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Royal Institute Christmas Lectures
category9 writes "One of the best xmas tv highlights for us chaps in the UK is the RI Christmas Letures. Once broadcast by the BBC, Channel4 now have the helm. Past lecturers include the world renowed cybernetics engineer, Prof. Kevin Warwick. This year Sir John Sulston, of Human Genome Project fame, will be talking about genetics and the building blocks of life over 5 lectures. This is a must see for anyone interested in artificial intelligence. The lectures are presented in a format which allows technical detail, but in a way very accessible to those outside the particilar scientific fields. The website has transcripts for anyone not able to receive Channel4, perhaps with streams coming at a later date (lobby Channel4 if you must)."
You clearly don't read The Register. Warwick is a joke in the Artificial Intelligence community, regarded by most as little more than a publicity hound. He used to go around saying that we would all be human slaves in a robot nation by the year 2000. At the time he came to my university to debate some of the professors in our Artificial Intelligence department, and they mopped the floor with him.
Having milked the world of Artificial Intelligence for all the publicity it was worth, he then installed one of those chips they use for tracking dogs in his arm and started claiming that he was the first Cyborg...
Do a search for "Captain Cyborg" at The Register to learn more about this guy, he gives science a bad name.
I went to these as a kid, very cool lectures covering some suprisingly difficult stuff with the usual obfuscating crap removed. It was also the only time I got to see TV crews and the amount of hassle it takes to make television, so a learning process on two fronts. If you can get to see one or two of these lectures, do.
Downside: Eventually you get to university and get taught exactly the same thing with the obfuscating crap put back in again. By the same people.
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
I have been reading it all morning.
The Reg's IP and the latest rumours on their demise were discussed here: http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=25327&cid=2751 007
Dave
I write a blog now, you should be afraid.
Until the majority of people in the country have an interest in science beyond 'press the button, the box in the corner soothes my confused little mind,' the BBC will remain the only station in this country that's purely committed to public service broadcasting. Can you see ITV broadcasting the RI lectures, or 'What the Romans did for us'? Can you even see UK Horizons, a supposed science channel, broadcasting anything more advanced than Robot Wars or Scrapheap Challenge? Of course not. The mongo on the street doesn't give a shit about cybernetics or astrophysics, he just wants to know whether Charlene is shagging Mandy Dingle. And sadly, by demographic, the mongos have more spending power, by dint of greater numbers, than the people who would be interested in true science. That's what the BBC is there to safeguard.
The 'enforced taxation' troll you dangle so enticingly is the same mechanism that's allowing the BBC to test Ogg streaming, provide one of the world's best news websites, and provide programming for minorities in this country - whether they be minorities by race, age, religion or intellect. If you want a (nearly) pure commercial entertainment look at digital TV - wave after wave of Temptation Island and When Animals Attack. Can you see Sky One dedicating an evening to science more serious than Voyager?
Frankly the only problem with the BBC is BBC1's strategy of chasing ratings. That's what should be left to ITV and the commercial operators. Leave public service broadcasting to the public.
And anyway, aren't the Christmas Lectures supposed to be to introduce children to science?
Oh, and Kevin Warwick is an attention grabbing buffon. Ithankyou.
If a tree falls in the forest, and it falls on a mime, does anyone care?
Yes, just over 100 pounds for a few good channels, compared to over $480 a year (~$40 a month) for a hundred crap ones here in the US. As far as paying for television goes I'd much rather have the UK system over the US system anyday.
It's this fee that has enabled the BBC to produce great television and not have to have any adverts. Thats right a quality TV station that doesn't have any adverts (apart from ones for BBC properties). It's the license fee that pays for http://news.bbc.co.uk. I think the license fee is great value for money.
No they don't beat down your door, in fact if they just show up at your door they can't come in without a warrant, unless they can see a television. Even if you don't have a license they just ask you to get one, if you don't they take you to court and you are ordered to get one, if you still don't you get a bigger fine and eventually jail.
On a related note, at a recent C. elegans seminar I attended, the speaker made mention of Sir John, saying (to paraphrase) "Only Sulston is interested in these long boring projects, like serial EM reconstructions and the human genome project". Said in jest, of course :)
NO CARRIER
RI is a quaint, somewhat ruritanian institution. Most of the membership are rather stuffy and insist on wearing formal evening dress to the discourses, and there is a tradition that no questions are taken from the floor (you have to buttonhole the speaker afterwards). The staff and the Director, on the other hand. are very unfussy and very helpful. The Director is Susan Greenfield, who is known as a broadcaster on neurology. They do have a lovely old building in Albemarle Street, however, with an absolutely excellent Faraday museum. Research into inorganic chemistry is still carried out in the basement where Faraday had his original labs.
perhaps there was a slight hint at sarcasm in my reference to kevin warwick, but we all love him really. he even offered me a place on his course at Reading uni. i decided against.
when i said AI, i kind of meant neural nets, alife, and such things. i admit i could have worded it better. oh well, its a first article for me, better luck next time.
Just from reading the story posted above it seems that in-fact, Channel 4, ITV's cousin, is now broadcasting these lectures...
From KW's 'Achievements' page:
Nice misspelling, there...
I got home from work just in time for the Christmas lecture, this morning, only to find that our friends on the BBC had started a similar science programme half an hour beforehand. It was called Come to Your Senses and it was pretty good. Unfortunately, it means I missed most of the damn Lecture.
Maybe it's just my misanthropic nature, but I can't think of any reason for putting on such a similar programme at the same time that doesn't involve fucking over Channel 4.
Offtopic? Perhaps. But I'm bitter, and needed to get it off my chest.
On an unrelated matter, I recently got hold of the book of a series of Christmas Lectures given by Sir William H. Bragg in the 1920s. It's noteable for the fact that it's not afraid of explaining maths to the audience. He also wrote The Universe of Light, a popular science book that contains actual equations!.
I was looking at the TV license website and they claim they have vans that can pick up the signals of a specific TV component.
Their wording made it seem like they require some sort of locator beacon to be built into every British TV. Is this the case or do their vans just pick up escaped EM radiation from the TV? If there is a beacon, do any of you ever open up your TVs and disable it? Or how about putting your TV inside a Faraday Cage?
Good luck actually getting a picture of anything other than snow if you ever *do* put your TV inside a Faraday cage.
Basically, it works like this:
1. Your television receiver has a superheterodyning circuit in it. It basically generates a specific frequency, mixes this with the input signal, separates out the beats caused by interference, and amplifies them.
2. Your television is a big glass tube wrapped in metal coils. These coils tweak at a rate of 15kHz (horizontal coil) and 50Hz (vertical coil) [note: these figures for PAL only].
3. Both of these (1 and 2) emit electromagnetic radiation with detectable and verifiable signatures. Using (1) you can even determine what station someone is tuned to. Using (2) confirms that the person has a monitor or TV that is operating.
Think of it as something like TEMPEST.
Simon
Coming soon - pyrogyra
He gave the lectures one year, and it wasn't actually as bad as I might have expected (decided to watch them for comedy value as much as anything else).
++ Say to Elrond "Hello.".
Elrond says "No.". Elrond gives you some lunch.
IIRC, you still do have to pay for a radio license, but only if you don't have a TV license. Radio licenses are about 6 quid or something silly. It's been a while since I read the form, but that was certainly the case only a few years ago.
Other license trivia: there is a discount on a TV license for blind people, but it is only of about £10 [about as scary as the drive-through ATM we used on holiday in Tennessee with Braille-embossed buttons].
"don't fall into the fallacy of believing that Perl can solve social problems. Maybe Perl 6 can, but that's a ways off"
All Electronic devices emit EM radiation, they pick-up these emmissions from the TV's tube, the 'detectors' are handheld today.
Or how about putting your TV inside a Faraday Cage?
Yes, tempest, prevents them, but it's rather inpractical.
how you guys over there can support this
Do you support tax evasions ? Well neither do we!
A TV license pays for the BBC, we support it because 1) The BBC produces the best quality TV & Radio in the world, certainsly better than satellite or cable alternatives. 2) A TV licence costs about 1/5 the price of Satellite or cable alternatives.