Choose the New PBS Science Show

chinmay7 writes "PBS has posted three different pilots for a new science show, and they want viewers to weigh in and help choose one as the regular science feature. All three pilots are viewable as vodcasts. Wired Science aired on January 3rd. The pilot certainly is polished, as one might expect from Wired Magazine, and deals with interesting topics: 'Meet rocket-belt inventors, stem cell explorers and meteorite hunters.' Science Investigators (air date: January 10) seems to be the most 'science' show: 'The investigators examine 30,000-year-old Neanderthal DNA, vanishing frogs, mind-boggling baseball pitches and more.' 22nd Century (air date: January 17) is pretty gimmicky and loud for my taste, but delivers interesting content — 'In the coming decades will all our brains be wired together like networked computers?' So watch and vote."

Comments

Direct link to 22nd century

[Mr_Perl]

For the browser-plugin challenged:

22nd Century
mplayer mms://wm.z1.mii-streaming.net/media/pbs/windows/ge neral/windows/22ndcentury/22ndcentury_384.wmv

(you'll have to remove a gap as entered by /.'s formatting "system")

While I'm watching that, anyone else feel like digging through the source for the others?

The videos

[ion_]

• Wired Science, 170 MiB
• Science Investigators, 299 MiB
• 22nd Century, 155 MiB

Re:no more 1hr documentaries

[maynard]

Have you compared the NOVA that is broadcast today with what was originally done in the late seventies through the eighties? It has been a pretty dramatic dumbing down over the last few decades. Nature and Frontline, though, are just as good as ever. So... yeah: You summed it up pretty nicely.

"So watch and vote."

[fyngyrz]

Better yet, turn the TV off, and read something like Wolfram's "A New Kind of Science", Dawkins "The God Delusion" or even something off the wall like McCutcheon's "The Final Theory", which will make you at least re-think what you know, though in the end you'll probably come to the same conclusion I did, which is, he's a crackpot. But a really clever one, especially if you read the whole book! :)

PBS... well, it isn't going to teach you any significant amount of science. It's 99.9% a complete waste of time, just like all the other pre-digested gee-whiz shows. If you want entertainment, by all means, head for the TV. But don't kid yourself that a TV show split over multiple subjects is going to be illuminating. It's just drool-fodder.