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• Father Ted

Father Ted is Channel 4. BBC America distributes it under license. Incidentally, C4 is also partially publicly funded and has a public service remit, though they show ads unlike the beeb.

Actually, Warriors could be related to the 1970's movie, and War Magician could be this project about Jasper Maskelyne. Really an interesting story.

Little Britain. It's great, but again, probably one that 95% of American's won't understand, due to cultural differences, and that won't survive a remake. Stars Matt Lucas of Shooting Stars fame.

Also good at the moment, Nighty Night (think darker than the League of Gentlemen) and Catterick (if you like Vic and Bob that is).

Black Books is also in the middle of a very funny third series.

Of course most of these are shows that have probably never been heard of in the US - pity, so visit BBC Comedy and Black books for more detail.

Channel Four International (C4i) asked a number of US and UK film and TV stars what the favorite swear words were -- and to say them out loud (and they do). Check it out here.

sorry its only shockwave, but you might find this British TV commercial rather appropriate...

Swearing

Enjoy :)

We have this ad for Channel 4: not broadcast admittedly

Everyone should watch this latest Channel 4 advertisement

It's still in use today, many of the "blue on blue" incidents in the recent conquests were blamed on drugged-out aviators.

Quote:

In the LAST Gulf war more than half of all American pilots used amphetamines to keep them going on long missions. And they did the same in the latest war in Iraq. What's more, the US Air Force says the drug they use - Dexedrine - isn't harmful. They need it, they stay, to stay awake and alert.

"It took 20 years before jet engine technology was really usable."

I'm not sure whether you're high, or the History channel. The Messerschmitt 262 was the first warbird with jet engines, and had it entered the fray just a few months earlier, it might have changed the course of history. The jet engine was eminently useful in that application at that time.

a british high speed train that leaned into curves

It was pretty much doomed after the first real-world journey, when it induced vomiting in the assorted dignitaries and members of the press who had been invited along.

Another great British idea which died (at least as far as Britain is concerned) was the world's first magnetically levitating high-speed train, developed by Eric Laithwaite. I remember seeing his Royal Institution Christmas Lectures in 1974 (I think I'm too young to remember the 1966 ones). It's a real shame that this man's genius was spurned in his own country, while other nations have exploited his ideas with conspicuous success.

FYI, this year's Christmas Lectures are being broadcast on Channel 4 in the UK this week, starting tomorrow (Sunday).

This may be of interest, Bruce Simpson appeared in an epsiode in the current series of Scrapheap Challenge (the UK version of Junkyard Wars)

In the final of Scrapheap Challenge series 6 - "Cat-alysts" vs. "Megalomaniacs" http://jyw.tacorp.net/specials/jousting/joust.html
http://tlc.discovery.com/fansites/junkyard/episode /season_07_07.html
http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/S/scrap heap2001/text/12/

Also quite probably Supersonic flight as well Miles Supersonic Aircraft

Ever play Ant City? yea...just like that... (btw this is not a plug, just a relevant referance)

The two programs you mentioned are remakes of British programs, both of which are actually pretty good.

I don't know what's happened to TLC lately. I have fond memories of The Secret Life of Machines and Junkyard Wars, back when it was a lightly rebranded Scrapheap Challenge. Not the silly show it has since become.

My perennial beefs with "science" programming are all the usual ones: too much emphasis on biology, zero coverage of the process of science, too many pretty pictures with zero words to go with them, and so on.

Of course there are counterexamples. I saw a current episode of Scrapheap Challenge on vacation in England recently, and it was the original, un-messed-with format. A hoot, in other words. Another nice counter-example was Rocket Science, done by the (Canadian) Discovery Channel.

How many stories have you ever seen about mathematics? I can only think of two (Femat's Last Theorem and the 4 Colour Theorem).

I wish there were more.

...laura

The pilot that repeativly straffed friendly troops in Afganistan was out of is skull on speed. Here is an article on it.

The same is going on in Iraq. Quote from this article:

In the LAST Gulf war more than half of all American pilots used amphetamines to keep them going on long missions. And they did the same in the latest war in Iraq.

Speed and cigarettes have been a part of the standard rations since WW2.

If you ain't with us, you're against us.

Ah you beat me to the punch marbike! I watched Alt-TV on Friday evening (GMT) which highlighted David Hahn's incredible story which was news to me (hey I've led a sheltered life in my nuclear family :)

I was skeptical at first especially since the programme had an whiff of mockumentary about it and the fact that the boy scouts offer an atomic energy badge, but googling around after the show yielded some interesting links including the one you posted:

here and here

I think most people in the UK (any maybe elsewhere) would understand this logo straight away.

The article you link is commenting on an occasion when an experimental wider set of decisions were allowed for referral. As far as I know ( I'm a cricket follower, but not a fanatic ), the referrable decisions are still limited to run outs, , stumpings , boundary decisions and close catches Furthermore, they are only allowed to review the video replay a limited number of times.

What you may be thinking of instead, is the extremely cool hawkeye system which is used by the channel4 TV station , who show the bulk of the UK cricket coverage, to predict the flight a ball subjected to an LBW decision would have taken. Its a brilliant TV aid, and extremely sophisticated technology, but its only used by commentators, and has nothing to do with the umpires. I doubt it would ever find its way into cricket in any official capacity

Cricket is a way cool game, and extremely nerdy. You have to admire any sport where a satisfying match can go on for a week and then end in a draw.

If it wasn't for human error involved in decision making, half of all interesting conversations regarding sport would be lost. It gives the losing team's fans something to hang on to as to why they lost, rather than blaming the inadequacies of their team.

However, I personally would like to see the Hawkeye technology used in cricket, being actually used in match decisions, rather than purely a toy for the television.

His documentry wasn't squashed. Stupid White Men almost was. It was supposed to have been on sale a few days after 9/11 but instead the publisher wouldn't ship the books until Moore made changes so as to look less Anti-Bush. Three months later his publisher was threatening to pulp the 50,000 copies already printed until a librarian started a grass roots campaign to get it published. Which goes to show, its not the right to free speach which is important, it is the right to have your free speach heard. If your press is so free, why did Michael more have to come to a British TV company (Channel 4) to get his TV series made? Why in his list of websites for "Real News" is it that the only two old news media sources he mentions are both British? (The Guardian and the BBC) One of which is a state run TV station! It seems that despite our lack of de jour freedom we might have more de facto freedom that Americans do. No really! Tell me one thing (other than own a machine gun) that an american can do that I cannot and I will tell you one thing I can do which an american cannot. can you say DeCSS? can you say DMCA, PATRIOT act, TIA? Freedom is the ability to choose, but choice is an illusion by those with power against those without, and no one in europe are as all powerful as your rulers^H^H^H^H^H^H leaders.

I can't speak for what link the British press may have made between Powell's and Blair's (separate) sets of presented evidence, but in either case, surely you would agree that an `unnamed source' which appear only in the Guardian (a paper with a well-defined ideological position, to put it mildly) is not necessarily the best source of information on what Powell is thinking, no?

The British press and politicians all appear to know exactly who the unnamed source was: British law is very strict about revealing state secrets, hence the secrecy. But all hell is breaking loose in Downing Street at the moment.
Here is The Times' take on it, top-selling right-wing paper in Britain.

Here is another from a middle-of-the-road paper, The Independent.
This story is relevant too.

And here it is again from Channel 4 News in London.

That post was indeed by glrotate. My apologies -- from the haste with which you posted to defend it, I took his position to be yours as well, and mistook who had posted first.

That's perfectly alright. Thank you for your polite and timely reply.

Is his position yours as well?

Not quite. glrotate says "There were no Scuds." I'm saying that there is no evidence of any Scuds yet, so we should proceed on the basis that there were none until the claims are independently verified.

As for your questions on Professor Herold, no, I can find no statisticians leaping to his defense on the Afghan numbers. But likewise, I can find only STATS criticising them, and lots of people quoting STATS. STATS claim to be a "non-partisan" stats group: well, how many stats groups or statisticians claim to be "partisan"? Every one of them is "non-partisan", just like every man in jail is innocent. The Iraq Body Count team may have only used a very small percentage of incidents from what you and I would consider unreliable sources (Saddam loyalists et al.), with a resulting insignificant impact on interpreted results.

My long background in medical stats has given me a healthy dread of the nasty little games statisticians play. If you'd like to see a good example of how distinguished "non-partisan" statisticians are happy to send innocent people to their graves for a buck, try googling for "thimerosal".

So please forgive me if I cannot accept a summary from some group I've never heard of, criticising the past work of one academic, as a basis for rejecting the work of all future work of any team he ever works in again. I'm aware that you would need to buy the report in order to prove their methodology to me, and even I'm not so presumptuous as to insist on that.

We therefore seem to be at something of a standstill.

Still, if you ever do come across a copy of what critieria they used to judge "reliable" and "unreliable" incidents on the Iraq numbers, and it shows I was wrong, I promise to admit it here, and remove the sig immediately.

Until then...

;)

....I am not sure on what grounds are u basing ur arguements upon,but it is certainly shaky!
Detachment,my foot!Look at the coverage of the war in US media. If you really want detatched,objective journalism,take a look at Bremner,Bird,Fortune or America's finest news source

Is that like Phoenix Nights?

For further information watch this to get an idea.

Wouldn't surprise me in the slightest. There was a comedy show ("Between Iraq and a Hard Place"; very funny, but worryingly accurate) which said "We know that in 1990 Iraq had enough Anthrax to kill the world population twice over. We know this, because we sold him most of it."

I think we're already at war.

Gotta love that thing called diplomacy.

And remember this war was pre-determined when Bush came into power.

Yes, yes I know its in real format, but I urge you to take a look at this and click on Project for the New American Century link, failing that, just read the letter and note a few of the names that it was signed by, Donald Rumsfeld and William Schneider certainly grab the attention. Ever wonder if your president is as much a puppet as our Prime Minister is a muppet?

How about this? £25000, sustainable and pretty much all natural? OK you need (quite) a few mates to do it for that price, but you can always pay someone.

Grand Designs

These scrolls are not lost to us!

They're lost to me. I haven't seen any of them yet, nor am I sure where to look if they've been published. Will they be published? I found an old article which seems to indicate so, but nothing more. I didn't search very hard though.

...and how long until Hollywood tries to declare copyright on them, and the only way you will "see" them is through the eyes of a low brow movie. ;-)

And why, in the case of the Library of Alexandria?

Religious ferver. It was burned to the ground by followers of Christ.

Don't worry, I'm sure the MPAA, RIAA, and Microsoft will help the modern world overcome such heresy, but with DRM rejection certificates instead of book burning. ;-)

I tried a Google search, but didn't find anything very interesting. A little more info at an article titled "Ancient maths revealed". Some possibly interesting links (at bottom of page). An article at BYU which goes into slightly more detail about the multi-spectral imaging technology. Though your "religious ferver" comment may apply here. If BYU does create a digital archive, will they really release lesbian poetry?

No, she's not related to Cathy (all hail Cathy).
Lisa -- note that the show is called "Scrapheap Challenge" in the UK.

Obviously the show cheats enough as it is to magiclaly get this contraptions to work

The UK version (Scrapheap Challenge) doesn't always have working machines. In the last series a car tossing trebuchet collapsed in spectacular fashion on the first attempt to hurl a Mini through the air. It is also common to see teams sitting, in true British stereotype fashion, wth a cup of tea at the end of the building time, having finished half an hour early.

So what I am interested in is if there is any research done on the demographic spread of viral style ads as defined by the previous poster and whether or not they have been effective in terms of a return on the investment.

Your marketing people should have some demographic data on the spread of viral campaigns. There was alot of research into this in 1998-2000 during the dotcom boom. Of course, most of those businesses went out of business. If your marketters don't have this data, they aren't doing their job. And the good studies probably aren't free either.

As for ROI, it sounds like your marketters want to violate one of the fundamental rules of viral marketing: Keep it scalable. The main point behind viral marketing is that it's supposed to be cheap.

Forwarding an email newsletter where the graphic elements refer to your website is usually cheap, because the newsletters are usually lightweight, and the elements don't require alot of dynamic or DB-driven content (Which simplifies the scalability issues).

Forwarding a movie file (Like the channel 4 stuff) is also cheap (for you), because the processing all happens on someone elses mail system (But it probably sucks for those ISPs).

But it sounds like your marketters want to combine the two: Use a "forwarded email"-type of marketing, but where the big elements reside on your servers in your office. That is not cheap.

Gimmick Promotions
These centre around some kind of novelty, such as an email attachment game, interactive section to the website, 'special offer' requiring you to 'recommend' the email addresses of friends in order to get a discount. In terms of generating traffic these can be the most productive tactics. Many variations on this exist, and chances are you've received or seen some form of it at some time, athough you may not be aware of it.

This is closer to what I was referring to when I posted the original story. Or to put it another way:-

Eventually the attachments got to some exec in advertising who, instead of worrying about their copyright being ripped off, realised that if they could get people to forward their adverts to each other they could save a hell of a lot on airtime and look cool in the bargain without worrying about the censors. Bingo.

My understanding was that once a sucessful viral campaign was under way, it would become self-sustaining thereby opening up the possibility of exposure to a load more eyeballs...

There was an item on Channel 4's Big Breakfast (in the UK) a couple of years back, when DVDs had just started to become the de facto medium over here. It was a reasonably high-up copper in the Met, explaining how pirate DVDs aren't made to as high a quality as original DVDs, so the picture tends to fade over time. This was complete with example of faded movie.

So by the time I'd finished creasing on the floor with laughter, I wrote an e-mail to Channel 4 just asking "wtf?". It seems that a load of other people had too, because there was soon an apologetic controller (or may have been director) on BB.

She explained how they'd heard of this effect, and how although the copper hadn't actualy seen it in a DVD, he was willing to act as "expert witness". So they threw together a few special effects on the mixing desk, and bingo! One "pirate" "faded" "DVD".

Made me laugh, anyway.

If NASA needs a big rocket, why not go to the people who have most experience? They're already willing to use Soviet engines on the Atlas V, so it can't be pride.

Best wishes,
Mike.

Best wishes,
Mike.

In the future, this will give great opportunies to remove "unwanted" persons from society. Just launch a few satellites, containing a powerful laser, and bye, bye Saddam (if he is stupid enough to show his head).

(This also reminds me of Ant City.)

Good job I am posting anonymously as I just stuck this in the wrong thread! Anyway here it is in the right thread.....

Can we avoid boring questions that have been answered many times in many places for example:
http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/S/scrap heap/show/FAQ.html

to quote:
Is the scrapheap 'seeded' with appropriate materials?
Almost everything that is used in the programme is general scrap. But in order for us to be able to set a wide variety of challenges, we sometimes have to place something specific on the site. We always make sure that there are the materials to build at least two different solutions to the challenges we have set.

Can we avoid boring questions that have been answered many times in many places for example:
http://www.channel4.com/science/microsites/S/scrap heap/show/FAQ.html

to quote:
Is the scrapheap 'seeded' with appropriate materials?
Almost everything that is used in the programme is general scrap. But in order for us to be able to set a wide variety of challenges, we sometimes have to place something specific on the site. We always make sure that there are the materials to build at least two different solutions to the challenges we have set.

Taken from the UK ScrapHeap Challenge FAQ

Is the scrapheap 'seeded' with appropriate materials?
Almost everything that is used in the programme is general scrap. But in order for us to be able to set a wide variety of challenges, we sometimes have to place something specific on the site. We always make sure that there are the materials to build at least two different solutions to the challenges we have set.

Another way of putting that is that the US gives food and medicine to starving nations.

Are you actually objecting to that policy?

I was hoping someone would try this argument. Yes I do object when the pharmaceutical companies use war, famine and death as an excuse to push up their stock prices. The drugs and other garbage these companies "dump" are of absolutely no use to the people in the countries they're sending it to.

A guy called Mark Thomas here in the UK presents a programme where he tries to uncover government corruption, corporate corruption etc each week (he also has a pretty wicked sense of humour, whire really makes the show). One of these shows dealt with this issue. Here are a few quotes that you might find interesting...

During the civil war in Bosnia so much unwanted drugs were dumped that the government were forced to pay $34 million to build an incinerator just to dispose of them. One charity we spoke to, Pharmaciens Sans Frontieres, said that they had to spend £100,000 in the town of Mostar alone disposing of these drugs in lime filled buckets.
[...]
Since then, the situation has not improved. We spoke to a woman who was involved in sorting out drugs in Albania in 1999. She told us of a hospital in Tirana which had received tonnes of drugs, shown below.

[picture of tonnes of drugs]

However in sorting them out she found some nitrous oxide canisters which had an expiry date of 1989 or 1990 - ten years before they reached Albania. She also discovered sadly that of all the tonnes of drugs donated, only a small proportion could actually be termed useful, shown below.

[picture of about 150 small bottles]

There were also other companies sending sex aids, diet pills and other completely useless crap to starving nations simply to make money while leaving the huge cleanup job to those with nothing. Nice, huh?

The adds work. We don't really know how, but they do

You'll find an awful lot of ads aren't just "Here's a new product", it's more that the ads associate a set of "values" (rebelliousness, healthiness, apple-pie patriotism, etc, etc) with the product. The point being that if they match the set of values to the mentality of their target market, then the next time a "target person" walks into a store and sees the product, they'll feel a certain "familiarity" with it.

You may have walked into a shop looking for something, seen a particular brand, and thought "ah, something in me tells me that's the one to go for...". OK, you don't *quite* think that, but something very similar. It's all the subliminal making-you-trust-the-brand-name-implicitly crap they put into the adverts, which you *can't* ignore, even if you say you pay no attention to them.

For more info, see Derren Brown's Mind Control site... he's a fantastic hypnotist (I was hypnotised by him, he's astounding), and one of the real experts at NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming). He did a good skit on advertising once, and managed to get the advertisers themselves to do exactly what he wanted by using their own methods back on them...

Learn to make a link, and to copy URLs without spaces...

anyway, I was going to post it as well: Ant City.

Cheat codes for life - easter eggs in photo booths etc.

Send Jade up there and get her to open her mouth.

build one for them. It might not work well, but it sure would be fun to watch.

* - Or "Scrapheap Challenge" if you saw it under its original title on the other side of the pond.

Channel 4 have quite a good write up with a realplayer video of one of their news pieces the other day.

There are some *very* cool (arcade) machines in the exhibition ranging from Computer Space through to Dance Dance Revolution, plus all the home consoles you can eat. I can barely wait...

Cheers
Chris