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NOVA
1974 · TV series · documentary · 55 min episodes · 53 seasons
PBS' premier science series helps viewers of all ages explore the science behind the headlines. Along the way, NOVA demystifies science and technology, and highlights the people involved in scientific pursuits.
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67 comments on Hacker News
>one-hour TV documentary-style shows like BBC Horizon or PBS Nova.
Yep, these must be them, but our Swedish state TV buys them and somewhat rebrands them, but the BBC logo is usually there at the end.
Yes they are much more flashy and "americanized" compared to 10-15 years ago. Sadly. I still appreciate them.
I liked the recent Nova episode on neanderthals. They talked about how awful the last ice age was for the neanderthals despite being adapted to cold climates, and how modern humans survived it by staying away until it got warmer.
> Most of what you think you are seeing at any moment is only imagined
For some great illustrations of this I recommend people take a look at the Nova episode "Your Brain: Perception Deception" [1]. Nova episodes usually are only available to watch for free for a couple months after they air, then you have to be a PBS contributor, but occasionally old episodes become temporarily available. This one happens to be available now, with the video embedded at the link I gave.
The whole thing is worth watching, but for the material most directly relevant to this you can start at the 7:13 minute mark, where it briefly discusses a well known optical illusion and why it works, and then looks at the question of if you brain can fake your perception so much to make that illusion work, just how much of what you see in normal scenes is real? Then they go into how you only have about 1 degree of high resolution vision at the center.
A couple minutes after that there is a demo showing an interesting way to exploit that. They put the host in an eye tracker that can figure out where she is looking. Then they have her read some text on a monitor and she has no trouble reading. But when the camera shows us the monitor we see that almost the text is just the letter 'X' with small groups of letters briefly switching to other letters and then going back to 'X'.
When we read our eyes don't smoothly scan the text. They actually look at a fixed point for a moment, then jump to another fixed point, and so on (the "saccades" mentioned in the above comment). This isn't just when reading. This is how we look at everything.
She can read the text because the eye tracker is figuring out where she is looking a the software shows the real text there. As soon as her eyes jump that text goes back to 'X'.
When we look at the text and aren't looking exactly where she is we might detect the change to normal text where she is looking but we can't read it because most of the time it will be outside of the small high resolution center of our vision. By the time we can move our eyes down to it her eyes have jumped and that text is back to 'X'.
We don't consciously control the jumps so we can't sync ours to hers, so at best all we can hope for is to occasionally get lucky and maybe get a couple words now and then.
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/your-brain-perception-deception/
From Claude -> Notable Programs They Fund: Public television shows like Sesame Street, NOVA, PBS NewsHour, and Masterpiece, as well as NPR programming like Morning Edition and All Things Considered.
I like all of those. NPR: $300m budget / 42m listeners = $7.14/yr. Sounds like if I donate $5/mo to KQED and $5/mo to KCSM, I'm supporting them to cover myself and couple other citizens?
I don't get what I can do to support PBS - when I press donate on PBS site, it sort of wants to direct me to KQED/KCSM donations again.
Anyone here with a little more time to understand/explain it?
> PBS in the US could be so much better.
PBS Newshour is pretty much the best/balanced news programming on US TV at this point. They take deeper dives into issues than most of the other shows out there. And then there's Frontline which is excellent and goes even deeper with a documentary format. The rest of PBS - there are a few good parts like Nova, but a lot of what plays on PBS stations these days is UK crime dramas - man, there seems to be a lot of mayhem going on in merry old England these days.
Must see TV when I was little was Mr. Roger's Neighborhood and Sesame Street. As I grew and my interest in what makes the natural world work became more sophisticated, Nova was something I watched regularly. Every one of these programs was supported by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting. I am saddened by this loss.
This is the first episode of a two part PBS Nova special on multi-vehicle crashes. The second part is https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/ultimate-crash-test-impact/
These were just broadcast for the first time, so should be available for free streaming on Nova's website for about a month before they become members only.
Description of part 1:
> Surprisingly little is known about the behavior of cars and drivers in uncontrolled, real-world accidents, despite rigorous testing in laboratory-controlled crashes. Now, a first-of-its-kind experiment aims to discover what really happens in a multi-vehicle pileup and how cars and driving could be made safer.
> In the first episode of this two-part special, go behind the scenes as scientists make a series of high-stakes decisions to ensure the ambitious experiment goes off without a hitch. They only have one shot. The plan is for 8 drivers to drive 8 different cars by remote control at 70 mph down a hazardous straightaway. But how can they best represent real-world conditions to create a crash, especially when the drivers have no idea what’s about to happen? How do they ensure that the remote drivers feel natural behind the wheel? And what is needed to fully capture every data-point possible? The intense preparation for the most ambitious crash test ever conducted culminates in the moment of truth as the cars barrel down an airport tarmac and collide in a massive, multi-vehicle pile-up.
(The way they reproduced drivers not knowing that a crash was going to happen is by having 4 of the drivers be volunteers who did not know that crashes were being studied)
Here's the description of part 2:
> In the second episode of this two-part special, forensic analysis is put to the test. Real-life crash scene investigations have very little data to work with, so are they accurate? And what can we learn about car safety when there is actual data to show exactly what happened? Follow scientists, engineers, and accident investigators as they analyze a treasure trove of data – more than they’ve ever been able to work with before. Interviews with drivers offer valuable clues into what they saw and how they reacted, and a LIDAR scan of the scene is stitched together into a digital version of the entire event that can be analyzed millisecond by millisecond. In this unprecedented look at a major multi-vehicle accident, discover insights about driver behavior and vehicle design that could save lives.
NOVA regularly acknowledges the existence of climate change.
Some episodes even have the audacity to claim that humans evolved from apes and that the earth is billions of years old!
There's a BBC Nova episode about the soviet union with an apocryphal story about train schedulers being evaluated on the amount of cargo shipped by distance so of course, freight was sent on the least efficient route to its destination. Amazing to see the exact same metric get gamed again.
As I move into my second decade as an educator (started as a teaching assistant around 2012, now a history professor) it's been really interesting seeing what "sticks" and what doesn't. A couple years back I made a Simpsons reference that I know would've landed with my students from circa 2015, but it was crickets. However I feel like certain movies and other cultural productions from as far back as the 70s are still on students' radar -- like Scorsese films, for instance.
I've got a two year old daughter and as she gets older, I'm tempted to show her old episodes of the PBS show Nova and the original Cosmos so we're on the same cultural wavelength, but I probably shouldn't try to force it. She was born with an illustrated box set of the Lord of the Rings already sitting in her room though ;)
There is a great episode of NOVA about it: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/rebuilding-notre-dame/
Exactly.
It's always really odd to watch an episode of eg NOVA about climate change only to see the underwriting by the Koch foundation.
It seems like they aren't selling influence or pulling punches for their benefactors... but would I actually be able to tell if they were?
Agreed.
The knowledge gap between "normies" and "crypto-aficionados" is pretty large.
Which is, of course, why so many crypto "businesses" turn out to be scams of one sort or another -- the asymmetry of information makes most folks easy meat for scammers.
To point up this asymmetry, go ahead and watch this[0]. The lack of knowledge WRT crypto-currencies (let alone smart contracts) among the hoi polloi is striking in comparison to those who are in the know.
[0] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/crypto-decoded/ (Recent NOVA episode).
I worked on food safety policy fir years, and “Our Daily Bread”[1] rocked my world. It profoundly changed how I thought about food policy, its transportation, handling, and overall safety from farm to fork.
As a kid, the nova documentary on Andrew Wiles[2] solving Fermat’s last theorem not only inspired me to study science, but I too wept with joy..
Honorable mention: “The KGB, the Computer and Me“ about my childhood hero Clifford Stoll [3]
1} https://youtu.be/zG7q1NQJz7E
2} https://youtu.be/6ymTZEeTjI8
3} https://youtu.be/4gHNVNRQTJg
The Cuckoo's Egg by Clifford Stoll [1]
Pulling a small thread of trivial inconsistent accounting value to in the end exposing an international spy ring.
I grew up in the cold war, so I have always been interested in what went on. First recommended by a lecturer at Uni. The book reads like a techno-thriller but happened. Full of technical detail, I learnt a lot about UNIX system when I first read the book.
I would still say the book offers a great primer on computer security concepts and the logical processes people use to understand a systems. Always good to be reminded of that from time to time.
NOVA made an episode based on the book [2]
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Cuckoo's_Egg_(book)
[2] https://youtu.be/PGv5BqNL164
> There are many chemical plants synthesizing chemicals in large quantities: ammonia, ethanol, etc.
There sure are. Zero of them, however, produce gasoline or kerosene from air.
Many, many substances cannot be produced in chemical plants currently.
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> Until 10 years ago, the cheapest primary fuel was all fossil fuel based
It still is, by leagues. The only reason that isn't showing up in the market is a blend of tax and subsidy (which I agree with.)
Notice what they use on the ocean, where there aren't laws.
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> making synthetic fuels from fossil fuels is simply a loss in efficiency.
This would be true if anyone had ever actually made it work at scale.
We're much earlier in that process than you seem to believe. The processes that people are talking about are things you can demonstrate in a beaker. These are not things that have even been industrialized at small scale, let alone at large scale.
There's decades of work involved in figuring something like that out. You don't just go "here's the money, build one."
It might be a good idea to watch some of those old Nova specials about Percy Lavon Julian, one of the greatest American chemists in history. Not only are the social angles interesting - he was a black man in the 1950s, but also a source of great wealth to an American dynasty, so you had various factions of old white people fighting over whether or not to be racist - but also his story is crucially informative here.
Mr Julian did invent and discover some plastics and other synthetics, yes, but that wasn't his important work.
His important work was taking "yeah this should be possible" and turning into "yes, we can do this cheaply at scale."
The reason he was so valuable is that that is much, much more difficult than the primary research.
I agree, the primary research has been done.
The things that people are bringing up aren't even the best examples; MIT's solar trees from 2002 do rings around this stuff in efficiency and productivity both per pound construction and per acre construction, and can be built relatively easily from already commercialized parts.
The problem is, once we're done being Cory Doctorow and being blown away by what should be possible, someone has to actually sit down and do the hard work of figuring out how to do it at scale, and then raising the money to do so, and then building several generations of factory until they get it right.
And yes, this will get done, sure.
But there's a /time/ /limit/ here.
Climate change is already putting island nations underwater, putting salt into major city aquifers, has been forcing the Army to relocate Louisianans for 30 years and now it's four states. Our water situation is getting to states suing each other and talking about piping seawater into Middle America to keep lakes wet.
I love the process you're describing, and I agree that it will eventually succeed, but I do not believe there is any realistic chance it will succeed in time for this specific challenge.
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> instead of raging at people
(sigh)
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> your own definition of "real"
"Has existed" is the common, dictionary definiton of real.
Why aren't vampires real? They haven't existed yet.
Why isn't strong AI real, even though it seems like it should be possible given the simulation argument? It hasn't existed yet.
Why aren't consumer jetpacks real, even though working jetpacks have been on demo for 100 years? Nobody's made them yet.
You know that 30 foot tall robot that some guy in Japan made for a TV show? Why isn't the American response to it real, even though we have all the same technology that one guy in a garage has? Because nobody's made it yet.
Why isn't a man with one son's daughter real, even though he can have children? Because knowing that something is possible doesn't make it real.
It's very strange to me that you think this is somehow "my definition."
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> its not "not real" in the same way perpetual motion is not real.
I never said anything about perpetual motion.
NOVA has been undergoing a similar decline.
The latest episode was about the nanoarchitecture of butterfly wings, which is a fascinating topic.
A researcher mimicked the nano structure onto a piece of metal, a disk the size of a nickel, which is so hydrophobic that two disks close to each other would float, as it had essentially a bubble trapped between them.
The subtext of the show was about "combating climate change". So the narrator ludicrously suggests that it could be used to create floating cities because global water levels are rising.
I used to enjoy the NOVA TV show, but it has steadily gotten dumbed down over the years. An example:
"Somewhere there was a first planet that formed in the entire universe. We'll never know about it. We'll never know when it formed or what its fate was. But it formed somewhere!"
-- NOVA Universe Revealed: Big Bang
I used to be moderately afraid of flying. Just didn't trust the machine.
Then I saw an episode of PBS's Nova where they filmed a bend test of the 777 wing, to destruction. The deflection they achieved before the wing snapped was jaw-dropping. I'm no longer afraid of the wings falling off, these are amazing machines.
I might change my mind if I saw the software. :-)
NOVA did an episode recently that demonstrated how the Hindenberg could have burned based on a confluence of the weather and coincidences. No sabotage or conspiracy is necessary.
https://www.pbs.org/video/hindenburg-the-new-evidence-3hjhu3/
I donate to PBS for the streaming, but I wish they would update their content more frequently, or rather they have a lot of content that I don’t care much about (especially the local programming). Mostly I’m interested in the nature, science, and history documentaries, especially the nature and nova series, but they only show a new episode once every few weeks.
> Longest running prime time show?
I'm not sure it's our job to keep adding qualifiers to the OP's bold statement that "Simpsons is not considered a sitcom, but it is the longest running show, period." until it's finally accurate.
In any case... PBS' Nova is 47 years old. Frontline is 37. I believe those are aired in prime time. And they are "not considered a sitcom" either.
I was watching an episode of Nova on PBS about "Search for the Super Battery" and it was pretty enlightening. The basic lithium battery can store a lot of energy but due to dendrite formation it can short circuit and fail catastrophically. So they made some modifications to improve its safety while compromising other parameters and we get an lithium ion battery. But scientists are learning how to improve its safety without degrading other properties too much. They play around with different anode and cathode formulas and the separator membranes between them.
I saw this on a 2-part Nova episode and was blown away. I had absolutely no idea that all world alphabets descended from the same source.
I haven't seen it yet, but there's a new Nova episode about CRISPR I've been meaning to watch: "CRISPR Gene-Editing Reality Check".
https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/gene-editing-reality-check/
(Does Berkeley still have parking spots reserved for Nobel Laureates? They'll have to add a new one...)
If you factor in that during sleep your body is actively restoring your organs, and mind is flushing/filing the info collected during the wake hours. How many hours needed for that is an intriguing question. But hardly this time is wasted, unless your sleep is ... restless.
I recently watched an episode of "Nova" on the subject of sleep (Mysteries of Sleep), very convincing , even to some toddlers fussy about the sleep as usual :)
Watch the latest episode of Nova, Mysteries of Sleep, lots of good stuff like this.
I grew up watching Big Bird as the lead character, and I think this analysis is spot on.
I don’t have kids of my own yet, so I’m out of touch with how the show is being run these days, but if Elmo is the lead now, this definitely sounds like a step back in quality level.
I guess it makes sense from a business perspective for the creators. I’m sure it helps the bottom line. Kids go nuts for Elmo.
Regardless, it makes me happy to see PBS expand their reach. The quality level across the board is astounding! If it was the only network I had access to I would be happy.
Nova science is unreal! ‘Nature’ episodes are best in the business for nature docs. Many of the Masterpiece series are great... and don’t sleep on all the cooking shows. For a publicly funded organization, it’s absolutely mind blowing the quality of product they put out.
A real treasure.
I feel a large part of HN are single people with no kids so you are not going to find anything good or insightful when it comes to parenting.
There are two main schools of thought on the issue you mentioned - 1 let them learn early / no major electronics filter (I grew up watching tv I am fine crowd)
- 2 let’s not let them have stuff they don’t understand.( I personally fall in this crowd)
I think both options have their pros and cons. Given “right” and “wrong” as a measure is always relative, you need to consider the if your actions ultimately help them or hurt them in the long term goals which generally for parents is to raise kids that are responsible and self sufficient and take care of themselves in a unknown future. Once you (and your spouse) have a agreed “North Star” it’s easier to set the rules, enforce them and lead by example.
Edited to add below answer
-Do you limit screentime writ large with an overall limit? No “limit”. The rule is as little as possible.
- Do you set limits on the kind of screentime they get? Yes- when we do show it’s either selected cartoons or nature or nova documentaries. The latter two is not a deliberate thing but mostly because I like to watch them they like to see it too. No Disney. Hate it with a passion. Their message is overwhelmingly emotional and romantic. In general I stay away from “movies” type things where there is a larger plot
- What protocol do you follow (X hrs per day, have to ask first, but are typically no more than) have to ask is the baseline. Also they don’t know how to operate the tv(yet). Typically if it’s been more than one hour of their cartoons in a day they are done. I might allow them to watch documentary or half if I am watching it.
- What do you do if they truly want to do something educational/positive with screentime but have hit their limits? Not have encountered this scenario but if I did I would not give them their screen time and have them understand that this time they used up their “credits” but next time they can plan for it. Just like how the real world works.
PBS/NOVA ran a documentary a couple of years ago talking about safer nuclear reactor designs. This included lessons learned from Fukushima.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eDCEjWNGv6Y
NOVA did an episode a couple years ago on this, season 44, episode 5, "The Origami Revolution", which can be watched online here [1].
[1] https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/the-origami-revolution
I recommend the Nova episode about the 3/11 incident, which is streaming on Amazon Prime. Also, lots of sources online discuss the machinations behind the press conferences: http://world.time.com/2012/02/29/panel-government-told-people-to-keep-calm-while-mulling-tokyo-evacuation/#ixzz1ntRd4YIz
How It's Made, Nova, and Nature. To a (slightly) lesser extent, 60 Minutes and Frontline.
The term documentary covers (imho) a continuum, from academic style nonfiction on one end to a gray area between infotainment and fiction on the other.
I can still remember watching the NOVA episode of this in the early 90's
https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x61qlf6
NOVA's always been my favorite science documentary series. I don't know if they've ever covered snowball earth, but they have a somewhat recent series on geological history of North America: https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/series/making-north-america/
The most recent episode of Nova, where they watched the process to find these voids, was very interesting.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/next/ancient/cosmic-ray-muons-reveal-hidden-void-in-the-great-pyramid/
Didn't Fujiyama fail because the tsunami took out power to the plant and took out their backup generators?
Germany may not be able to get tsunamis, but are tsunamis they only thing that can take out power and take out the backups?
There was an excellent episode of Nova fairly recently (within the last year, I think) on nuclear power. It covered Fujiyama and other conventional designs, and then spent a lot of time on upcoming safer and more economical designs, and the large number of nuclear power startup companies that are working on them.
For example, one design involved a liquid fuel that has to be held in a container that has a high volume to surface area ratio in order to sustain a chain reaction. The design had such a container, connected via a pipe in the bottom to another container with a shape that cannot support a reaction.
During normal operation the fuel is kept in the top container by a plug in the pipe. The clever part is what that plug is made of it. It is frozen fuel, kept frozen by cooling coils around the pipe.
If the plant loses power the plug melts, and the fuel drains. This is inherently massively safer than conventional plants. Instead of always being on the verge of disaster, relying on active controls to keep that at bay, the newer designs require active controls to keep running. The failure modes are to stop running instead of to run out of control.
There was a great "Nova" episode on the Grand Challenge [1].
[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/darpa/about.html
The advantage of television channels and networks is they provide "curation". Someone needs to wade thru the crap and find the "quality programming" you desire.
Take the average Nova or Frontline episode. It's not cheap to produce. Do you think people could afford to put the work into making shows like that if all they could count on was the crumbs that Google threw at them from page views on Youtube?
And even if the funding could be solved, how would you discover this programming? There are very few HN submissions that ever get much notice. And the HN crowd is not nearly big enough to provide enough Youtube eyeballs to actually fund "real" programming.
This is really neat, but I'm slightly miffed that they didn't include an image of the giant ripple marks. I watched a PBS Documentary (Nova?) about this area that went into great detail. I might be mixing some things up...
More info for fellow Geo-Nerds:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_current_ripples
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MMbsGHVzXRU
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/megaflood/
Interesting. And much different from IIRC what a recent episode of Nova[1] said. Nova claimed that our worldwide power needs would be 3x current by the end of the century.
No way we can get to that point on mostly renewable energy. The show visited a large battery installation in China. The installation was huge (many many acres) for IIRC 20 MWh. The batteries helped smooth the power output from a PV solar installation.
So batteries were great in that example, but I just can't see how they can replace a nuke plant for base load. How do you go from 20 MWh to replacing a nuke producing 1000 MW * 15 or more hours of low sunlight in winter? Just like in Jaws ("you're gonna need a bigger boat"), you're gonna need square miles and square miles and square miles of batteries.
And if it's not a nuke, then it's a big combined cycle natural gas plant. Or a coal plant. Something, anything, that can keep the lights on at night.
I think this Guardian article is nothing more than wishful thinking.
[1] http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/earth/treasures-earth-power.html
There is an excellent, if dated, Nova episode called "Top Gun and Beyond" that addresses this. Navy research showed that the (all male) fighter pilots responded much faster to a female voice, so that's what they put in the voice alerts.
This is a minor point in the program, though. It's really one of my favorite Nova episodes and I recommend it to anyone.
There were plans drawn up by the UK for conducting warfare in N. America, with the specific aim of countering a US invasion of Canada, the purpose of which would be to deny the port of Halifax to the Royal Navy. During this time, Canada drew up contingency plans for invading the US and fighting off an invasion. Britain hoped that the Canadians would be able to defend Halifax, but had no plans to bail out Canada in this circumstance. The US drafted a plan for the invasion of Canada, while the UK drafted a plan to defeat the US Navy at sea.
I think there's a Nova episode about all this.
I first discovered him on a PBS Nova episode many many years ago. I did not know of him. Nova just showed a one-hour lecture of his without any commentary. I was blown away.
On a Nova Science Now episode they were also talking about using animal organs for their scaffolding.
There is lots of developments like this that looked pretty amazing, 5 years go when i first saw it, why isn't there an easy way to keep track of things like this?
Are there any decent sources for Nova episodes online? It's been years since I watched any of them but I'd love to dive back in.
> forcibly keep an animal awake for long enough and you will kill it. The same almost certainly applies to humans.
There was a PBS Nova episode on sleep many years ago. It showed people who never sleep. They are rare but they exist and have been studied extensively. They do have down-time where they rest for hours, but they never fall asleep. If this was any other show than Nova I'd call bullshit.
NOVA episode talked about first "secret" Soviet space station- mainly a cylinder for extending spy photography missions. A human in space was a more efficient photographer than a robot in the 1960s.
Not exactly easy or cheap, but a data point for you:
My OTA DVR for the last 8 years setup has been a PC with Windows Media Center. Apart from the setup, there is no monthly cost for the guide data, as with Tivo etc. Right now this runs on a NUC, with a SiliconDust HD Homerun (HDTC-2US) living in my attic, which transcodes the OTA MPEG-2 to H.264, saving tons of disk space. A nice side effect is that I can archive shows (e.g. NOVA episodes).
P.S. One interesting tidbit I remember from a Tivo ad (but can't dredge up right now), based on their users TV consumption stats, apparently ~ 87% of what people watch is available OTA.
Edit: Windows Media Center was dropped from Windows 10. The replacement will be Xbox One DVR functionality, coming 2016.
Love me some NOVA. Got me interested in science as a kid. My favorite episode is probably the one with the Bose-Einstein condensate.
Sucks it looks like their website only supports flash.
Remote / Async / Anywhere for contract work (perm if we can get off the ground)
Untitled Advanced Science Show Lecture Series
We're Atlanta-based and in need of some biology, chemistry, and physics PhDs (or students; perhaps even really good grads).
We want to film 15 minute science lectures that are much more advanced than Cosmos or NOVA, but we need research and writing. Existing formats are drawn out; we can be informationally dense and fast-paced. We'll include a few relevant figures; we'll also add footnotes, equations, and primary literarure citations for those that want to pause and do their own further exploration.
A perfect description of our demographic is HN--educated adults who might not actually be pursuing the field we're covering but have a ton of interest in science. This market also includes advanced college and high school students that likewise share the same level of interest.
The lectures can be broad surveys or deep coverage of a particular area of research or discovery. We're going to fund filming about 3 videos, film them here in Atlanta, and then test the market for fit (ie. "Show HN"). If the market demands a less "smart" or info-dense video, we'll probably abandon the project. Our goal is to fill the perceived lack of advanced material, not clone the existing formats.
bt at brand dot io
There was a good NOVA episode, Aboslute Zero, on the race for cold:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y2jSv8PDDwA
This Nova Science Now episode gives a demonstration where Prof. Yoshi Kohno of the University of Washington hacks a car and remotely slams on the breaks....
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/tech/can-science-stop-crime.html
Quite a nice segment.
I don't believe it. Getting to Mars with people is going to be much harder challenge than the moon was. This[1] was a great episode of Nova (with Neil Degrasse Tyson) exploring the research NASA has been doing to prepare for a trip to Mars.
1. http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/space/space-food.html
The article mentions 15000 years of convolution. That's on the low end of the probable range. There is some good evidence for dogs being domesticated at least 30k years ago, and even some for as far back as 100k years.
There's a very good "Nova" episode on dogs that is well worth keeping an eye out for.
There's a Nova episode about the effort to prove that a portrait was a lost da Vinci.
An important part of the investigation was Elisabetta Gnignera, a costume historian and expert in renaissance hairdos, identifying the bound ponytail of the girl in the portrait as being a style that only ever became prominent in Milan, and only for a few years--the same years when da Vinci served the Milan ruling family as artist and engineer.
I thought it was cool that there are people who are experts in renaissance hairdos--and that their knowledge can actually be put to practical use.
(There is much more than the hairdo evidence to tie the painting to da Vinci. It's worth watching the Nova episode if they show it again. The combination of historical research and modern scientific analysis was quite intriguing).
I could not agree more. I have a FIOS and a huge HDTV, in the living room and I end up watching one TV show reguarlly and a few movies. The last time I spent a significant amount of time in front of the TV was the Olympics whose coverage was so bad I ended up fast forwarding though most of it. The only advantage of cable is they live HDTV programming is less compressed than most streaming options. Yet, for some reason even their Video on Demand option is more compressed than live tv even though they have a full fiber network.
As to programming, I used to watch a fair amount of edutainment like NOVA but even that has been dumbed down to meaningless drivel. I can still get into a good nature show in HDTV, but mostly they are just Steve Erwin style psudo reality TV designed to maximize the number of teeth shown per minute.
PS: If you have not seen it "How It’s Made" is still fairly interesting.
Our netflix usage is 99.5% kids shows. Pretty much all the PBS cartoons are on there, NOVA Science now is on there, Thomas and Friends, Dora the Explorer etc. We use hundreds of GB every month streaming media and have no plans on going back to cable or satellite. My wife can get some of her shows via hulu at her desk, some of them on the TV and if she is patient she'll get a whole season at once on netflix.
That being said, we'd use even more bandwidth with Netflix if their on demand streaming selection didn't suck for more recent releases. I don't watch a ton of older movies and those I do want to watch over and over again I own on DVD or Bluray which I would prefer to use since the quality is better and there's never any buffering problems.
There is some strong evidence of Man and Dog working closely together going back at least 30k years, and even some evidence going back 100k years--far longer than for any other domesticated animal.
There is also evidence that the long association of Man and Dog has changed both species. By hunting together, each evolved to emphasize their strengths in the partnership, and lost things they no longer needed. There is a good discussion of this in Temple Grandin's "Animals in Translation".
Some scientists even think it was our ancestor's symbiotic relationship with dogs that let them outcompete other groups such as Neanderthals.
Dogs are able to figure out human states of mind from our facial expressions and body language much better than any other animal, and we can do the same for them. There's a good episode of "Nova" that covers this, and shows some of the experiments.
To put it succinctly, according to science dogs really are "Man's best friend".
This makes me wonder what the heck went wrong in those cultures that reject dogs, and consider them to be pests and vermin to be exterminated or at best tolerated.
I can pick up and read Cuckoo's Egg anytime and re-read it and every time it is just as exciting. If you haven't read it, you should.
Also, the NOVA documentary is available on YouTube, viz.:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v1swbLfrP6g
Worth watching (but read the book first!)
I don't know about tears, as such, but the NOVA documentary about Watson included a video clip from the end of the famous Kasparov-Deep Blue game. It showed him angrily storming away from the table after being beaten; the way the video was cut, in combination with the narration, gave the impression that he was something of a sore loser. Note, however, that it was a very short clip, and there was probably a lot of context that didn't come through.
Did you know it took 4 hours to film the episodes because Watson kept crashing? Seriously.
http://i.i.com.com/cnwk.1d/i/tim/2011/02/16/nova_610x363.png
The NOVA episode on fractals (and Mandelbrot) was one the of best NOVA's that I've watched: http://video.pbs.org/video/1050932219/
One of my favorite episodes of Nova is about the scientist who picked a tree at random to cut and count rings. He was shattered when he found it was the oldest tree of them all, almost 5000 years old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Methuselah_%28tree%29
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/methuselah
There was a great bbc or nova episode that followed a number of children as they passed into adolescence. One of things they noted was how for a child there is no moral ambiguity.
"Your wife is very sick, but you have no money. Your at a store and have the opportunity to steal some medicine, do you?"
The children always said it was wrong and there was no justification for stealing. The 13 year old was very hesitant and unsure what to say.
So for a 5th grader (11?) there is no emotion about it, the guy is cheating and will be reported on.
It isn't a documentary to begin with, but an investigative news program (rather a sensational one at that). Can't speak for shows in non-English speaking countries, but I'm sure we all have shows like this one in our respective countries of residence. I've watched BBC Panorama episodes this year that are just as biased & fear-mongering for example. If you want serious American documentaries, sample PBS's Frontline or NOVA series (via file-sharing =]) before jumping to conclusions.
"The set of 48 customers is divided into equal-sized communities, with members chosen at random so they may not be close in taste.
The recommender function chooses an item by looking at what customers in the same community have chosen. It recommends the one most popular among others in the community."
So first we randomly assign you to a group and then suggest items that has already been marked as popular. With an algorithm like that it is no wonder why he ended up with the data he did. This is the model where we all go and buy from the amazon top sellers list, not because they are good but because everyone else is buying it. There is zero surprise that showing this list to users would cause the items on the list to go up. This is also about the worst recommendation algorithm I could think of. His algorithm is the one used before the internet by the general population. You don't listen to every band, but see what your friends are listening too. You buy the same fridge as your friend because they recommended it. You did things usually because other people had, not because they were good. So according to his data what was happening before the internet should never have happened.
A good recommendation algorithm will present me with choices that I actually want to see. The key is that the choices presented me are only my choices and not choices that everyone sees. So as time goes by the odds that I will see the Nova episode on Rats from a few weeks ago will grow higher (really good one btw). But I don't think tivo will suggest that to all tivo's.
In a real recommendation algorithm as time goes by good items will get viewed more and bad items will not and the spread will grow larger. This is exactly what Netflix people talk about when they say they have been shown all sorts of great movies they never would have tried on their own. Netflix hates, absolutely hates monoculture because it means they have to buy 1 zillion of the blockbuster dvd from the summer. Which is part of the reason they do recommendations and sponsor its research. If they can find you something better to watch it means they can spread the que of users out to not be a monoculture. That is what recommendation algorithms do, they create niche's.