Such arcane stuff as organisms that might not exist, Newton and colour

February 9, 2021 9:54 AM

If you grew up in the late 70s or early 80s, there's a chance you had your mind at least slightly blown by one of James Burke's TV programmes. In these he charged across the history of science and technology making, well, Connections between things you might not have thought were linked. It's a while since we had anything new from him, but if you can get hold of BBC Radio 3 then you can listen to to him doing his James Burke thing for 15 minutes every evening this week. The voice is older, but it's still James Burke.

Or is it?

posted by YoungStencil (28 comments total)

Thank you for this. I have fond memories of being introduced to Connections by my prof in a History of Psychology course back in the mid-90s. It was mind-blowing, especially with Burke's breezy wit that contained a playful tinge of 'oh, didn't you know?'
posted by kmkrebs at 10:03 AM on February 9, 2021 [5 favorites]

"The Greatest Shot in Television"
posted by gwint at 10:16 AM on February 9, 2021 [39 favorites]

I remember being wowed by this show when I was a young kid growing up. It was like Sagan's Cosmos, but on earth and about people. So cool.
posted by Meatbomb at 10:17 AM on February 9, 2021 [7 favorites]

"The Greatest Shot in Television"

I remembered it as one continuous shot, but impressive nevertheless!
posted by Meatbomb at 10:19 AM on February 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

I must've been introduced to him through a post here and his show was truly one of the best things to ever be binged on.
posted by cendawanita at 10:23 AM on February 9, 2021

Burke's visual puns were just the greatest in The Day the Universe Changed. He was making terrible Dad jokes across the whole of history.
posted by benzenedream at 10:31 AM on February 9, 2021 [9 favorites]

I resemble the FFP's first sentence So. So. Much. I adored Connections, and I've eagerly followed his similar series since. So, deep thanks for this nice touch of the old Burke-ean manner.
posted by Quasirandom at 10:58 AM on February 9, 2021 [3 favorites]

I recently re-watched the first Connections series. Two things hit me: how cheesy the B-roll sequences were, and Burke in one episode holding up a punch card, assuming it's perfectly clear that there card is a universal signifier for computers.
posted by CheeseDigestsAll at 11:08 AM on February 9, 2021 [2 favorites]

Synchronous. I was just last month binging Connections on archive.org.

Season 1 Ep. 1 is instantly relevant to present events, RE: how we are interconnected and reliant on each other.
posted by Horkus at 11:11 AM on February 9, 2021 [10 favorites]

If you grew up in the late 70s or early 80s, there's a chance you had your mind at least slightly blown by one of James Burke's TV programmes.

Or were a stoner in 90’s, when TLC broadcast them in Canada and the US. Picturing Burke in a wide-lapelled safari jacket as I listen to this, with a tumbler of gin and tonic in his hand.
posted by rodlymight at 11:36 AM on February 9, 2021 [8 favorites]

"The Leisure Suit of Wisdom"
posted by gimonca at 11:58 AM on February 9, 2021 [17 favorites]

*tiny squeal* this is so great I can't wait to listen.
posted by Dr. Twist at 12:47 PM on February 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

Well now I'm downloading Connections from Archive.org and I'm going to force the kids to watch it.
posted by sleeping bear at 1:25 PM on February 9, 2021 [10 favorites]

oooh thanks, this is awesome
posted by 5_13_23_42_69_666 at 2:28 PM on February 9, 2021

Burke in one episode holding up a punch card, assuming it's perfectly clear that there card is a universal signifier for computers.

There’s a decent chance that the screen you are reading this on also has a Save icon in the form of a stylized floppy disk. I think the gap between when I last used a computer punch card and when I first used a floppy is less than the gap between when I last used a floppy and today.
posted by ricochet biscuit at 3:57 PM on February 9, 2021 [8 favorites]

I’ve been binge watching Connections 2 just this last week, very happy to find this! Thanks so much for posting.
posted by ElasticParrot at 4:19 PM on February 9, 2021

In addition to Connections And The Day The Universe Changed, there’s also After The Warming.
posted by TedW at 4:30 PM on February 9, 2021 [1 favorite]

There’s a decent chance that the screen you are reading this on also has a Save icon in the form of a stylized floppy disk. I think the gap between when I last used a computer punch card and when I first used a floppy is less than the gap between when I last used a floppy and today.

Ha! In my case, there was virtually no gap at all. I took a college course titled Computer Applications in Psychology (honest title: Doing Your Correlations By Hand Is So Yesterday) in the fall of 1984, and in the first half of the class we were still doing our stats by batch-processing data and commands on punch cards. Then our university finished upgrading to dumb terminals, and all those boxes of cards were so much waste paper. At about the same time, the computer lab got a few new Macintoshes--don't ask which model, AFAIK there was only the one, although they may have been 512Ks--and I bought the "new" 3 1/2 inch floppy disk to put a flyer that I was designing for the psych honor society induction on, said flyer using at least three different fonts just because I could.

Anyway, yes, Connections is fantastic.
posted by Halloween Jack at 4:48 PM on February 9, 2021

I still have my print copy of The Day The Universe Changed. That and Connections were intellectual revelations to a young me that profoundly altered the way I looked at science and technology for pretty much my entire life since.

School had me memorizing names & dates, and I was bored stuff by it. The idea of how one invention built upon another in unexpected ways (likes the monks basically inventing clocks) gave me a gestalt through which to view history that made it all fabulously interesting all at once. I have been an avid reader of all sorts of history ever since.
posted by Devils Rancher at 5:33 PM on February 9, 2021 [5 favorites]

I have a VHS set of TDTUC that i bought off ebay for waaaaaay too much money about 15 years ago and have about worn them out. I wish I'd known about Connections on archive.org, but I got the DVD box set of those last year for my birthday. I never, ever get tired of them. (especially O Fortuna while a modern 70's eurostyle apartment disintegrates into itself)
posted by hearthpig at 6:59 PM on February 9, 2021

If you don't understand the connection (hah!) between Jacquard looms and modern computing, then you probably don't understand computers at all. Yeah, he held up a Hollerith card and used it as a short-hand for "computer". I guess I'm kind of privileged to have grown up when computers were in their infancy and it was possible to know *everything* from metal to screen. How you kids see computers these days, I don't know. But they aren't "magic boxes". There is a science to them and it's very deep.
posted by SPrintF at 7:38 PM on February 9, 2021

If you don't understand the connection (hah!) between Jacquard looms and modern computing, then you probably don't understand computers at all.

Jacquard looms ran Javascript??!? /hamburger
posted by benzenedream at 9:01 PM on February 9, 2021 [4 favorites]

No, but in their own way they ran a very primitive version of HTML.
posted by hippybear at 9:13 PM on February 9, 2021

Hmmm, sorry, Jacquard isn’t doing anything so high level as markup. The punched holes are 1:1 with the rods that lift or don’t lift a single pattern warp end. One hole or nonhole = 1 thread.
posted by janell at 10:16 PM on February 9, 2021

In the late 70s into the 80s I grew up on a steady diet of shows like Connections but had nearly forgotten about Burke until the late aughties when I really dove into the history of the Apollo program reading every book on the subject that I could find and watching whatever happened to be on youtube. Serendipitously I re-discovered Burke--- I was trying to find more information on the padded escape room (where the crew would ostensibly shelter in case the rocket had exploded-- they'd jump into a chute leading that would gently guide them into one of these rubberized bunkers) and there he was, the James Burke of 1969 reporting directly from one of those chambers explaining how it would all work.

I am happy to know that he's not only still around but also still doing his thing after all of these decades.
posted by drstrangelove at 3:41 AM on February 10, 2021 [1 favorite]

Did anyone else notice that the volume controller on the BBC player linked in the post goes to 11?
posted by fogovonslack at 6:17 AM on February 10, 2021 [2 favorites]

I have never forgotten these shows: I was born in 1972 so they hit my still-plastic brain just as I was starting to drink coffee. After watching them, I assumed that everything was connected to everything else, and there was always a root cause. (Except for people: they always did terrible shit for no reason at all.)

I have had no cause to change my mind since then, and Burke's hangglider lapels still mark him today as a man of both wisdom and style.
posted by wenestvedt at 12:35 PM on February 10, 2021 [4 favorites]

Jacquard isn’t doing anything so high level as markup. The punched holes are 1:1 with the rods that lift or don’t lift

So, you're saying the holes literally mark an "up" or a "not up"?
posted by hippybear at 8:01 PM on February 10, 2021 [4 favorites]