what reality that corresponds to.
"create simulations of various propositions by moving through the latent space": there was already a documentary about this, it was called "The Matrix."
"Latent spaces contain all parallel worlds": if properly constructed and queried, it seems they would really only contain our reality. A parallel world would be a different "latent space" (ie big matrix) with different values.
The "Personal latent space" does make me think there might finally be a way to "download" our brains into silicon, but you'd really have to train it with google glasses running 24/7 from birth, and nobody wants that. Plus, it would be a security nightmare: unless you could carefully guard all access in an air-gapped container only you control (a bit like your brain in your body), you could be duplicated and your virtual duplicate could drain your bank accounts, be easily blackmailed, steal your IP, etc.
That was one of the secondary points of James Burke's Connections documentary (the primary being the "technology trap"). Scientific discovery begets more scientific discoveries in unpredictable ways because of connections between STEM fields in an ever accelerating chain reaction.
Wow, I messed up there!
You were talking about Connections. I watched The Day The Universe Changed.
Just realized my mistake now, and watched Connections episode 1.
Yeah, totally about technology traps.
Saw this show connections on Stremio, sounded interesting and put it on. This scene caught my attention ;p
From: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0818341/?ref_=ttep_ep_1
Connections is one of the greatest shows in television. The pilot episode is amazing, highlighting the problem with dependence on technology that we don't understand.
"Never have so many people understood so little about so much."
Even more true today.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
Where can I watch Connections show? What's the best place? Any episode recommendations?
James Burke is a great man. I have a personal policy that when I write a white each paragraph has a "layperson's" explanation beneath it, which was inspired by the first and the last episode of his BBC show Connections
Agree with your comments on Connections 1.
Better still, like a well-written essay, there is closure to the series. All the ends left about in the preceding episodes are drawn together neatly in the final one.
Agreed that Connections 2 and (especially) 3 were pale shadows of the original series.
However the related The Day the Universe Changed, which took a slightly different conceit (the episodes aren't necessarily linear in time) and focus (science and philosophy rather than technology), is excellent, and I'd put it right next to the original Connections series.
(There is, it turns out, a fourth season of Connections, "Connections 4", released in 2023 on Curiosity Stream according to Wikipedia. I've net seen any of it. It consists of only 6 episodes. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series)#Series_4_(2023)>.
I think if you watch Connections 2 & Connections 3 (and even Start Trek: The Next Generation) then you can see the progression that all documentaries went by the 1980s. "Story" used to be more important, but then "eye candy" became far more important.
Connections was so influential that my university (Purdue) introduced a 3 semester series of courses on the history of technology.
The "Trigger Effect" episode ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcOb3Dilzjc ) that set off Connections:I was one of the finest hours ever produced for television. It influenced my family and I in the years to come. Hope for the best, while preparing for the worst.
It begins at South Tower of the World Trade Center, and as Burke enters an express elevator (Car 6 or 7 if you must know) he says in effect, "Do I worry about ascending to the top in a steel box? Of course I don't! We take going up in the world like that for granted." When the elevator goes dark he says. "We expect this to happen sometimes so what do we do? We strike a light and look around in the dark for an emergency button to push and is we find one, we press it." In this discussion of single takes, note what the temperature of the butane lighter must have been by the time he finishes his speech. Ouch!
Also interesting to note in the realm of happenstance: the airliner portrayed in trouble over darkened New York was flight 911.
The very first episode of Connections walks through might happen in New York City if power went out and never came back on. Pretty much an apocalyptic scenario for people living there!
He didn’t shy away from talking about technology for good or ill, for the ways it liberates us but can also trap us, for the ways it makes new sources of energy possible, and new weapons.
I first saw Connections in the late 2000s... the final scene of the last episode, "inside the British Airways computer" (an entire floor of a large building), had me standing on my couch pointing at the screen.
A year or two before I was born, James Burke wandered between mainframes and reel-to-reel tape machines, speaking with extraordinary prescience about data, communications, decision-making systems, and power:
"This is the future. Because if you tell a computer everything you know about something, it will juggle the mix, and come up with a prediction. Do this, and you'll get that. And if you have information and a computer, you too can look into the future. And that is power. Commercial power, political power, power to change things."
I'm going to watch that scene again, because it's even more important 20 years further along: smart phones, "big data", large language models, Palantir...
If you look at the start of that episode, there is another crazy thing in there, a device which allows you to "see" the bits on a credit card track.
Apparently something called "magnetic viewing film" can allow you to see the bits on the magnetic stripes of credit cards.
I had never heard about this before.
Link to video time: https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections/S01/S01E08+-+Eat%2C+Drink+and+Be+Merry.mkv?start=176.1
James Burke is one of Earth's treasures. Connections is the best docuseries I have ever seen.
> "I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology)..."
Good grief, no. The basic thesis of Connections 1 was that humanity has become fatally dependent on technology (the "technology trap" he speaks of), that that dependence continues getting deeper and deeper, and it's hard to predict what technologies will emerge or where technology will take us, possibly utopia but just as likely a living hell, and finally that we don't even have the option to stop digging ourselves deeper and deeper into the technology trap because technological advancement can't be stopped because its emergence is unpredictable. Re-watch just the first and last episodes and they will terrify you.
Connections 2 and 3 were indeed scattershot because people liked Burke's charming mannerisms and didn't want to think about the ever more complex and ever more fragile panoply of technologies that individuals, even the technologists themselves, can neither understand nor control that is all that stands between humanity and its extinction.
Thanks for the link.
This clip is Season 1 Episode 8 "Eat Drink and Be Merry" and the shot starts at 48:17:
https://archive.org/download/bbc-connections-1978/Connections/S01/S01E08%20-%20Eat%2C%20Drink%20and%20Be%20Merry.mp4
I personally feel like _The Day The Universe Changed_ (his second documentary) is better. I love Connections but the basic thesis (there are hidden connections between disparate developments in science and technology) ends up pretty scattershot, spreading out like Brownian Motion. _tDtUC_ is much more focused. Largely based on Kuhn's _Structure of Scientific Revolutions_ for individual stories, it traces how the understanding of time in Europe changed from the middle ages to the 1980's- the idea of time as a marker of descent from a previous golden age (1), or at best a repeating cycle, evolves into our modern conception of time as endlessly improving into a better future. And the supporting book was amazing too.
I also want to speak up for the BBC history documentary team that worked with Michael Wood: _In Search of the Trojan War_, _In Search of the Dark Ages_, _The Story of England_, _The Story of India_ they were also a staple of American PBS and informed my understanding of the world.
1: My go to example for this is imagine you walk into the Pantheon in 1000 AD: no one on your entire continent has known how to build a dome like that in 500 years, and won't again for another 500 years. The fundamental way you understand the world has to be completely different from the "newer is better" baseline that we have understood the world by for the past 150 years.
The full series is on Archive:
https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections/
It still holds up for the most part, though of course some of the takes, being almost 50 years old, may seem a bit quaint. It's certainly worth watching the first series at least start to finish. Burke is an interesting guy.
Or a Carl Sagan fan:
> If you wish to make an apple pie from scratch, you must first invent the universe.
From episode 9 of his Cosmos TV series.
https://kottke.org/23/11/if-you-wish-to-make-an-apple-pie-from-scratch-you-must-first-invent-the-universe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmos:_A_Personal_Voyage
There were a number of "history of technology & invention" TV series, all inspired by Connections.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series)#
Education, real education, can be made entertaining. Mythbusters and Connections (I believe it was called) both qualify. As do some historic documentaries.
I based that on seeing the BBC Science TV series (and books) Connections by science historian James Burke. If it's been updated since, then I stand corrected. Regardless of the specific example, my point was that sometimes modern standards are linked to long-outdated historical precedents for no currently relevant reason.
I believe Robert Hooke is mentioned in James Burke’s Connections, a fantastic program that just got a new season on Curiosity Stream; I haven’t seen the new episodes yet but I have thoroughly enjoyed everything else Burke has ever done, so I expect the new series to be great also.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series)
The episodes Faith in Numbers (1978 original series, S01E04[0]) and Thunder in the Skies (S01E06)[1] feature Robert Hooke from what I can tell from a little searching, though it’s been a while since I saw the series, so I apologize if I’m wrong on that point, though the entire series is worth watching all the same.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6yL0_sDnX0
[1] https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978/Connections/S01/S01E06+-+Thunder+in+the+Skies.mkv
This was the framing behind James Burke's Connections if I recall, a wonderful documentary series.
James Burke's Connections (companion to his 1978 television series of the same name) does this in fair part, though it tracks a number of distinct (and somewhat idiosyncratic) paths through time.
<https://openlibrary.org/search?isbn=9780333248270>
There's Joseph Needham's Science and Civilisation in China though that's not exactly a coffee-table book. It's staggering in its own way, however:
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_China>
First episode of Connections is great to watch on blackouts and technological dependence https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
I'm reminded of the old Connections tv series where huge breakthroughs are often a result of tons of abject failures that later, and unpredictably, come together.
There was an episode of the Connections reboot (can’t remember which one) that mentioned this.
https://curiositystream.com/connections/index.html
They say two points but it was really three. The ammoniac mixture at 0F, water freezing at 32F and body temperature at 96F.
Also Celsius, for whatever reason, originally put boiling at 0 and freezing at 100. Maybe Sweden is just that cold.
Jame's Burke's "Connections" series covered this in series 3 episode 10. Here's that clip:
https://youtu.be/w4ujTt0gDx8?si=XUV9J3srYdaBwqwm&t=1227
I feel like concepts like "this has to a have an economic impact" really limits what discoveries can be made and adds some blinders ...
I'm not opposed to some concept of that, but what feeds science is OTHER science, often not even directly obvious how the impact plays out.
I'm thinking of the old Connections TV show where huge advances are lead by tons of experiments and failures. You don't get the big advancement without the other failures / attempts and more general science.
Similar to the article, you have to fund ALL that science, if you're going to get some applicable output. Not just "do the last step first". We didn't go to the moon JSUT because we decided sometime in the mid 20th century to do so...
I can highly recommend the old James Burke's Connections TV series where he traces ideas/inventions through history, highlighting the random meetings and developments that led to modern technology.
You may want to go back almost fifty years to 1978 and a British science miniseries.
Just the first ten minutes will make the point, but the object displayed during minute five speaks to your point…and the fact that the quirks are largely invisible.
What he says about modern existence is even more true today,
Whole show, free to watch.
https://archive.org/details/ConnectionsByJamesBurke/Connections/Season+1/Connections+S01E01+-+The+Trigger+Effect.mp4
Also from Burke, The Day the Universe Changed. He also has a recent new Connections miniseries.
There's an old BBC TV series called Connections that explores how technological progress happened. I think you can find most/all episodes on YouTube now.
I had the same question about touchstone from the same episode. I am becoming a Burke-ite after digging up the mention of 'The Trigger Effect' episode of the 70's 'Connections' from an HN Crowdstrike thread and am now binge-watching the entire first series. Amazing stuff.
I'd recently read 'The Ascent of Money', Ferguson, and was thinking there's more to be understood than what I found there. I've got 'Debt: The First 5000 Years', Graeber, in my queue, but am looking for other resources. Any ideas?
If you want a more in depth view about this series of events, I suggest https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6yL0_sDnX0 which is an episode of the amazing documentary, Connections. (The show also has one of the best timed shots in history: https://youtu.be/cCJh5D0FCZk?t=119)
What a coinkidink, I just finished watching episode 2 of "Connections" with James Burke which mentions this in the beginning of the episode, when talking about the invention of currency. The article from Egypt Today doesn't seem to mention the discovery of touchstone (which the episode does), which seemed like an important detail of "why gold?".
Seems it's available on the Internet Archive too: https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e02
This might be a good time for folks to go back and watch the first episode of James Burke's Connections: The Trigger Effect
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcOb3Dilzjc
Interconnected systems can fail spectacularly in unforeseen ways. Strange that something so obvious is so often dismissed or overlooked.
Oh, the foresight of the 1st episode of Connections. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
Reusing the surveillance film and fax technology for a lunar mission makes this story feel like something out of an episode of James Burke's Connections.
There’s definitely not a lot to like, but there is a lot to appreciate.
If you want a somewhat toned down version, the first episode of James Burke’s Connections describes some of the same concepts and themes in the context of the NYC blackout of 1965, and is only somewhat less disturbing, but is easily the most upsetting episode of the otherwise charming educational program.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
https://archive.org/details/ConnectionsByJamesBurke
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Northeast_blackout_of_1965
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series)
Threads, mentioned elsewhere, is a good cure for hoping to survive a major nuclear exchange.
The first (IIRC) episode of Burke’s Connections is also pretty good for this. The exploration of how dependent we are on electricity and petroleum fuel, and how fast things would get very, very bad if the power simply went off and didn’t come back on, even for folks we think of as being pretty self-sufficient like farmers (“suppose they do have great-grandfather’s plow buried somewhere in the barn, and escaped a dozen other ways things could already have gone lethally wrong within the first year—do they have oxen? Draft horses? No, almost nobody has those anymore” or words to that effect). A largish nuclear exchange would turn the power off and it’d be off for a while. On top of all the direct damage from the bombs.
(The broader point of that episode is that this is basically what we’ve always done: develop new technology, then use it to increase our population such that most of us would die if that tech vanished, starting with the plow, then irrigation, et c; by the mid 20th century we’d reached that point with electricity and petroleum products)
You might enjoy the tv show Connections.
Sometimes “useless” facts, theories and discoveries become useful. Like say Boolean algebra.
Absurd isn't really the word I would use. I think it's more of a naive/common misconception about how science advances. People tend to think of a single genius making breakthroughs when in fact a lot of ideas were building on prior work and in collaboration with others; essentially the ideas eventually have their time, and you get a sense that the specific people who discovered them, while impressive, are a bit of a historical detail rather than an essential ingredient. To me, the biggest example would be evolution - Darwin was famous for it, but you will find others speculating about it before him, and famously he sat on his work and only published it once Alfred Russel Wallace was about to independently publish his discovery of the same phenomena
"Connections" by James Burke is a wonderful documentary that first helped me to really understand this.
For those that remember the James Burke show "Connections", he also did a program called "After the Warming" that's staged like a documentary that takes place in the future after humanity has solved the global warming crisis.
In that show, policy makers use a computer simulation of the world to quantify the limits that they set on emissions, and all of the nations in the world come together to make it happen and look back on this age as an important lesson.
I believe there's a low-res VHS rip of it available somewhere if you search, which gives the whole thing an eerie feeling of discovering an alternate-reality documentary.
Hard to find the entire 10 episodes but here's the first 4 of James Burke's Connections, a look at how various discoveries, scientific achievements and world events are tied together. Pretty awesome stuff.
https://youtube.com/playlist?list=PLw7aVsjFLyMmkEqHami9AHGmc3x3-s3xa&feature=shared
Lewis Mumford's Books;
- Technics & Civilization
- The Culture of Cities
- The Story of Utopias
Lewis Mumford talks about technology, but from an anthropological pint of view.
Another book I would recommend is The Nature of Technology by Brian Arthur
The other I would recommend is James Burk's Connections he's has some books but I but the documentary is highly recommended.
What would be bad about that? His Connections documentary was great. And apparently rebooted last year: https://curiositystream.com/video/6468
Someone here recently linked Connections episodes available on the Internet Archive and it's been great to watch episodes.
https://archive.org/details/bbc-connections-1978
Some lesser known (and some well known) scientists of the industrial age are profiled by the wonderful TV show "Local Heroes": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Local_Heroes_(British_TV_series)
Great show if you can find it. Another show, Connections, is much more popular, and traces the family tree of various inventions. Again, highly recommended!
As Flexner was recounting to Eastman the many contributors to Marconi's unification of threads that led to radio, I was reminded of the recurring theme of James Burke's great TV series 'Connections' in recognizing the multitude of contributors who are so often overlooked as we grandly laud a masterwork as a solitary act of 'genius'.
I was watching James Burke's coverage of the Apollo missions from the 60s and 70s, and came across this very enjoyable clip of him in a reduced gravity aircraft.
James Burke was a reporter for the BBC who also hosted a science history TV series called "Connections". His "Greatest Shot In Television" [1] clip was recently on the top page of HN, which rekindled my interest in his work.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2WoDQBhJCVQ
That reminds me to go back and watch some old episodes of Connections by James Burke. He does a great job of showing the unpredictable and non-linear path of progress. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_TV_series)
The first episode of the new "Connections" w James Burke has a cool look at one of these proto-museums.
Shout-out to the recent reboot of Connections (1987), Connections with James Burke [0], for threading cabinets of curiosities through museums and finally ending with the internet in episode 3, "In the Net".
[0]: https://curiositystream.com/title/series/787
According to IMDB [1] 'Connections' was produced 'in association with' Time Life Films so probably some sort of clearance would be required from them ?
FWIW Time Life were involved in a number of distribution arrangements with the BBC, there's some details here [2].
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078588/companycredits/
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Time_Life_Television#Television_syndication_and_co-production
I mean the whole BBC (nevermind ITV) archive, not Connections specifically which I've never heard of before now.
If they just put up everything they already made they could charge more than Netflix IMO. Instead, god knows why, it's a limited selection that too from which some missing episodes due to the usual 'woke' rewriting of history & present (racist or whatever-ist people exist right, so what's the problem with a show having such a character? Doesn't mean it's right, nor that the show itself is that-ist).
Burke even mentions that in the Ars interview:
> Television is entirely different. I remember walking around the world with a film crew, sometimes 15 people, and pointing at a bush and saying, "What am I doing here?" That's very time-consuming and expensive, and we no longer need that kind of thing. This time, there's no money. [...] Nobody went anywhere, so we didn't get up and catch planes all the time. And nothing got in the way of the story except me. All I did was stand and talk. Because of the structure, the nature of the production style, the story can move more densely and more quickly than ever before.
I don't know if I agree with him that it's a good thing. One of the things I loved about the original Connections was the experiential aspect of it. James Burke in front of a green screen is just James Burke in front of a green screen.
That brings back some very fond memories. Connections was a seminal TV show that was interesting, funny, and intelligent. As a newly minted electrical engineer, I loved learning the obscure history of things I used daily. Until Carl Sagan created Cosmos, there had been nothing like it nor has anything been like it since.
While I enjoyed rewatching the latter half of episode 2 of season 1 of James Burke's Connections tv series, I don't see how the invention of the cloud chamber (which you start the video at) is relevant to standards for rail, horses, or rockets. What's the connection ?
The Day the Universe Changed (also by Burke) was also exceptionally good.
Similar premise, but focusing more on philosophy and understanding, and not tracking linearly through time.
There were another two Connections mini-series, though they were IMO not up to the mark of the first. Good, but not truly excellent.
Huh, just a week ago, I was searching the seas for a copy of Q.E.D. A Guide to Armageddon which was Mick Jackson's earlier directorial attempt to capture the sheer insanity and horror of nuclear war.
It seems to me that modern television is very watered down compared to what was shown in the 1970s/80s.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0085630/?ref_=nm_flmg_eps_tt_2
Edit: After some random clicking around on IMDB, I've just found out that Mick Jackson also directed the amazing Connections series (starring James Burke).
1. The Imagineers of War by Sharon Weinberger
2. The Nature of Technology by Brian Arthur
3. (Not a book but documentary) Connections by James Burk
4. Books by James Burk [0]
[0]: https://www.thriftbooks.com/a/james--burke/215445/
I know what you mean! One of the things I loved about the TV show “Connections” was how it followed one thread to get you from some seemingly random starting point to whatever the final thing was. It would be interesting to see some of these threads plotted together.
The other thing that makes this tricky is that any given event or phenomenon may not happen everywhere all at once. Just think of the popularity of a pop song, for example. It might have started in New York, and spread westward as more radio stations started playing it. Then it kind of died out in New York just around the time it was picking up steam in LA, or whatever. When you read about these things they often make it sound like one day someone played the song on the radio and then it was on every radio in the country simultaneously for the next 10 weeks before falling off the charts. But of course, that’s not how it actually happens. So it can definitely be hard to contextualize some of this stuff. And getting an accurate picture can be hard because we may not have all the details.
I enjoy Adam Curtis films the way I used to enjoy Jame Burke's Connections: As impressionistic history, entertaining art, montages of feelings, ideas and suspicions. They are daydreams and hallucinations of the past that offer explanations where there are none, not to be taken seriously but as a way of mulling things over. For our consideration. Like Bill Hicks said, life is a ride. Curtis films make that clear, fun and sometimes enjoyable, sometimes frightening. Many people think art is supposed to mean something, but that's not the case.
Fwiw - I’m not sure it’s wise to ground one’s moral philosophy from mass murderers. The invisible hand in economics seems both more causal to technology’s advancement and less dubious.
Also there’s a fantastic BBC docuseries called “Connections” by James Burke that makes the case that nothing in tech could have happened sooner or later than it did, and that each progression was an inevitable next step from the previous. It has interesting implications.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NcOb3Dilzjc
Connections, episode 1, "The Trigger Effect".
TL;DW shit gets very, very dicey in a matter of days if the power goes out—and most of our ways of recovering with any speed rely on power so if it goes out for most or all of the world at once, that's extremely bad.
If it hit the wrong time of year, I could easily see a global power outage killing millions in the very first day. Loss of air conditioning and heating could push it into the millions all on their own.
The first episode of Connections—"The Trigger Effect"—plus times I've read here and other places that the destruction of a lot of critical power infrastructure in a big chunk of just the US could leave power off for weeks before replacements can be procured, even with the whole rest of the world functioning fine, make me... pessimistic that we'll do very well, in such a situation.
No clue what sort of plans major governments have for it. Hopefully they have some. We're incredibly dependent on electricity—the point of that Connections episode was largely that human history is a series of events in which we take on some critical new technology, it permits a huge boom in productivity/population/whatever, and from then on, we're flat-out dependent on it to avoid disaster—and that, now (for 1978 values of "now"), electricity has become one of those things that we have to have or most of us will die.
I remember watching one of the final episodes of Connections 3: With James Burke, and he casually said we'd have personal assistants that we could talk to (in our PDAs). That was 1997 and I knew enough about computers to think he was being overly optimistic about the speed of progress. Not in our lifetimes. Guess I was wrong!
Useful electricity was not born suddenly into a world that had never heard of electricity. People had been playing with electrical toys and scientific equipment for generations before advances made industrial electricity possible. Electricity may have earned any number of different cultural reputations for its associations with aristocrats, magicians and quacks.
Just yesterday I rewatched James Burke’s Connections, episode 3, Distant Voices, which vividly illustrates some of the ways people tried using electricity.
I was fine with literature, but yeah, history, what a snooze-fest. Why do I care who fought what war 1,500 years ago and who won? It seemed like it mostly came down to a bunch of pompous elites having dick-measuring contests a lot of the time.
Then one day the teacher didn’t want to teach and instead showed an episode of Connections, and I was blown away. Learning about how and why our science and technology became what it is was something I could related to and seemed actually useful. I still don’t care for military history, though.
> This entire treatment is motivated by the urge to make money from it.
Nearly all our high standard of living came from people motivated to make a buck.
See James Burke's "Connections" (both the TV series and the book)
I learned it from the Connections episode "Eat, Drink, and Be Merry", at https://archive.org/details/ConnectionsByJamesBurke/Connections/Season+1/Connections+S01E08+-+Eat%2C+Drink+and+Be+Merry.mp4
That segment starts at 16:57 (after development of the Swiss pike, changes in military tactics, mass mobilization in France, leading to the need to feed large mobile armies.)
This being Burke, it's not until 20:40 that it gets to setting up the competition and Appert.
At 24:10 is the transition to talking about tin cans. After discussing a machine to make paper, at 26:06 it leads into the chain of events that resulted in (at 27:49) that French book being translated into English, patented in England, and started (at 28:17) making preserved canned foods - because they were better at metal than bottles.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steel_and_tin_cans says the idea was conceived by Philippe de Girard, who got the British merchant Peter Durand to patent the idea in 1810.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Can_opener adds "the first can openers were not patented until 1855 in England and 1858 in the United States."
I recall visiting the museum many years ago and seeing a demo where they heated a glass rod and pulled a fiber. This was probably when fiber optics was in its infancy. It was definitely a highlight for a young science nerd. I would love to go back some day.
Along those lines I highly recommend the episode of the show “How we Got to Now” about glass [0]. It tells the story of how clear glass was developed, something I always took for granted, but early glass was not clear and took a major effort to create. The show then goes into how Corning took it to a new level for fiber optics. The whole series is excellent and similar to James Burke’s excellent series “Connections”. [1]
[0] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt4160136/
[1] https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078588/
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ&list=PLf02uWXhaGRng_YzH-Ser_VEV4lGSLX_1
^^^ Thank you! ^^^ Came here to reccommend Connections by James Burke and glad to see someone else has mentioned it. It's a masterpiece of popular science production made better with the grainy film patina of the 70s and 80s.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
The British documentary series Connections (three series, one in 1978 and the others in the 1990s) do an amazing job of showing all the strange and different paths that led to our modern world.
if you enjoyed this comment, you may also enjoy the The Trigger Effect episode from James Burke's Connections series.
https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e01
You might be interested in James Burke's TV Show Connections!
Which does this sort of thing for like 8 episodes. Go and learn why you can't have cars without swamp gasses!
Who remembers the World of Warcraft oriented Thottbot web site, and how it pivoted to farming and selling gold, and who was involved, and what they're doing now? It's a fascinating, lurid, and twisted story, worthy of its own Connections episode by James Burke.
https://wowpedia.fandom.com/wiki/Thottbot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thottbot
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_documentary)
WOW is extensible in Lua, and there are lots of cool, even sophisticated extensions, including Auctioneer, which analyzed and remembered histories of items and prices on the auction house, and helped you make lots of money selling items in the game.
https://www.curseforge.com/wow/addons/auctioneer
The Thottbot web site was an enormously useful catalog of ALL WoW items (and monster drops, weapon stats, monster spawn locations, and character profile data), which was gathered by the Thottbot WoW plugin written in Lua, that monitored network messages and kept a journal of every object a player encountered, then uploaded them to the Thottbot web site.
Thottbot was originally created by Bill "Aftathott" Dyess and run by Wowhead, but then was bought by a company named ZAM (for Alakazam).
https://www.wow-pro.com/wowhead-sells-to-zam-ige-for-over-1-million/
Then ZAM was bought be a slimy gold farming company called IGE, whose parent company was RPG Holdings, and they incorporated it into their gold farming and selling empire.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IGE
Through a dramatic saga of infighting and scams and scandals and lawsuits, ex-child-actor-who-turned-into-a-banana then underage-sexual-abuse-scandal-triggered-dot-com-scam-video-streaming-company-ipo-meltdown-involved and now Trump-boot-licking-crypto-bro-new-age-burning-man-whack-job and failed-presidential-candidate Brock Pierce spun the company out into Affinity Media.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brock_Pierce
Brock Pierce worked with none other than Steve Bannon at Affinity Media, farming and selling virtual gold online. That was where Steve Bannon discovered and started fanning the toxic hateful easily manipulated sexually frustrated incel culture that he exploited and replicated to launch GamerGate and the Alt Right MAGA whack-jobs, which led to electing Trump, which led to the insurrection on January 6, 2021.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Bannon#Entertainment_and_media
https://twitter.com/davetroy/status/1354727245449990145
>1/ Hey guys, remember that time Steve Bannon ran an army of game virtual currency miners in Asia, for sale to westerners at discount prices, arbitraging attention for profit? That was awesome...
John Oliver did a hilarious story about Bitcoin featuring Brock Pierce:
Cryptocurrencies: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg
Here's Brock Pierce spouting cryptocurrency bullshit:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=1182s
And here is Brock Pierce as a child turning into a banana:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g6iDZspbRMg&t=1220s
John Oliver recommended "Just google Brock Pierce Scandal, that's all I'm saying there."
https://www.google.com/search?q=brock+pierce+scandal
Brock Pierce was deeply and notoriously involved with the DEN sexual abuse scandal.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Entertainment_Network
Before he worked with Steve Bannon, now-convicted sex offender Marc Collins-Rector was Brock Pierce's original partner in crime at DEN (which been called "the poster child for dot-com excesses"), and when DEN's IPO collapsed when the child enticement indictments were leveled, they both fled their LA party mansion and went on the lam together, then got arrested by Interpol in their party mansion in Marbella, Spain.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marc_Collins-Rector
Fucked Company made a hilarious documentary all about DEN in the format of a South Park style swf file, which was eventually uploaded to youtube, but has since been taken down. But I saved a copy of the swf file, although I don't know how to view it now. (Anybody know how to convert it? VLC is supposed to play it, but it's not working for me, just playing audio...):
https://donhopkins.com/home/movies/FuckedCompany_DigitalEntertainmentNetwork.swf
>Dot Com Boom & Bust - Digital Entertainment Network
>A parody of the founders of Digital Entertainment Network. DEN was "a quintessential example of the excesses and lack of control of the dot-com craze."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fucked_Company
Here are some stories about Steve Bannon's involvement with Brock Pierce and virtual gold farming:
Trump Campaign CEO Once Worked for a World of Warcraft Marketplace
https://www.motherjones.com/politics/2016/09/stephen-bannon-world-warcraft-gold-farming-donald-trump/
>Stephen Bannon brought quite the varied résumé to his new gig as CEO of Donald Trump’s presidential campaign. At various points, Bannon has worked as an investment banker, earned money off Seinfeld royalties, overseen a biosphere, directed films, and run an alt-right news site. But one of the stranger blips on his career path came in the mid-aughts, when Bannon joined and eventually ran a company that made its name and fortune as an online marketplace to sell virtual gold to World of Warcraft players and other online gamers.
Trump's Campaign CEO's Little Known World of Warcraft Career
https://www.wired.com/2016/09/trumps-campaign-ceos-little-known-world-warcraft-career/
>BEFORE HE BECAME CEO of the Donald Trump campaign, and before he took over the alt-right media outlet Breitbart, Steve Bannon made his living selling virtual gold on the Internet.
The Decline and Fall of an Ultra Rich Online Gaming Empire
https://www.wired.com/2008/11/ff-ige/
Brock Pierce was appointed as a board member to the Bitcoin Foundation, and several people resigned over his links to sex abuse:
https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/05/some-in-bitcoin-group-resign-over-new-board-members-link-to-sex-abuse/
And here is a photo of Brock Pierce at Trump's inauguration proudly wearing a red "Make Bitcoin Great Again" cap.
https://www.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=10155736654012782&set=a.112810102781.118888.749357781&type=3&theater
https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2022/01/13/crypto-puerto-rico/
>‘Crypto colonizers’ in Puerto Rico try to sell locals on the dream. A new wave of wealthy investors is moving to the island. Locals are greeting them with excitement — and suspicion.
There is a documentary called "An Open Secret" all about all the underage sexual abuse, cocaine, guns, threats, extortion, and all kinds of other shit that went down at DEN, which showed interviews with the people involved, including lots of evidence like videos and photos and printouts of emails from Brock Pierce and others proving what happened, but apparently Brock Pierce or other alleged Hollywood child abusers who didn't like what the documentary said sued to take it down and suppress it, so it's not on youtube any more.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/An_Open_Secret
SAG-AFTRA Threatened To Sue Director Amy Berg Over ‘An Open Secret’
https://deadline.com/2015/06/sag-aftra-threatening-sue-an-open-secret-director-amy-berg-1201438339/
I found the PG-13 version here:
AN OPEN SECRET. Official PG-13 version. Copyright Esponda Productions LLC #AnOpenSecret
https://vimeo.com/142444429
>In light of the long awaited revelations of sexual abuse in Hollywood finally being reported ESPONDA PRODUCTIONS presents AN OPEN SECRET for free for a limited time . A film about the sexual abuse of children in the entertainment industry in Hollywood. Please support our efforts of raising awareness by sharing with your friends and colleagues. #AnOpenSecret #BeCourageous #ReportIt #LifeGetsBetter. Follow us on Twitter and Facebook @AnOpenSecret.
No, this isn't just a bunch of Q-Anon Pizzagate bullshit. It it all went down and was well documented a long long time before Q-Anon. Although it may have inspired some of those conspiracy theories via psychological projection.
But Brock Pierce's deep involvement with the Alt-Right, MAGA whack jobs like Steve Bannon, and Bitcoin bros, as well as his latest hypocritical presidential campaign to end human trafficking (and the fact that he also attended the Mindshift conference that Jeffrey Epstein supported, after he had already been convicted of soliciting prostitution from a minor), just goes to show how much that Q-Anon Alt-Right MAGA bullshit is all just about psychological projection and hypocrisy.
https://www.thedailybeast.com/meet-brock-pierce-the-presidential-candidate-with-ties-to-two-pedophiles-who-wants-to-end-human-trafficking
>Meet Brock Pierce, the Presidential Candidate With Ties to Pedophiles Who Wants to End Human Trafficking
>In the trailer for First Kid, the forgettable 1996 comedy about a Secret Service agent assigned to protect the president’s son, the title character, played by a teenage Brock Pierce, describes himself as “definitely the most powerful kid in the universe.” Now, the former child star is running to be the most powerful man in the world, as an Independent candidate for President of the United States.
>Before First Kid, the Minnesota-born actor secured roles in a series of PG-rated comedies, playing a young Emilio Estevez in The Mighty Ducks, before graduating to smaller parts in movies like Problem Child 3: Junior in Love. When his screen time shrunk, Pierce retired from acting for a real executive role: co-founding the video production start-up Digital Entertainment Network (DEN) alongside businessman Marc Collins-Rector. At age 17, Pierce served as its vice president, taking in a base salary of $250,000.
>DEN became “the poster child for dot-com excesses,” raising more than $60 million in seed investments and plotting a $75 million IPO. But it turned into a shorthand for something else when, in October of 1999, the three co-founders suddenly resigned. That month, a New Jersey man filed a lawsuit alleging Collins-Rector had molested him for three years beginning when he was 13 years old. The following summer, three former DEN employees filed a sexual-abuse lawsuit against Pierce, Collins-Rector, and their third co-founder, Chad Shackley. The plaintiffs later dropped their case against Pierce (he made a payment of $21,600 to one of their lawyers) and Shackley. But after a federal grand jury indicted Collins-Rector on criminal charges in 2000, the DEN founders left the country. When Interpol arrested them in 2002, they said they had confiscated “guns, machetes, and child pornography” from the trio’s beach villa in Spain.
>While abroad, Pierce had pivoted to a new venture: Internet Gaming Entertainment, which sold virtual accessories in multiplayer online role-playing games to those desperate to pay, as one Wired reporter put it, “as much as $1,800 for an eight-piece suit of Skyshatter chain mail” rather than earn it in the games themselves. In 2005, a 25-year-old Pierce hired then-Goldman Sachs banker Steve Bannon—just before he would co-found Breitbart News. Two years later, after a World of Warcraft player sued the company for “diminishing” the fun of the game, Steve Bannon replaced Pierce as CEO.
The lesson: Be careful who you buy virtual gold and Bitcoin from, and never trust MAGA Bitcoin Bros!
Your comment reminds me of the excellent series "Connections" by James Burke. The opening episode in the series asks that exact question.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ&list=PLf02uWXhaGRng_YzH-Ser_VEV4lGSLX_1
I agree that the late 19th to mid 20th century time period sounds amazing. I'd recommend "Connections" by James Burke as a truly well written and produced documentary that shows some of the accidental discoveries and connections that led to scientific progress.
That said, the majority of my life has been in the 21st century and so far I can't recommend it. You're pretty big on life expectancy, but that's actually down in the US and was trending down even before the pandemic. If you look at Robert Sapolsky's work into primate societies and neuroendocrinology, he'll tell you that inequality is one of the biggest stressors of primate tribes, and the implications for humans are obvious. Yet inequality grows ever greater while many of our elite try ever harder to create a morality in which this is acceptable.
I'd look also at children. We just don't have as many of them as we once did. There was a baby bust during the late 30's till the end of WWII that set up for the famous Baby Boom. It seems like we get the bust as though everyone fears the world might end (I'm told it seemed like a real possibility in the 40's), but now for distributed reasons that are economic and ecological. You may say that is just media scare-mongering (I agree their business models reward it dis-proportionately), but real lived experience says otherwise. How many economic disasters do you think a Millenial need live through before they fear the next one? How many years grinding away at a crappy job while education, housing, and healthcare all grow ever more expensive compared to your pay (which by the way might get shipped overseas next quarter)? How many record setting days of heat do I have to endure before I feel like something isn't right?
And if you want more data, look up the wealth and health of Millenials, Gen Xers, and Boomers at any given age - you'll see a continual slide downhill.
And all of that might even be OK - every generation faces its challenges, but when you experience them your entire adult life, and then you get gaslighted and told that the problems don't even exist (presumably in order to justify the ongoing inequality) then you might start to lose hope. You might start to see them doing some strange things. Look at mental health issues amongst Gen Z - another place where the data isn't going to look so rosy. Look at the rise in crime, or the ultimate expression of nihilistic anger - the mass-murder suicide by the young (male) zealot.
Sure you can blame the media, but that just seems like another lazy excuse or attempt to hide the real problems of modern life.
That's where I really love James Burke's "Connections" TV series, it somewhat dispels this idea by showing just how interconnected discoveries and inventions were even in a far earlier age. One invention makes a new way of making money possible, this new way of making money comes with entirely new challenges and the capital to solve them. Unsurprisingly people naturally align themselves to solve these problems and capture some of that capital.
The idea of the "lone inventor" is a lovely one.. but I submit that they have not been the majority of force behind much of the invention our world now enjoys. Humanity itself is an iterative process.
James Burke's Connections episode 9: Countdown [1], covers the invention of limelight, gives a history of the technology and places it in context. The entire series is intertwined (thus the title, Connections), but if you start watching Ep. 9 at 18:30 it gives plenty of preamble for the need for the invention before introducing it and covering its adoption.
[1] https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e09
Ever seen Threads (1984) though? Or for something less outright depressing, perhaps the first few episodes of James Burke's Connections?
Both make it clear that should something cataclysmic befall us all we'd be faced with the near-impossible problem of restarting agriculture. Modern, surplus-generating, agriculture isn't possible without modern society, starting with the basics like fuel and fertilizers (and everything else that's connected: the rule of law, supply chains, logistics, PhD-level domain knowledge and expertise, and so on). Those who survive "the event" would be forced into a life of sustenance farming for generations - and while you might think some semblance of modern civilization could be reestablished within a few years, consider that if everyone is sustenance farming for themselves, that leaves almost no-one left to do the actual reconstruction work, and that includes rebuilding fertilizer plants, fuel refineries, oil extraction, and agricultural machinery production.
Without anything close to today's industrialization and automation being restored within a few years (hint: very unlikely) it only gets worse: our modern society depends on an educated workforce. Under a "everyone sustenance farms for themselves"-scenario that means there's no-one to sufficiently educate the tens of millions of school and university-age people, assuming those kids aren't press-ganged into farming for their local district before they can even read or write, so with that outlook what hope is there to rebuild and operate oil refineries from scratch?
And "rebuild from scratch" is the word. While Russia might no-longer have enough strategic warheads to completely obliterate the northern hemisphere (at least for now), I'd bet a week's worth of my future postwar turnip ration that Russia has all of North America's oil refineries and related infrastructure marked as primary-targets, such is total war - so in the aftermath it definitely wouldn't be as simple as reconnecting some broken pipework and wiring-up a generator: the entire gulf-coast's set of oil refineries would be obliterated.
So, yes, you're not wrong: we will all band together, but I'll add that we'll band-together for a world of suck for 10-20 years before we mostly succumb to then-untreatable cancers, and our offspring will grow up as illiterate and uneducated serfs.
I must say, relocating to Chile or New Zealand is looking very attractive right now...
The series was produced and directed by Mick Jackson of the BBC Science and Features Department, according to Wikipedia. (So that might be the answer to your BBC question.)
But I've never heard anyone question its accuracy. (Over many years, for what that's worth.) Acknowledging my biases, I watched that show when I was young, and I'd really loved it.
There's no other show like it. The New York Times reports "It took more than two years to make, was filmed at 150 locations in 22 countries and cost 51.5 million."
https://www.nytimes.com/1979/10/21/archives/pbss-connections-the-many-sides-of-technology-a-review.html
If you ever watch the documentary "Connections" by James Burke, you get the impression basically all inventions are caused by the circumstances where two realms of science meet up in a new way to solve a problem, and that the people involved are a detail of passing importance.
The Secret Life of Machines - Tim Hunkin - TV Series, now on the web
Connections - James Burke
The Origins of Precision - Machine Thought - Youtube
MacGyver - 1980s TV show
James Burke covers this in Connections, season one I believe.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(British_documentary)
> Do you really think windmills were fundamentally restricted by a lack of technology in the 50s/60s/70s? And that aggressive early solar investment wouldn't have produced what we have now back in the 1980s? Or that battery chemistry wouldn't have been substantially advanced with aggressive funding?
To a certain extent, yes. Control electronics and especially HVDC use in offshore turbines, where all the economies of scale are happening, were not as advanced as they are now.
No. Solar technology is based on semiconductor technology to a certain extent, and we weren't as far long as we are now in that.
Funding is no guarantee of discovery in research. Yes you can throw more money at the problem to have more people looking at things, but there's an element of creativity in deciding which pathways to go down for experimentation. Discovery is also often (usually?) random and serendipitous: see James Burkes' television series Connections.
In material science and chemistry there is a finite number of paths, because of the finite number of elements involved, but it's still a grind to go through, and people may prioritize/try the wrong ones initially.
More research is more better, but there needs to be a societal base that is fertile for the change in question. Once that base is there, there is often the same/similar discovery popping up from multiple places 'spontaneously':
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiple_discovery
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_multiple_discoveries
> Oil has owned our military, political, and industrial landscape.
Oil has not: cheap, convenient energy has. This is because cheap, convenient energy allowed us to get beyond mere sustenance living and industrialize and mechanize work. Oil just happens to be that for the last century or so (after surpassing coal in the Industrial Revolution which kicked things off). Would you have us completely stop modern society?
> Our "defense department" has force projected all over the globe to enable access to oil, we've fought wars at the behest of oil companies […]
The US has been running the globe well before oil companies were a major influence. The US went after Mexico and Texas before oil was discovered there. There was no oil in Cuba or the Philippines.
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Manifest_destiny
Thanks for the summary. I think it's a bizarre position to be in yet recall around 2018 there were a numerous people waxing post-scarcity optimism, such as James Burke (of the tv series Connections): https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b09jvfc4 .
I personally liked the series Connections that showed off that many of these guys did not live in a vacuum. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0078588
Basically mostly everything is fairly incremental but every once and awhile you get someone who connects 3 or 4 different fields together and something really cool happens. If you work by yourself you will become odd and stale. Bouncing ideas off others helps weed out junk and maybe even help you get a better understanding of what is going on. Or they may ask a question you did not think of and woosh you found something even more cool.
I had an idea a few days ago that most ML seems to be mostly curve fitting (except when it isnt). But what if you could turn that network back into a formula instead of a set of nodes with weights and particular follow rules. Those sets of formulas could yield some interesting ideas, I think, if you could compare them. Like there may be a set of formulas that are just hiding there but are smeared across 1000 nodes. Not even sure where to begin on that. But an interesting idea none the less. One of the smart ones could see the idea and also figure out where to start and tease out the idea until it is done.
On a related note, there is an episode of Connections that ties the width of the early railcar's wheelbase to pretty much all subsequent forms of transportation, ending with modern space exploration capability. Pretty awesome to observe the actual reach of decisions made long ago.
I think ultimately what you want is some measure of say it's practicality / viability to really make change?
I think the catch is that if you really knew that... you'd be out making an insane amount of money as you'd be able to pick and choose winners / make them work ;)
I'm reminded of the old TV series "Connections" where lots of individual innovations are cobbled together over surprisingly long periods of time to really have an impact. Mostly... it seemed like a combo of inspiration and happenstance when someone strung them together.
Only if you walk away from the experience thinking about it, processing it, perhaps thinking differently yourself.
Few television shows did that for me — "Connections" is a HN favorite and changed my way of thinking.
Several books by Kurt Vonnegut (and Dune as well, FWIW) also changed how I think about the world.
Content is important is my point.
Either Connections or Cosmos even specifically explored Newcomen's engine and the pumping out of mines. (I don't recall if the need for copper-clad ships preceded it though.)
Edit: Yes, "Connections", episode 6, "Thunder In The Skies", about 22 minutes in: https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e06
Stories like this, about how random, independent events tie together to create our sense of 'progress', always remind me of James Burke's Connections:
* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
See for example how the Jacquard loom (i.e., punchcard 'programming') came about in episode four, "Faith in Numbers":
* https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itd-4lMoXgI
The search for artificial quinine to treat malaria led to the development of artificial dyes, with the first colour being mauve (a 'pale purple'). A fuller treatment of the subject of artificial dyes, and the rise of the chemical industry, can be found in Simon Garfield's book Mauve (ISBN 978-0393323139).
The right answer to this, as usual, is probably somewhere in the middle. Perspectives like this are pessimistic, but important because the industry has age bias and yet we need to understand where technology might be going full circle. But instead of taking that as a bad thing and stopping there, we need to understand why and how the context is different this time and what that means. Managed services in general seem to be the ultimate cloud computing offering so far, and aren't reinventing the wheel. They are expensive and costs can be hard to reason about (probably on purpose), and cloud computing companies are profiting greatly from inefficiencies, but they take care of entire categories of operational concerns. This feels like the natural progression of the field. We can take advantage of these things selectively while being conservative in when and how we adopt them.
Complexity is a difficult topic, not the least because the many ambiguous meanings it has taken on. When people bring this up, they talk about it like it's a fixed thing that could go to 0 if only someone actually tried hard enough. Yes, complexity is a problem, but that complexity is always increasing is inevitable as long as technology advances. The first episode of the 70s series "Connections" comes to mind. We need to be able to identify and eliminate waste while dealing with this fact.
There are a couple of TV series I know of that do this sort of thing. Check out Connections with James Burke, Modern Marvels, and Genius of the Ancient World, for starters. There's another TV series on Netflix that talks about stuff like the development of the bicycle, and the like, but the name escapes me. :(
If you're in the Bay Area, the Exploratorium and the Computer History Museum might be something you'd enjoy along these lines.
I can't speak specifically to "historical documentation", but in a field that interests me, which I suppose we could call "music, musicking and music theory", YT is better than anything I'm aware of from TV with the possible exception of the Bernstein lectures.
For a TV station/network/organization to have exposed us to just one of (for example): David Bruce, 12Tone or Adam Neely would be remarkable enough, but we actually get all three and then a whole bunch of others who are in the same general ballpark.
For example, the "David Bennett Piano" channel, produced by a young UK piano player, has a 15 minute segment that is hands-down the best explanation of why many musical cultures settled on dividing the octave into 12 tones. It's better than anything I've ever seen on TV.
It is true that these tend to be shorter and more focused presentations than series like Connections. I'm not sure I see anything inherently wrong with that. It's also true that they don't score always hit it out of the park for every "episode" they produce (unlike much the more collaborative processes that would have led to each episode of Connections). But I'm not sure I see much a problem with that either.
I'm surprised by how many people are missing the central thesis of Connections. Yes, it was about how technological progress is a web of interlocking discoveries, which is entertaining, but that wasn't the _point_ of it. The first and last episodes of Connections 1 introduce and wrap up the theme of the entire series and it ought to terrify people to the core.
(Warning: spoilers ahead)
The first, "The Trigger Effect" highlights how utterly and irrevocably dependent human civilization is on a broad web of technology and how delicate that web is, the so called "technology trap". Break it and we can expect an astronomical death toll. (We got a tiny taste of this in the supply chain disruptions of COVID-19.) No one wants to think about it or believe it but the breakdown of civilization is actually possible.
The final episode, "Yesterday, Tomorrow and You", ties together the past episodes by pointing out that technological progress is not really controllable or stoppable because of its incremental and interlocking nature. Yet by doing so, we are only deepening our dependence on an ever more delicate web of technology without which we are helpless. Moreover, we don't even know where this unstoppable technological progress is taking us; perhaps a utopia but just as likely a hellscape. (An example of this is the unforeseen societal consequences of the growth of social media or the loss of privacy caused by the web.) It is enough to make one think that the apocalypse preppers aren't entirely wrong.
It is one of the most utterly terrifying and thought provoking concepts I have encountered over a lifetime of gathering knowledge.
Connections was savvy in finding faires, working museaums, and access to the BBC's film vaults for providing much (though not all) such footage. Burke describes going to reenactment festivals to film many of the medieval life scenes.
And his journalist background and connections enabled him to have the access necessary to shoot single-take sequences such as this:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=2WoDQBhJCVQ
(Hardly the only impressive on-location scene in his work.)
Agreed with your comments on the primary importance of writing and research. I'd argue that Chris & Evan Hadfield's "Rare Earth" is getting close, Tom Scott is doing quite well, and Derrek Muller's "Veritasium" and Destin Sandlin's "Smarter Every Day" have promise.
Several YouTubers have been picked up by traditional broadcasters/production organisations, notably Hank Green ("Crash Course"), with PBS, and Emily Graslie ("Prehistoric Road Trip"), with the Chicago Field Museum. YouTube as a training and recruiting ground has merits.
One reason Connections is so hard to compare to is that it's pretty incomparable: forty years on we're still discussing it in glowing terms. It was produced by someone well-established and experienced at least within the BBC, and backed by the organisation. Notably, little from either national/public broadcasting or commercial production has even approached it. My short list includes Sagan's Cosmos, Burke's own The Day the Universe Changed, Ken Burns. Daniel Yergin's The Prize. And of course Kenneth Clarke's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man, which had paved the way for Burke himself. I might include Adam Curtis's works.
The role of the author or creative voice --- a Burke, Sagan, Burns, Bronowski, Clark, Curtis --- cannot be overstated. That talent seems rare, perhaps also the ability to simply get out of its way. Also realising when it's circled too hard back in on itself --- Burke had 2--3 good series in him, but he hasn't matched himself in at least three decades.
Related HN thread with additional recommendations: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2698026
Part of that is a more crowded field: there's more produced, it's harder to get noticed. Part my own near-total avoidance of broadcast television. But I don't think that's all of it.
And yes my HN history shows I'm quite the fan of Burke: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&query=by%3Adredmorbius%20connections%20burke%20&sort=byPopularity&type=comment
In that era typically only things recorded in studios would be video, the rest would be film. So Connections could certainly he remastered, and I hope the BBC does so. Some of their older documentaries, like Ascent of Man, already got that treatment.
If I am not mistaken, you are saying that technical entry barriers into documentary filmmaking are much, much lower today than in 1978, and therefore it is much easier to create such a series today. The former is definitely true, but consider the following:
- "Connections" used a substantial amount of acted historical scenes. Creating them in such a quality (and not some sketchy animation or a re-cut of existing work) is still a challenge today. You need half-decent actors.
- Technical quality is secondary to content. "Connections" is not just a collection of interesting and well-made bits about how technology evolved, there is an entire and compelling theory behind it, which Burke tries to bring accross. Such aspirations, executed with such intellectual and inspirational confidence, need something more than just technical ability and financial resources. Just because paper and ink got much cheaper since the 16th century, we didn't suddenly produce a Shakespeare every 2 years.
So far, I haven't seen any historical documentation on YouTube which even compares to the depth and width of "Connections".
I completely agree. For those who haven't experienced Connections-style history, four episodes are on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
My favorite is this one about proto-computers that came about due to the Black Death: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6yL0_sDnX0
On this website we can't fail to mention the connection to James Burke's Connections: Arecibo Observatory appears in Episode 3 from 43:50 https://youtu.be/eCp8h9RkaSw?list=PLf02uWXhaGRng_YzH-Ser_VEV4lGSLX_1&t=2630 (skip to 47:00 https://youtu.be/eCp8h9RkaSw?list=PLf02uWXhaGRng_YzH-Ser_VEV4lGSLX_1&t=2820 for discussion of the obsevatory), including in some nice aerial shots.
James Burke went into this in The Trigger Effect[0] back in the late 1970s. It's an incredible film, if only for the timing on the last in-person voice shot [1].
The amount of lucky breaks you must have to survive even a non-nuclear civilizational collapse event are astounding. Even if you make it out to a remote corner of the world, you'll need a farm with some supplies and no one still sulking about.
The really hard part is starkly obvious though: You need an ox and you need to know how to plow. Without those two things, you're basically kaput, again.
I, for one, have no idea how to plow.
Oh, and the ox eats too.
[0] https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e01 (the whole series is here, and it's all fantastic)
[1] He times his narration to end with a rocket launch, down to the beat! The practice on it must have been incredible, and the luck was out of this world, literally.
The first Connections series (and the book), and The Day the Universe Changed, are both excellent.
Connections2 and Connections3 flag somewhat. Both were produced for TLC, at a point before its Honey Boo Boo slide, though off its peak. One ran shorter (~25 minute) episodes, which is unfortunate, and there was an excessive fascination with early-1990s CGI effects. Still a net positive.
The series is often findable on YouTube.
A notable omission from all four series is much reference to Chinese science and technology, or any reference to Burke's compatriot Joseph Needham, who compiled the definitive study of these topics, Science and Civilisation in China, a monumental work I've only learned of in the past five years or so.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Science_and_Civilisation_in_China
I hope everyone here has seen the complete "Connections" (the original ten episodes). Almost certainly the inspiration for Sagan's "Cosmos".
In addition to each episode being fascinating, he ties it all up with a bow in a fascinating final episode.
Some of the Cold War, super-power paranoia might seem a little dated, but the "Future Shock" stuff seems just as relevant today, 40+ years later.
For the uninitiated, Connections is a documentary series from the seventies exploring the interconnectedness of technology. In the first episode, titled "The Trigger Effect" [0], Burke shows that if electricity were taken away from us, we'd be sent back to the plow. It's a little dated (1978), but it's an excellent watch even today.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
> "we're not going to stop being able to produce enough food to feed everyone in the US"
The Great Depression? Hyperinflation in the Weimar Republic? I'm sure there are modern examples as well. There may be a plentitude of food and other products but if the societal and economic structures that process it and get it to where it needs to be collapse, that food might as well be on the far side of the moon.
And even producing that food is questionable. Modern production is reliant on mechanical and electronic systems nowadays, even farming. Without replacement parts and consumable supplies, everything rapidly grinds to a halt. We saw an example of this in the recent COVID-19 shortages; lack of packaging and other consumables from overseas blocked domestic production of products even when the actual content of the product was still available.
Everything is interlinked today. Everything. Watch episode one of James Burke's excellent documentary "Connections" to get an idea of what occurs when that breaks down: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
the article skips a lot of things that I would consider to human industrial literacy. only thing, that explains human development is a bbc documentary by james burke called connections. then you'll see things like the plough that transformed human lives.
Connections[0], The Day the Universe Changed [1], and Industrial Revelations [2] are other very good choices in this area. These series are very old (1978, 1985, and 2002 respectively) but their age gives them a level of quality that modern, dumbed-down, documentaries do not have.
They're probably more readily available through forms of through non-monetary cultural exchange rather than by paying streaming service danegeld, however.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Day_the_Universe_Changed [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Industrial_Revelations
> But... viably teaching the tapestry, may require a much lower prevalence of misconception, and lack of insight, among teachers and texts. And creating such content, insightful and correct, is hard. Really really hard.
This is why people like James Burke ("Connections" and other documentaries) are so important.
They can do this. But this takes funding from somewhere. And it's not going to make a profit.
But it will make for a better society.
There's an episode of James Burke's Connections that explores this idea with a bit of depth, I recommend watching the whole series if you have the time.
James Burke Connections, Ep. 4 "Faith in Numbers"
Connections is a 10-episode documentary television series and 1978 book (Connections, based on the series) created, written, and presented by science historian James Burke.
The cascading failure of NYC’s electricity grid in 1965 was the background of episode 1 of Connections.
Connections was such a great show. Thx for this. Wish I could find the old black and white Dr Who episodes on YouTube as well.
Yes, so much good stuff in this series. Sagan must have been inspired when he released his "Cosmos" a year or two later.
But this one has that central thesis that ties all the episodes up with a bow.
Not sure I cared as much for Burke's follow-on series but maybe I need to give them a second watch. They probably couldn't measure up to his original "Connections" masterpiece anyway though.
The voice, oratorical flourishes, and narrative style really remind me of James Burke's Connections. "And that's why I chose to film this here..." Delightful!
I'd highly recommend the TV series Connections[0], which explores the history of science and technology through the lens of this sort of butterfly effect. There were a couple later reboots of the series that are not as good IMO, but still worth a watch.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
It's also probably not encouraging that the Connections TV show spans ... often hundreds of years, or more.
A lot of us are just falling for someone else.
I always thought that was sort of the point of the business side of "Fail Fast".
Try it now, if it doesn't work, now you know something valuable and you can try something else.
As someone who suffers from a lot of analysis paralysis, distraction ... sometimes I find just making myself keep typing and trying things in order to fail quickly and learn from it leads to much faster / sooner successes rather than burying myself up in all the minuta and every aspect of something and... not doing it.
There was an old TV show called Connections where they tracked various inventions and progress over history, and IIRC it is telling that almost every positive step they note involve someone failing to do something else they were trying, but still finding out something valuable that adds up to the next step for something else and so on.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
I’d like to recommend James Burke’s series “Connections”[1] and “The Day the Universe Changed”[2] from the late 70s early 80s.
He was a bbc journalist covering NASA and doing science communication and one of his particular fascinations (and mine, having grown up with his work) is the cumulative effect of ideas and technology shape not only how we interact with the modern world, but how we perceive it.
[1] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0078588/ [2] https://m.imdb.com/title/tt0199208/?ref_=m_nm_knf_wr_t3
There's an episode of the excellent late-70s documentary Connections series 1 that talks about this as well
The director, Mick Jackson, later made Threads [1], which is one of the bleakest, most depressing films ever made. Highly recommended, though not for the easily disturbed. It's filmed like a documentary, not too different from A Guide To Armageddon.
He also made Connections [2] with James Burke, which is a fantastic documentary series about the history of science.
(His later, very commercial Hollywood work is less interesting, though Steve Martin's L.A. Story is great.)
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Threads
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
John Baez's blog has a series on how civilizations collapse, first looking at the Anasazi, and then how one might model it using agent-based modeling and also looking at general collapse through differential equations:
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/01/20/anasazi-america-part-1/
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2013/01/24/anasazi-america-part-2/
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/civilizational-collapse-part-3/
https://johncarlosbaez.wordpress.com/2019/08/26/civilizational-collapse-part-4/
James Burke is a science historian and BBC documentarian, and in his first episode of "Connections" a series on the nature of innovation, he talks about how fragile our complex infrastructure can be, and, much like this article, how hopeless individualist survival skills would be once we "leave our technological womb".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
In his later series, After the Warming, a 1988 documentary which imagines what it would look like in 2050 if we failed to act on climate change (in which it predicted refugee crises, wars, hurricanes, mass flooding), and looks back on thousands of years of climate shaping civilizational rise and collapse, from the Ice Age to the Nabataeans to today and beyond. It gets most things scarily right, with the notable exception of failing to see Japanese economic bubble popping in 1991.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Qa4aWFDCMqQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxJLyPSRusc
Again, views and theories vary greatly.
The Renaissance, printing, the Reformation, the Enlightenment, and the breaking of uniform Catholic control over thought and science. That's an area I've been exploring (I'm exploring a lot of areas, progress is slow), and it's fascinating.
The Bacons (Francis and Roger, no relation), free-thought movements especially in the north (Amsterdam and Copenhagen), and relative political freedom of inquiry in England all seem to have helped. It's interesting that the Enlightenment itself played heavily in Scotland, otherwise a hinterland (Adam Smith travelled to London for an education he didn't think much of, taking six weeks to make the journey by coach or on horseback, in the 1740s or 50s).
James Burke's television series Connections and The Day the Universe Changed cover much of this development (as well as earlier and later periods), and have been useful, though I'm starting to find holes in Burke's treatments (he wholly ignores Joseph Needham's work and Chinese invention, as examples).
Gregory Clark, mentioned above, has a generally excellent treatment of the question, one of the best I've read yet, though there's much I've yet to read.
Another excellent resource is the History of Information website. It's a useful place to explore questions such as this.
http://www.historyofinformation.com/index.php
Years back I was introduced to a terrific BBC show called Connections with James Burke (1978). The first episode, available on YouTube [0], is all about the world's reliance on power and that within a short period of time we'd be catapulted back to the plow.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XetplHcM7aQ
Someone else linked a book, but this TV show, Connections by James Burke [1], follows this idea of cyclical dependencies in technology. Society starts with the plow. Definitely a great watch, even though it was made basically pre-internet.
[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
See resources around the thread about precision manufacturing. Consider how Industrial Revolution started thanks to easy access to high-density energy sources like coal, and how we've mined and burned pretty much everything that's accessible by hand. Observe how modern mining requires huge amounts of energy and sophisticated technology. It's all intertwined.
Consider also the amount of people needed all across the industries and supply chains of any product you know. I don't have hard sources, but I fondly remember this essay by Charles Stross[0]. TL;DR: how many people does it take to maintain (not improve) current technology level of our civilization? Charlie puts it at 100 million to 1 billion.
And now think of the economies and infrastructure needed to just feed these people. We hit 1 billion around 1804[1], which is far in the industrialization process, and most of these people weren't working to support the technology levels anyway.
For some insights, I recommend tracking down and watching Connections[2]. It's an old show, from the era where TV shows actually made sense, and it drives home just how much our current technology is dependent on right combinations of social, economical and technological conditions.
EDIT: fixed site reference in [2].
--
[0] - http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2010/07/insufficient-data.html
[1] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_population_milestones
[2] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series); I hear you can find it on a site that starts with "daily", and ends with "motion.com".
The TV series "Connections" did a great job demonstrating how often that more often than not we're not short on ideas or inventions or inventiveness.
Usually there are a lot of great ideas, but availability of materials in quantity, or a key part is what is missing, sometimes for centuries, and often comes from someplace you might not expect.
I've mention this a few times I think, but there's an old TV series about this topic, James Burke's Connections: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Connections_(1978) episodes can be found on Youtube.
About how one development leads to the next and so on. And how a break in the chain (eg. New York blackout of 1977) could lead to the entire collapse. The underlying topic is still, or even more, relevant with today's technological dependance.
The video of James Burke in the capsule was great. He could explain things to me any day.
I'm Canadian. When I was a kid we got reruns of Connections on TLC before it was a reality TV network. That was possibly the most informative TV show I've ever watched. When my kids start hitting the middle school science age I think we're going to marathon it.
I love James Burke. The first "Connections" is available on Kanopy if you have a library card. Lots of episodes on Youtube too.
"The Day the Universe Changed" was my intro to Burke; I loved it as a child an still as an adult.
Last year I had the privilege of watching two really great documentaries:
Connections - James Burke
Century of the Self
It's hard to judge the lasting impact both these docs will have on me, but boy, I can't even remember how I used to think before watching them. Watching Century of the Self and the AMC show Mad Men right after was also a very interesting contrast.
"Connections" is one of the best TV shows I've ever seen (I have it on DVD) and I'm barely even an adult.
To see a jacquard loom in action, check out this clip from James Burke's excellent documentary, Connections: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=itd-4lMoXgI
The clip doesn't show it, but Burke in the documentary makes the same connection as the article, but in a little more detail. He goes from Jacquard -> Babbage -> Hollering ( who used punchcards for the 1890 census), who founded the company which later became IBM.
Really fascinating to watch Burke pull up existing pieces of the modern world and examine their roots. Most of the time, it reveals that most revolutionary innovation was just a variation/consolidation of existing technologies.
Also a theme of James Burke's delightful "Connections" documentary (https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e01), which traces how various precursor ideas and technologies came together to create a modern technology.
> What was the effectiveness of these forts?
James Burke covered this a bit in episode 9 of Connections (about 4 minutes in):
https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e09
I'm continually amused that one of my favorite stories exists because of a volcano. If there ever was an episode of "Connections" that I could get in to, it'd be about this.
Came here to post this. Love James Burke's work! Connections is my all-time favorite documentary. It changed how I think about technological progress (or really, historical progress generally).
Frankly this article should have credited Burke since it reads like a summary of the Connections episode you mentioned. But I guess everybody steals from everybody.
An episode [1] of my favorite TV show ever, Connections [2], did a great job of showing what an important step the Jacquard loom was in getting to today's digital systems.
[1] https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3dvbkg
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
That is very sad. I can only hope that Levandowski someday stumbles upon James Burke’s documentary series Connections and gains an appreciation for how science and technology can develop in unpredictable ways far beyond the expectations or aims of the creators.
A hundred years from now I bet history professors will bring up Levandowski as “one of those Silicon Valley jackasses who thought they were building the future but had no idea how they arrived at the present.”
If you've never watched James Burke's series Connections [1], you'd probably enjoy it. I binge watched it years ago on youtube, and walked away with the distinct impression that our path to calamity started with the plough.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Connections_(1978)
Replying again (waaay past the edit window) with another thing.
Today I wanted to watch something while eating my breakfast, and recalled the 1978 "Connections" series[0], I've seen recommended on HN many times. I ended up binging first two episodes, and the second one[1] is quite relevant to your question. It tells a story of how discovery of a particular stone in ancient times, that allowed people to set a standard on precious metals, started a chain of discoveries and transformations that culminated in (spoiler, rot13) gur vairagvba bs enqne naq gur ngbzvp obzo. Of course, technologies have a dependency tree, not chain, but watching this episode you can get a feeling of how one invention enabled another, how all the pieces for a new breakthrough might be there, but the economics are not right yet to have them used, and how the accumulation of knowledge accelerated over time.
I highly recommend the episode, and judging by the first two, the whole series.
--
[0] - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Connections_(1978)
[1] - you can find it on dailymotion dot com slash video slash x2gohd2
Gets me thinking of an episode of the original Connections, where the host muses about how computers will make corporate management mostly obsolete.
He envisioned them doing little more than sitting idly around waiting for the computer in the basement to churn out the game plan for the next business period.
> not all TV is just entertainment
Certainly, not all television is entertainment but in my experience the whole medium itself tends to get looked down upon and there's a lot of ridiculous virtue-signaling involved.
Compared to the people I interact with I read a fair bit, I'd say higher than average. However, I also watch the occasional documentary / tv show. In social settings I usually don't bring up what I'm reading as I find it's not a socially wise thing to do unless I'm certain the other party has similar reading habits to mine. In general I usually bring up what I've watched recently. What I find amusing are the subtle jabs I get for 'wasting my time watching tv' from people who I'm sure don't read as much as I do.
To me television is just another medium, nothing more, nothing less. It has its advantages and disadvantages, sure, but I've learned just as much if not more from extremely well done lectures / documentaries as I have from books. Even from watching regular 'tv shows' for entertainment purposes I've learned quite a bit as a lot of shows these days are extremely detailed (e.g. Mr. Robot) and there's quite a lot to learn or think about if you pay enough attention.
I don't play video games as much these days, but I also find the amount of disdain people hold for the entire medium is unwarranted IMHO.
For what I'm watching right now - I'm enjoying James Burke's Connections which was recommended here on HN a while back. I highly recommend others to watch it if they haven't!
"Connections - Episode 1: The Trigger Effect"
https://www".dailymotion.com/video/x4e30ki
The punchline is at 29minutes
It's almost like a more mundane episode of the series "Connections", how a world war led to my grandmother making Jell-O with grated carrots in it for me to eye suspiciously as a child.
Fun history there and if you ever get a chance to watch it, there is a nice episode of Connections ('Countdown', https://archive.org/details/james-burke-connections_s01e09) that uses this as a key point for one of Burke's nice random walks through the history of technology. Nitrocellulose was initially a failure as an explosive, but when mixed with a few other things it was used to replace the ivory in billiard balls as hunters were decimating the elephant populations. Nitrocellulose ended up being the base for smokeless gunpowder that had a huge impact on guns and cannon later in history, but the other big thing it was used for was early film stock. One source of so many fires in theaters (and film storage vaults at studios) in the early 20th century was due to this particular type of film stock.
Bret Victor - Inventing on principle
https://vimeo.com/36579366
Alan Kay - Power of Simplicity
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdSD07U5uBs
Steve Jobs - Marketing (unveiling Think Different)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4HsGAc0_Y5c
Robert Cialdini - On Influence
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AC6ItuT1Eso
Peter Thiel - On Zero to One (Notes on Starts Ups or How to Build the Future)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZQnKtjM1TA
Naval Ravikant on Reading, Happiness, Systems for Decision Making, Habits, Honesty and More (Farnam Street podcast)
https://www.fs.blog/2017/02/naval-ravikant-reading-decision-making/
Josh Wolfe - On "This is who you are up against" podcast
http://investorfieldguide.com/wolfe/
Richard Feynman - Fun to Imagine
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4zZbX_9ru9U
Paul Graham - Startup school (2008)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q7K0vRUKXKc
James Burke - Connections (BBC documentary)
<No link>
Jim Al-Khalili tells the story of the Atom (BBC)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gm3p_3Vgejk
Elon Musk's 2003 Stanford University Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=afZTrfvB2AQ
Ken Robinson - Do schools kill creativity?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iG9CE55wbtY
Paul Stamets on mycology, bioremediation and fungi- Joe Rogan Experience
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mPqWstVnRjQ
Gets me thinking of one episode of the original Connections series.
There Burke talked about automation (keep in mind this was recorded back in 1978), and how it would make management simply sit around waiting while the mainframe in the basement churned out the action plan for the next week (or some such) and then implement it.
Effectively he envisioned that computation could eliminate the managerial class.
If you _liked_ that, then you'll love James Burke's Connections TV series [1] and books of the same title [2].
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)#Content [2]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burke_(science_historian)#Books
This is incorrect. The gold itself was valuable, and specifically gold because there were ways to tell in ancient times that it _was_ gold, and how pure it was. It helps that it's easily malleable for coinage too.
I believe there was an episode of Connections that I saw as a kid where he explains why gold was used as currency. I'm searching for it and will link if I find it.
If you like the “proper perspective puts it all in place” meme, then you should check out James Burke’s “Connections” TV series (there was a sequel series as well), which is all about those perspectives in the history of science and engineering.
Key passage: "When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous. Whereas the way these things are taught normally in college and school is a sampler of what this one wrote and that one wrote and you’re asked to be more interested in the date of the publication of Keat’s sonnets than in what’s in them.”
I think many of us have deployed this graph in our own lives. I watch movies this way - watch more movies made by a director I like. Then watch movies by the people this director likes. Its a wonderful exploration.
I wish there was a version of IMDB that allowed this meta exploration of movies - i.e. exploring the influence-graph for movies (or any art as a matter of fact).
There is a wonderful documentary called Connections [1] that explores this in the world of science, technology and engineering -- it traces the sequence of inventions and inventors that had influenced each other. I strongly recommend viewing it. You may find it very inspiring!
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
Connections is absolutely brilliant. It's definitely one of my favorite TV shows, ever. Definitely worth checking out
There is this interesting old documentary with a similar premise called Connections by James Burke: (first episode) http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xnwpsp_veetle-connections-s01e01-the-trigger-effect_tech
It uses the 1965 New York power outage as starting point for the discussion on how modern society relies on technology and the consequences of a breakdown. It then goes through the technology tree from the humble plow all the way up to aerospace and how seemingly unrelated things cause us to end up in our current technological state (like how a excess of linnen lead to cheaper paper and widespread literacy).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
I encourage you to watch the first episode of James Burke's original Connections, if you believe that.
I found that the 1978 BBC documentary series "Connections" by James Burke really spoke to that as well as the interrelatedness of inventions.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
reminds me of the back-to-the-land movement and the foxfire books. their impetus in the 60s and 70s was a retreat from the complicated, (inter)dependent, technological ecosystem of a modern metropolis; towards a simpler redundancy structured around puritan hard work, self-sufficiency and independence of the farm and barter village. james burke had an excellent tv show in 1978 called "connections" covering science and technology (episode 1 linked). the follow up series in later decades were not as good:
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xnwpsp
it began by unwinding civilisation should a critical failure in a complex system lead to catastrophic and cascading collapse; then later trying to understand the connective steps taken from ancient pre-history to then present day.
most well-educated people lack the physical endurance, manual dexterity, strength and mental fortitude to revert back to pre-20th century agrarian survival. as we belong to a society of atomized individual consumers who receive instant gratification from novelty products which require little skill, patience or forethought to use. we depend mostly on mental faculties and the mechanical advantage of machines, with atrophied social and physical abilities. how many jokes, poems, stories or songs do you know? how many hours can you do hard physical labour for? professional sports and fitness industries artificially fill this void.
nobody can sell the things you actually need. the simplest short-term way to survive a disaster is to introduce yourself to your neighbours. depend on each other and share resources, car pool, grow food, recycle rainwater, repair broken things. you now have a backup network to the unavailable local, state, federal and international resources otherwise marshalled to aid you in time of need.
i will conclude my boring cliched opinions with this: i don't believe a disaster you need to prepare for is coming, nor am i convinced any preparation even on a whole city scale would be sufficient. should transportation and grid networks collapse indefinitely, you will likely die. if you live in a place prone to flooding, own a boat. if you live in a place with bush or forest fires, leave you homes when instructed. if you live along earthquake fault lines, avoid old buildings. if you live in a place with high crime, legally carry a weapon to defend yourself.sense became uncommon in a world without commons. if you care for my advice, i suggest you learn play an instrument and develop your singing voice, as the oldest ongoing human activity you are guaranteed job security even during ragnarok.
In the context of Curtis I also like to point out James Burke's original "Connections" series. It's a deconstruction of history that is about ideas, rather than places and dates, and the first season is structured around the development of arguably the 20th century's most ambitious achievement (no spoilers:) The last episode is the most Curtis-esque in asking questions about managing human progress.
One good solid exchange of nuclear weapons would do it. Once the manufacturing chains are broken and international commerce is halted, the collapse of civilization would occur pretty quickly. Even among the survivors bent on preserving knowledge, most digital records are on ephemeral media and the components of most electronic devices have a rated operating lifespan of only a decade or less.
Though somewhat dated, James Burke covers this quite well in the first episode of his classic "Connections" documentary. If anything, the situation is far worse now.
In ancient times, there was a television show called "Connections" [1] in which the host followed the multiple links and serendipitous events that led to some modern inventions, technologies, and scientific achievements.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
* John Wyndham: The Day of the Triffids.
One of the minor themes is the relationship between morality and society. I read it as a teenager, and it made me think about the issue in a way I'd never done before.
* Adolous Huxley: Brave New World.
Similar reason as for the Triffids. If this is a dystopia then what, exactly, is wrong with it? To answer that you need to first define what society is for, and to do that you need to confront deep questions about what humanity is for.
* Desmond Morris: The Naked Ape
* Robert Axelrod: The Evolution of Co-operation
* Matt Ridley: Nature Via Nurture
These three changed the way I think about human nature.
* Douglas Adams: The Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy
There were all these ideas in my head that I didn't have words for, and suddenly here was someone making jokes about them.
* James Burke: Connections
A book as well as a TV series. History suddenly became interesting, as well as making a lot more sense.
Then you'd probably enjoy watching two TV series by James Burke: Connections and The Day the Universe Changed. They explore the driving forces behind many of the major technical inventions in the past 800 years -- how the status quo created a void that invention arose to fill.
The videos may look a bit dated now, but the content is amazing and Burke is terriffic.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Burke_(science_historian)
Pretty much everything by James Burke, including the Connections series and The Day the Universe Changed.
Both were turned into TV miniseries by the BBC (plus a successor to Connections that I haven't seen).
You would enjoy James Burke's Connections series. It is curiosity driven.
There are very few Renaissance men (and women) around today. I've met a startling number of people who spend time online but never encountered Wikipedia, there is also very large number of university students who have no interest in reading. This goes to show it is not about access to information or elite institutions.
That doesn't mean it's not worth doing. It is probably more worthwhile because fewer people are doing it. One prominent example among ourselves is Gwern, he is a great example to us. A lot of the most interesting threads on HN are where the discussion is regarding something not obviously connected to programming, such as woodworking. The most famous AMA in Reddit's history was a vacuum cleaner salesman, which was fascinating and bolstered my regard for Redditors as a healthy if fractious community with a native curiosity not evident on most social networking sites. In my opinion the best people have a mixture of useful values from different social classes - working, middle, upper. LessWrong has an expression parallel to this I'll paraphrase as 'hold your identity loosely'.
If anybody feels like they're stuck in a rut, unmotivated to be 'curiosity-productive', check out 'Japanology' on Youtube. Peter Barakan could make anything interesting. I always get a lift after watching his documentaries.
The app is intended to encourage lateral thinking and make connections.
James Burke was a hugely popular scientist in the late 70s and 80s. He predicted the Internet in the 80s and made a series "After the Warming" also in the 80s that seems to have been off by about 10-15 years on runaway climate change (Really well worth, and quite chilling, watching again today with our current awareness of climate change. It's on YT).
He made a fascinating, award winning, set of TV series - Connections. That showed how much progress is a series of interconnected events. Often stemming from apparently unconnected accidental events. Got me fascinated in science and technology as a child and set my course for the next 40 years!
Here's an article he produced in a book "Impact of Science on Society" for NASA in 1985 along with articles from Jules Bergman and Isaac Asimov: http://history.nasa.gov/sp482.pdf
Some of his TV series are on the web - Youtube and TPB. Not sure how well they've aged! :)
I like documentaries where there isn't much narration/interviewing going on. They are also short.
Primitive Technology
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCAL3JXZSzSm8AlZyD3nQdBA
I think this guy is most of HN's silent hero.
Two documentaries on working class skills approaching a true art form.
Ben's Mill
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l2KJbRHO76s
Sadly only part is available unless you pay a few thousand dollars. It is really good though. It's a guy using the raw power of water to create wooden objects for local farmers.
Glas
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KAYh0f1CPuc
A Dutch documentary on glass making in the '50s.
Three made for Television documentary series are:
James Burke's Connections. This is the first episode.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e4tLYYXDg74
This series had an enormous influence on many of HN's older hackers. History, Technology, Philosophy, it's all there. One of the best television series I've seen, and I'm a millennial so it isn't just nostalgia. It is smart.
Carl Sagan's Cosmos. This is so famous I assume you've already watched it. Carl is scientist and poet. The recent adaption is a fair effort but the original is by far the best.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6YgBXLUSsmg
Lord Kenneth Clarke's Civilization (1969!). This is the favorite documentary of many Western conservatives and reactionaries because it doesn't constantly caveat, qualify or diminish the history of The West. It is not shy about showing wickedness as well as greatness but nor is it politically correct.
Before I watched this it was quite hard to fully grasp the motivations of the right wing. After watching it I came to the view we have narrowed our view to a chronocentric interpretation of reality. This shows the grand sweep of history, which is admirable even if you don't agree with its worldview for political reasons.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TDm4Sl6CdYU&list=PLFYDyLgHrFHC_YIf7cs9-HpCb6WIBHm1R
I'll chime in here to add The Day the Universe Changed, on PBS. Less "invention" specific and broader, about how certain concepts shifted us. It has also aged better, in my opinion. Connections, especially its last episode, seems rooted in a certain place and time.
The thing you can't recall in your second paragraph sounds like the sort of "chain of inventions" that James Burke used to explain on the old BBC series Connections. (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series) )
See in particular episode 6 in the original 1978 series (just going by the summary on Wikipedia).
From a recent HN comment, a list, some authors, and some guidelines, largely based on books which radically changed my thinking.
Currently: Vaclav Smil, Energy in World History (1994), and Manfred Weissenbacher, Sources of Power (2009). Both detail the role and impact of energy through world history. The latter draws strongly on the first, both are exceedingly well documented. TL;DR: coal changed much, oil changed everything.
http://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/30398523&referer=brief_results
http://www.worldcat.org/title/before-oil-the-ages-of-foraging-agriculture-and-coal/oclc/837625798&referer=brief_results
http://www.worldcat.org/title/oil-age-and-beyond/oclc/837625970&referer=brief_results
James Burke's books Connections and The Day the Universe Changed, and their accompanying television series, were a profound introduction to the history of technology, science, ideas, and philosophy. Though 30+ years old, they remain highly current and relevant.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/connections/oclc/4494136
https://www.worldcat.org/title/day-the-universe-changed/oclc/12049817
Jeremy Campbell's Grammatical Man (1984) introduced the concepts of information theory and their deep, deep, deep interconnections to a tremendous number of interconnected systems, many not explored within his book. Darwin's The Origin of Species, James Gleick's Chaos, and many of the works of Santa Fe Institute members, including John C. Holland, J. Doyne Farmer, Geoffrey West, W. Brian Arthur, David Krakauer, and Sander van der Leeuw, continue these themes.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/grammatical-man-information-entropy-language-and-life/oclc/8306673
https://www.worldcat.org/title/chaos-making-a-new-science/oclc/15366709
William Ophuls' Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity (1977) is perhaps the best, most comprehensive, shortest, and most readable exposition of the fact, reality, dynamics, and interactions of limits on the present phase of fossil-fuel fed economic growth I've found. This is a book I recommend not only for the message, but the author's clarity of thought and exposition, his meticulous research, exquisite bibliographical notes, and, given the nearly 30 years elapsed, testability numerous of his predictions, some failed, yes, others uncannily accurate. Rather more the latter. In a similar vein, William R. Catton's Overshoot looks at the ecological dynamics in more depth, with much wisdom, the writings of Richard Heinberg cover the ground of limits fairly accessibly and more recently. Vaclav Smil in numerous books addresses technical factors of the profound nature of the past 250 years, and implications for the future. Meadows, et al, in Limits to Growth set off much of the post-1970 discussion (though they're hardly the first to raise the question -- it dates to Seneca the Elder),
https://www.worldcat.org/title/ecology-and-the-politics-of-scarcity-prologue-to-a-political-theory-of-the-steady-state/oclc/2524932
https://www.worldcat.org/title/overshoot-the-ecological-basis-of-revolutionary-change/oclc/6195764
https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3Aheinberg%2C+richard&qt=owc_search
https://www.worldcat.org/search?q=au%3Asmil%2C+vaclav&qt=results_page
Though hardly pessimistic, Daniel Yergin's book The Prize (and TV series) impressed upon me more than any other just how much petroleum specifically changed and transformed the modern world. Though intended largely as laudetory and championing the oil industry by the author, my read of it was exceptionally cautionary. The impacts on business, everyday life, politics, wars, industry, and transport, and the rate at which they occurred, are simply staggering. You can continue this exploration in Vaclav Smil's Energy in World History (1994) (I've recommended Smil independently elsewhere), and a rare but profound two-volume set I'm currently reading, Manfred Weissenbacher's Sources of Power: How energy forges human history (2009). The shear physicality of this book speaks to the message -- it's divided into five parts: 1) Foraging Age (6 pages), 2) Agricultural Age (156 pp), 3) Coal Age (160 pp), 4) Oil Age (296 pp), and 5) Beyond the Oil Age (142 pp). That is, the ~2 million years of pre-agricultural existence are little more than a footnote, the 8,000 years of agriculture roughly equal to the 150 years of coal, and the 100 years of petroleum use roughly twice either. The oil and post-oil ages comprise their own volume. Yergin followed up with The Quest, continuing the search for oil, though I've been less impressed by it.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/prize-the-epic-quest-for-oil-money-and-power/oclc/22381448
https://www.worldcat.org/title/energy-in-world-history/oclc/30398523
https://www.worldcat.org/title/before-oil-the-ages-of-foraging-agriculture-and-coal/oclc/837625798
https://www.worldcat.org/title/oil-age-and-beyond/oclc/837625970
Adam Smith's An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations is among the most-cited (and most incorrectly cited), least-read books of high influence I'm aware of, outside religious texts (and perhaps it is a religious text to some…). The author's message has been exceptionally shaped and manipulated by a powerful set of forces, quite often utterly misrepresenting Smith's original intent. Reading him in his own words, yourself, is strongly recommended. I'd also recommend scholarship particularly by Emma Rothschild and Gavin Kennedy, though also others, on Smith. Contrast with the portrayal by the propaganda disinformation front of the Mont Pelerin Society / Atlas Network / so-called Foundation for Economic Education, and much of the modern American Libertarian movement (von Mises, Hayek, Friedman, Hazlett, Rothbard, and more recently, Norberg). Contrast The Invisible Hand (1964), a compilation of essays published by Libertarian house Regnery Press in 1966, at the beginning of the rise in public use of Smith's metaphor to indictate mechanism rather than an expression of the unknown.
There are numerous editions of Smith, I believe the Glasgow is frequently cited by Smith scholars: https://www.worldcat.org/title/glasgow-edition-of-the-works-and-correspondence-of-adam-smith-2-an-inquiry-into-the-nature-and-causes-of-the-wealth-of-nations-vol-1/oclc/832488566
https://www.worldcat.org/title/economic-sentiments-adam-smith-condorcet-and-the-enlightenment/oclc/45282974
https://www.worldcat.org/title/adam-smith-and-the-invisible-hand/oclc/820387997
https://www.worldcat.org/title/adam-smiths-lost-legacy/oclc/56598640
https://www.worldcat.org/title/invisible-hand-a-collection-of-essays-on-the-economic-philosophy-of-free-enterprise/oclc/326622
I'd like to put in recommendations on technology specifically, but am still searching for a good general text. The material's covered somewhat in the chaos and complexity recommendations above (Campbell et al), though I'd add Joseph Tainter's The Collapse of Complex Societies. Charle's Perrow has several excellent books including Normal Accidents and Organizing America. I'd like to reference something concerning Unix, Linux, and programming, perhaps Kernighan and Pike's The Unix Programming Environment, Linus Torvalds' Just for Fun, Richard Stallman's The GNU Manifesto, and Steve McConnel's Code Complete. The O'Reilly book Unix Power Tools also encapsulates much the strength of the Unix toolset. All these are somewhat dated.
https://www.worldcat.org/title/collapse-of-complex-societies/oclc/15083222
https://www.worldcat.org/title/normal-accidents-living-with-high-risk-technologies/oclc/10229932
https://www.worldcat.org/title/organizing-america-wealth-power-and-the-origins-of-corporate-capitalism/oclc/939707157
https://www.worldcat.org/title/unix-programming-environment/oclc/10269821
https://www.worldcat.org/title/unix-power-tools/oclc/52381684
The science historian, James Burke, had a sobering walkthrough of the consequences of a large-scale failure of technology in the first episode of the first of his classic "Connections" series: "The Trigger Effect"
http://www.dailymotion.com/video/xnwpsp_veetle-connections-s01e01-the-trigger-effect_tech
(Even more sobering is that, nearly 40 years after this series was filmed, we have a new layer of technological dependence: telecoms networks and data services. This would greatly amplify a lot of the things that Burke describes.)
I agree, keeping 'food insurance' is far from crazy.
You can buy MREs that last five to ten years.
They won't solve all problems but they will certainly give you time to react appropriately e.g. escaping an area or growing food for the following year.
Does anybody remember James Burke's Connections? The very first episode on how to live in a global downturn?
Brings to mind Burke's Connections series. Specifically the first episode, where he presents all the technology needed to power New York City.
Damn it, ever so often i sit in near awe that i can be typing this message and expect it to reach the server etc. The number of wires and circuits that need to work properly for that to happen is staggering.
> Thank you, this was a wonderfully thought-provoking response (also, the first season of Connections is probably my favourite documentary of all time!).
Thank you. I hope to meet or communicate with Mr Burke at some point soon, I know Dan Carlin had a podcast with him a little while back if you're interested in his new take on the world. Connections remains the high water mark for documentary making and it is worth reading the books. If you want to watch a documentary in a similar style I suggest The Ascent of Man.
> In a sense, I think that although television itself isn't interactive, you could say that our family was 'interactive about' television. So we got the benefits of being able to use television in a positive way.
I believe you, I am mainly thinking of the average 5 hours per day the average American (or European) spends in front of the television. The dose makes the poison!
> This really resonated with me at the time, given that I was really getting into the Space Quest & other 'Quest games
Yes, it is clear that videogaming can provide for a shared community and culture, most obviously the MMORPGS. This is not something television achieves, or if it does, it is rare, like fans of Mythbusters or Connections. In the present we are concerned with developing the foundations of the Net, like commerce or the law. But ultimately I think a Net culture will be the most valued feature we ascribe to the Net.
Thank you, this was a wonderfully thought-provoking response (also, the first season of Connections is probably my favourite documentary of all time!).
One thing I will offer is that in my household growing up, television was positive because it was an experience that we shared as a family. We would watch TV shows together, talk about them together, laugh at them together, etc. In that sense, television brought outside viewpoints into our household and spurred conversation. I think that is one of the key factors that may differentiate between TV having good effects and TV having bad effects on different people.
In a sense, I think that although television itself isn't interactive, you could say that our family was 'interactive about' television. So we got the benefits of being able to use television in a positive way.
Thanks for reminding me of how important that was for me :)
By the way, on the limitation of television being a passive medium.... This reminds me of something I read back when I was a kid that was very profound for me. I can't recall exactly now, but I think it was in a Sierra On-Line catalogue where Roberta Williams said something about wanting her children to play adventure games rather than watch television as with adventure games, they had to be actively engaged rather than passive. This really resonated with me at the time, given that I was really getting into the Space Quest & other 'Quest games :)
> The thing that disturbs me about this argument is that IMHO it's a slippery slope towards "back in my day, we didn't have this new-fangled stuff".
> I just think we all need to be mindful about where our concerns might be coming from.
Basically we're on the same page.
Here is proposition. I'll steelman the Conservative view and you tell me what you think. I promise not to claim vidya causes violence or D&D is a leading cause of Satanism.
My proposition is that television media has meaningfully worsened our society by making it dumber. This is an artifact of the medium itself, rather than an issue with any specific content on it. To explain what I mean by dumber I must elaborate.
The television is a unidirectional medium. It contains consensus on various intellectual issues of the day and gives a description of the world I'd call received opinion. There exists no meaningful difference between the advertising that tranches people into buying products and the non-advertising that tranches people into buying ideas. Most ideas that are bought are not presented as items to be sold, they are pictured as 'givens', obvious. Most lying is done by omission. Even were all information presented truthfully, we have a faux sense of sophistication about our awareness which is a problem. When you buy prepackaged meals at a store you are not in the makings of becoming a chef, and in that way you are not chewing over the ideas presented to you, you do no mental cognition. Your state is best described as, and feels like, a hypnotic trance.
One of the problems with this is that television creates a false sense of normalcy that has no objective basis. It asks the questions and provides the answers. All debate is rhetorical debate.
It's the cognitive equivalent of 'traffic shaping' that Quality of Service mechanisms do on routers. In a way that is a much bigger lie. This concept is very similar to Moldbug's Cathedral concept. The people who work for the Cathedral don't realize they represent a very narrow range of thought on the spectrum. Their opinions cannot plausibly be of their own manufacture because one arbitrary idea is held in common with another arbitrary idea and they all hold them.
The key to understanding this is very real and not at all abstract, is that millions of people have synchronized opinions on a range of issues without any other discernible cause other than the television (or radio). Why do populations of teenagers become anorexic after the introduction of television where they did not suffer before it? Synchronized opinion is always suspicious. It defies probability theory to think my grandmother and millions of others suddenly came to the conclusions for example, that gay marriage was a positive idea? Why do millions of conservatives think buying gold is a good idea? It is not that there is something wrong with gay marriage or buying gold. It's that there is no genuine thinking going on about about any of this. There many ways to hedge against inflation that don't involve buying gold. Why is gay marriage the morality tale of the age, and not, say, elder abuse in nursing care facilities.
Why do some things become 'issues' and not a myriad of others? How directed this is is up for debate, but what is not is that the selectivity and constraints of the medium have narrowed our perception of the world, and that has led to the thing that made us dumber: it stunted our native creativity and curiosity.
> Yet kids ALWAYS adapt. They don't view smartphones or tablets as anything particularly out of the ordinary. It's just their ordinary. I'm certain their brains will build on top of this foundation. That's the thing - brains are extremely adaptable. All of us adapted.
There does exist a series of schools in Silicon Valley. The software engineers at Google and Facebook and other firms send their children to them, and they strictly contain no computing related devices. Instead it's schooling of the old fashioned sort, from the early 20th century.
It is possible that this is juvenoia as you suggested. But at least take into account those parents may understand something else about electronic media and its affects on brains. After all many of them study seriously human attention for a living.
The other thing I want to ask you is have you ever visited in your country what we call council estates in Europe? These are places which contain the poorer class of people in our society. I've been to many of these gray lifeless places and they all have many characteristics in common. Television is a major part of their lives and their shelves are bare of books. It is ubiquitous. In the past the working classes were much more socially and intellectually mobile. They read. They did things. Little evidence remains of that today, but it was so.
It is possible that television is like a slow poison that affects some classes more than others. You can't just say people you know are unaffected and therefore it does not matter, because it is possible you may be part of an advantaged group for which reasons may exist why they could be more immunized than most e.g. having challenging or interesting work to do. It's worth considering that all the problems I mentioned still exist without television in society but you might say the 'dose' determines whether it's medicine or poison. There is certainly a sense among many people that television has progressively gotten worse and watching old news broadcasts and documentaries it is hard not to see what they mean. I appreciate this isn't objective measurement, but comparing like with like, say James Burke's Connections with Neil deGrasse Tyson's Cosmos, the difference is obvious and the Cosmos reboot would be considered very good relative to its current competition.
Evidence for my claims could be a reduction in the number of inventions (excluding paper patents) per capita, reduced library visitations with respect to population changes, increasing numbers of younger people unable to read, evidence of decreased adventurousness or increased passiveness in the population, some metric for diminished curiosity/creativity over time. If those were mainly found wanting then I'll concede my error.
I'd be much more concerned about curiosity/creativity, than reduction in IQ or school test scores because creativity is really the key to much of what is good about human endeavor.
I'd also like to point out that you might not be able to spot the 'brain damage' so easily, since it's hard to come up with objective measures without a good control group. If it happened to most people then it's a new normal but that doesn't mean it had no effect.
He's not produced another TV series so far as I know.
He has been pursuing his knowledge-web concept for the past couple of decades, though I also get the feeling his game's slipped a bit. The first Connections and The Day the Universe Changed are really his best work. Both remain quite relevant to this day.
The Knowledge Web concept is ... interesting, but of itself I don't find it quite so fundamental or useful as the concepts of Connections & TDTUC.
On the other hand, you remind me that sinks and unintended consequences seem to be particularly potent late-stage factors in technological revolutions.
That is a fantastic programme, and other than the leisure suits, has aged phenomenally well. The opening sequence of the first episode, in and above lower Manhattan, gives me the chills.
I'd also strongly recommend the subsequent programme, The Day the Universe Changed, which follows a similar, though temporally arbitrary, connect-the-dots motif.
The two sequels to Connections aren't as good, though C3 is the better of the two.
Also: if you're interested in the background of technology, look up the story of Joseph Needham and his extended exploration, Science and Civilisation in China. Begun in 1954, it remains in process, with 27 volumes. Needham himself died in 1995. Simon Winchester's written an excellent (and much shorter) biography of Needham.
Likely because they first encountered it on PBS, some Americans are unaware Connections was a BBC production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
Even less known these days (by Americans, at least) is that Connections was but one of many extraordinary educational science series that the BBC produced in the 1970's.
Original footage of one of the best of these was recently rediscovered and finally made available on the web: Look Around You: Season 1 Pilot - Calcium
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBaVwwuErmU
Watching it again today, it's hard to understate the positive impact this series had on British science education, and the obvious "leg up" it gave for Britain's technological prowess.
This series (the first series at least) is one of my favorite documentary series of all time. I've always been vaguely interested in history but usually in terms of the occasional specific topic or passing interest. The way this series dives into history in terms of interconnections rather than chronology makes it immensely more engaging. I watched the entire thing over the course of a couple of weeks maybe 10 years ago and enjoyed every bit.
Chances are, this sort of presentation is a bit too close to "pop history" or layman's terms for serious history scholars but in the same way that Cosmos brought a lot of physics, astronomy, and cosmology to an audience that may not have much background knowledge, I found Connections to be a great way to learn about history in an engaging way.
I never did get around to watching later series but with this reminder, maybe I'll dig around for it (especially since I seem to have exhausted my supply of shows to binge-watch on Netflix and Amazon).
Calling it the "myth" of basic science is not instructive. Plus, the general gist of this article isn't new. But nonetheless interesting and accurate in many aspects.
But the old [BBC Connections](1) series brings home the inevitability of technical and scientific progress in amazing ways, such as how the introduction of the concept of bank credit led to refrigeration and the space shuttle. One innovation does inevitably beget another. Very much worth watching the whole series.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
Civilization is formed by technology that provides great access to energy.
As James Burk described in the final episode of Connections:
This was the first great trigger of change: the plow. It appeared maybe 7000 years ago, and when it did it gave people the chance to grow enough grain not just to survive, but to provide a surplus to support craftsmen. That triggered the beginnings of civilization.
With enough food, the population expanded every year. Small viliges sprang up, and they too grew larger with the population. In the spreading fields around the villages, the technique grew of irrigating the land from the nearby river. As the grain supply increased, it had to be stored. The potter's wheel solved that problem. Who it belong t demanded the development of writing, and building these irrigation ditches taught people the skills of engineering and mathematics, that gave them in turn architecture.
The need to predict floods for irrigation brought realization that the flood was annual. That gave them a calendar their government could use to enforce law through a police force and an army who needed weapon makers to protect the wealth of the country from invasion.
A country that was now an empire... all because of the plow.
The various aristocracies of the past built their standard of living by exploiting the work of others, usually shaped by the available technology. To build a pyramid required a very large number of slaves. To wage war against the neighboring feudal lord required a large number of serfs providing food and practicing the longbow.
In the west, we like to think that we grew out of feudalism into a modern representative democracy for various reasons usually relating to ideology or politics. In reality, we prospered because we quickly took advantage of the energy provided by technology and salve labor. Learning how to take advantage of the greater energy density of coal and oil was much more efficient at providing energy than slave labor.
Every time society learns a better way to exploit energy, society quickly reshapes itself to take advantage of the energy. Modern society now depends on a large amount of energy, and we had better learn some way of sustaining those levels or we will learn the hard way that this ability of society to reshape itself works both ways. Without modern levels of energy that technology provides us, we will lose our freedom to specialize on topics not directly linked to survival.
He had a short TV show that I loved (also called Connections)
There's a great segment in the documentary series Connections that discusses the Hollerith Machine: https://youtu.be/_mT_futz23s?t=2m37s
I recall a interview in recent years with James Burke, about his Connections tv series.
At one point he mentions that he basically had to ignore certain aspects to fit things into a clean narrative, as things were just so darn interconnected.
And even then you get some inkling of that in some episodes, where he basically has to tell the viewers to keep some event in mind while he rewinds and starts on a different branch that will eventually reconnect to the event to drive the story onwards.
And from a technical aspect you can sometimes see this in old telecom setups. Where now retired box A was used to bootstrap box B, that then bootstrapped box C, that was used to bootstrap box A+1. Except that if you then have a complete power failure you find that you can't bring up any of it because none of them can be booted on their own.
James Burke's 1978 TV series, Connections, starts with just that quandry. He starts with the question [what do we do if all the electricity goes out](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lKELMR6wACw) and uses that zombie escape as a path to our bedrock tool: the plow.
The article reminds me a lot of Randall Monroe's What If? site when he answers questions like, [What if all the water disappeared](http://what-if.xkcd.com/103/).
And finally, I have lots of sympathy for the bug eating movement. I would totes eat cricket mcnuggets. But, when I went to buy some insects to make some, all I found was fish bait (unless I rear my own). I felt a bit dizzy and questioned my motives a while, before I remembered that those suppliers are targeting their predominant market.
If you're looking for science documentaries with a little more depth, look at the series done by Jim Al-Khalili (eg., "Atom", "Absolute Zero" or "Chemistry: A Volatile History") and Michael Moseley ("The Story of Science").
In "The Story of Science", Moseley covers much the same ground as James Burke's famous "Connections" (and also his highly-esteemed "The Day thee Universe Changed") -- albeit in a more literal and less literary angle -- or indeed Sagan's eminent "Cosmos".
Al-Khalili is a physicist, though, and I think his documentaries are more to the point than Cox's, even if they're also full of excellent photography. Definitely less bubbly.
The Ascent of Man is utterly fantastic. It, along with Civilisation[0] and Connections[1] are among my favourite documentaries ever.
Here's an excerpt from Charlie Brooker's Screenwipe on Jacob Bronowski[2]
[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Civilisation_(TV_series)
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3bNK97nIsKs#t=141
Many people here are writing about various techniques/books that talk about science, i.e., for distinguishing scientific truths from non-scientific falsehoods, but as a scientist myself (well ok, computer "scientist"), I think in some sense we give "science" too much credit. There are things we consider "truths" in science which are actually only a veneer on "beliefs as of today" -- i.e., not that far removed from even such non-scientific things as e.g. "religion".
This is very abstract, but more concretely, what I mean is that it helps to read about the philosophy/history of science. The canonical recommendation here is Thomas Kuhn's The Structure of Scientific Revolutions [1], but I also strongly recommend watching James Burke's Connections tv series [2] and then watching or reading his The Day the Universe Changed [3] to understand how our entire conception of "reality" or "truth" is so strongly determined by the technology of the time.
Finally, there are lots of "truths" in fields where this is no scientific basis to fall-back on -- politics, art, etc. For these, you have to seek out and find the best elucidators of each field (usually, but not always, books).
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Structure_of_Scientific_Revolutions
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_%28TV_series%29
[3]
Take a look at the older BBC "Connections" documentaries by James Burke.[1] They're really fascinating, however they have a strong editorial presence. In my view, like with Sagan's Cosmos, the presence of the series creator's point of view can make the content more interesting than a collection of data alone.
However, people do really enjoy TV tropes, so a huge effort to categorize everything could attract a huge audience, too. Such a site would be a good source of inspiration for new ideas incorporating older ones, too.
[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=plgLCYha7pE&list=PLGi4Jd5YfR_lnV68fTIlPMZQzVAjeeg5g&feature=share&index=1
I caught Civilzation in one of its early re-broadasts, though was too young to appreciate it at the time. I've downloaded it and it's on my watch list.
Note though: the programs almost always had some point of view. Burke editorializes a few times in Connections (particularly in the 1st, 2nd, and final episodes). Clarke has a distinct vision of Western Civilization. Carl Sagan's thoughts on the importance of science, possiblities of extraterrestrial life, and against mysticism and nonscientific thinking are clear in Cosmos. The fact that the views are more aligned with convention don't lessen this any.
No. I was listing documentaries which aren't included on the list posted. I've edited my comment to clarify that point.
Connections (the first series) was absolutely brilliant, as was TDTUC. I've been less enamored of Connections2 -- the 22 minute format is too brief, the episodes rushed and a little too topical, and a lot of material re-treaded. I haven't watched C3 yet, but note that it returns to the 55 minutes of the original series.
I've become increasingly fascinated by the Industrial Revolution and the changes both leading up to and emerging from it. Vernor Vinge and Ray Kurzweil are trying to tell us that there's a Singularity in our future. I feel it was in our past (and that they're pitching snake oil). The change in the human condition from 1780 to 1980 simply staggers the mind. I'd argue that much of it completed by the 1930s, and that there's been fairly modest change since (mostly in information and communications).
I don't think the world of 2013 is hugely different from that of 1963. But 1963 was worlds apart from 1913.
I'm likely misunderstanding, but are you suggesting that James Burke's "Connections" series is not intellectually stimulating / worth watching? They may have some pop-sci aspects, but as a whole, they piqued my interest in various scientific discoveries/inventions as well as parts of history I may have otherwise ignored.
People learn through stories and pictures. The documentary is a powerful teaching tool. Not perfect, and it can mislead, but powerful.
I've spent more hours than I care to admit over the past year going through a range of material from slick and well-prepared documentaries (including several on this list: "Inside Job", "The Four Horsemen", "Capitalism in Crisis", How Many People Can Live on Planet Earth", "The Fog of War", "The Ascent of Money" (well, I read the book). "Collapse" with Michael Ruppert.
And a few which aren't on the list: "The Prize", on the story of petroleum, based on Daniel Yergin's book of the same name. James Burke's "Connections" and "The Day the Universe Changed". And numerous conference presentations, interviews, and various other presentations.
What's particularly useful is watching these not online through a crappy video player, but by downloading the videos, where I can stop and start playback, and by checking up on points (did that really happen? is there documentation of that fact?), and taking notes. Sometimes I'll breeze through a light topic at 140% realtime, in others it may take me most of a week to get through a 90 minute lecture.
Yes, books have their place, but a well-made documentary or series which mixes spoken word, visual imagery, demonstration, and other effects, hits on the keys your mind uses to form memories. I'd watched "Connections" decades ago as a child, but bits stuck with me, and it was interesting to watch myself anticipating Burke reciting "Hardwick Hall, more glass than wall", which I'd last heard some 30 years earlier.
Yes, there's material that tends toward the bogus, but sometimes watching good bogosity is decent training, or you can simply skip over that part of the list. I tackled an instance of this a few weeks back with an RT interview that was posted to HN: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6905655 Dissecting the elements of conspiracy (or finding out that the conspiracists were right -- reading up on COINTELPRO and Operation HOODWINK (an attempt to set the Communist Party of the US and La Cosa Nostra against one another) from the FBI's own website a couple of days ago was sobering in context of Snowden and related allegations: http://vault.fbi.gov/cointel-pro/hoodwink).
Ruppert's a case of one of the shakier videos. His history's pretty solid, his near-term future somewhat bleaker than I suspect is strictly accurate. If you read on background, the director notes that the story is as much about a man unmade by his own pursuit of an idea: "What I hoped to reveal was ... that his obsession with the collapse of industrial civilization has led to the collapse of his life. In the end, it is a character study about his obsession." (Ruppert's since continued to have a pretty hard time).
Still, anyone not planning to be dead within fifteen years had better consider what happens on the energy, resources, population, and sustainability fronts to be the biggest factors in their lifetime.
Dismissing the documentary format out-of-hand as some have done here, is simply uncalled for. Actually, it's pretty much straight out of the old FBI playbook. Perhaps even the current one.
I've encountered the use of this narrative technique before, using loose and wholly inconsequential connections to link together the points of a logical argument. I'm not sure where it originated but it's defiantly more popular in GB than the US. The late 70s BBC series Connections with James Burke used this narrative technique for all of its episodes.
Having been on a bit of a Burke kick for the past few months (re-watching Connections, hitting The Day the Universe Changed (excellent) and Connections2 (a bit too commercial and rushed) for the first time, I agree that some of his connections ... are a bit tenuous. But he's making a point (forget now if this was in Connections or TDTUC) that progress isn't linear and doesn't happen within given categories. Things draw from all over the place, some people make it huge, many don't (the number of people in Burke's stories who either toil on in obscurity or die penniless is ... sobering).
I'd say that while he occasionally does reach a bit far, most of his junctures are at least defensible.
C2 is where this starts to run a bit thin. The episodes are 22 minutes long, rather than 54, much of the material is covered in his earlier programs (and feels a bit like a go-over / phoning-it-in), and it feels a bit more commercial overall (not nearly as bad as the crap that shows up on most modern TV, but decidedly moreso than the first series and TDTUC). I'll see how C3 turned out, at least it returns to the 52 minute format.
As for Curtis: I found his opening a bit weak and vague, but it built a bit like a Neal Stephenson novel: there's foundation being laid and an atmosphere being created which pulls together if you stick with it. No, not a fast read, but a damned good one.
I remember watching the first episode of "Connections" when I was a kid and being pretty badly frightened by the power-loss scenario that James Burke described: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WgOp-nz3lHg
That's James Burke, in the years before he created his excellent "Connections" and "The Day The Universe Changed" series. Highly recommended - I watched every episode when they came out starting in the late 1970s.
One could trace it back to monastic traditions born during the early middle ages. James Burke makes that point in one of the later Connections episodes in the first series.
Reminds me of "Connections" TV show.
Judging from the 4th episode of the tv show Connections, programming <i>evolved</i> from knitting, so this is not surprising.
James Burke's Connections, with each episode showing how one idea sparks a chain of inventions and innovations resulting in something seemingly unrelated several centuries later.
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/james-burke-connections/
Actually there is a book version as well:
http://www.amazon.com/Connections-James-Burke/dp/0743299558
I loved this series as a kid. It was my favorite TV show. Now that I know more about the history of technology, the connections sometimes seem a bit strained, but even so I know of no better introduction to the topic.
Not really a book, but check out James Burkes Connections series. Other shows he's worked on have to do with the history of science/technology as well.
The episode pertaining to the birth of the computer is here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ORY-mXXgJg4&feature=PlayList&p=0C43386079D8B683&index=0&playnext=1
That's worth checking out first, to give you an idea of what it's like. The rest of his stuff is here: http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=JamesBurkeWeb#g/p
Wait a second, what relevance do knights in armor have to the London stock exchanges? Nothing, or I'm a blithering idiot.
The comparison between corporate hierarchy and feudal hierarchy has been around for many decades. Incidentally, both of these are only indirectly related to markets. No claim of analogy is being made to markets. Please keep these things straight.
http://tinyurl.com/yb5tkka
So the Brits are uniquely good at open source because, at one point, they had agriculture? AGRICULTURE?! Every modern nation has agriculture!
Actually, there are particular practical aspects of rice agriculture which are especially conducive of cooperation. Basically, the irrigation requirements make pre-industrial revolution rice agriculture impractical without a much greater level of cooperation than is required of, say, someone with a subsistence potato patch. (The idea is not mine. It comes from western anthropology of Japan.)
http://www.publicanthropology.org/Archive/HO1991.htm
Thanks for mistaking your lacking a few pieces of information for someone else's poor thinking. So all "agriculture" is functionally equivalent? It's all an undifferentiated token? I guess that would make sense from a strategy game POV.
Every modern nation has agriculture! Well, I suppose it is an indirect pre-requisite for Computers on the Civilization tech tree WHAT UTTER TRIPE AM I SAYING.
So you get your ideas about history from strategy games, project the same toy world view on everyone else, then accuse them of being misinformed? Your adjectives are appropriate, but perhaps they're directed at the wrong party?
Actually, the history of technology is much better represented as a vast, dense, directed acyclic graph, not a tree as in most games. This might help you out. There's a TV show if you have too short an attention span.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)
If you have a really short attention span, try just skipping to the 3rd episode. You can relate that one to Left4Dead.
Wow, the responses went way off map on that thread ;)
All my computer work, including job-type jobs I've held, have all come through networking. But that's really just a truism I guess, in that all work will/must come from networking. Which I take as your point...
What's interesting to me is the way one's personal network, seems to grow; like the facts of networking are stranger than fiction in an organic "Connections (BBC)" sorta way.
(Been watching old connections episodes on my G1 off youtube, while the inet is out at my house. Great show.)
The book (and TV series) "Connections" by James Burke is a very interesting peek into just how interconnected technology is.
The one that amazed me was how the technology of the auto loom lead to the computer (via punch cards). Again, this won't give you insight into the math of things, but it will show you how one innovation lead to another.
http://www.amazon.com/Connections-James-Burke/dp/0316116726
The user who uploaded the Connections series has also uploaded other TV shows James Burke worked on. You can find all the episodes here http://www.youtube.com/profile?user=JamesBurkeWeb&view=playlists
Also, there is a fascinating episode of the show that deals with the history of computers (punchcards as a way of holding information) which is available here http://www.youtube.com/view_play_list?p=0C43386079D8B683
I hope you all find it as interesting as I did.
For those interested, A Mathematician's Apology is available online here:
http://www.math.ualberta.ca/~mss/misc/A%20Mathematician's%20Apology.pdf
YouTube links to the first episode of the series "Connections 1" (from 1978):
1/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pTbCNycm0nQ
2/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tlKykc6ipY4
3/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIVnaq0spdE
4/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RNPL92tvqhY
5/5 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SnRZ18GpOhg
The rest are on YouTube also, as well as bittorent:
http://thepiratebay.org/tor/4039213/BBC_-_Connections_-__Complete__History__Science
Depending on whether or not you think paying ~$500 for them would serve "to promote the progress of science and useful arts", you might be legally obliged to buy them on Amazon.
When I was a kid, the documentary series Connections. It was the first time I'd ever seen someone follow vectors through history instead of recounting it one period at a time, like most books and classes do.
Discovering Lisp was a big one. This was in 1983, when the default programming language was Pascal. Lisp seemed (and in retrospect was) startlingly better. There was no one single book or quotation, but I remember how excited I was to get my hands on a photocopy of the InterLisp manual.
Kenneth Clark's documentary series Civilisation (and the accompanying book) impressed me a lot. In fact, it was clearly the model for Connections. I've never read anything else better about art. His ideas are extremely subversive, but few get it because he usually speaks in code. And he had access to stuff like no one else ever will again.
I also learned a lot from his book The Nude.
One of the biggest influences on my ideas about startups was an essay by TJ Rogers, the CEO of Cypress Semiconductor. I don't remember the title, but it cut through the usual corporate bullshit like a knife. For me the important thing was not just what he said, but that one could even be that candid.
Of all the books I've read in the last 5 years or so, Hardy's A Mathematician's Apology is probably the one that stuck most in my head.