Tag Archives: documentary

Whiffleball: Bill Hammack on the IBM Selectric

Integrated electronics make us forget about them.  Tiny packages with millions of transistors encapsulate so many functions so effectively that we don’t or can’t know what all they do.  This is a boon to manufacturers since repairing anything is all but impossible.  In the not-too-distant past, these functions or a small subset of them, had to be implemented in metal.  Techmoan does a stellar job of rediscovering old technology.  Prof. Bill Hammack of UIUC is also a master of this.  Here he explains how the whiffletree mechanism enabled the IBM Selectric typewriter to work its magic.  Beware – it is easy to lose a day watching his other videos and searching on the nuggets he finds.

Youtube Channel: Engineerguy

 

Where are they now?: Carol Meier on Voyagers 1 and 2

Narrator Carol Meier has a meticulously researched, splendidly detailed, and wonderfully delivered update on the twin Voyager spacecraft and their epic journey of discovery from Pasadena to the outskirts of the solar system.  It isn’t clear if this is a commissioned piece or one she did on spec.  It is engrossing either way.

Youtube Channel: Carol Meier

Fun damentals: RCSB’s Protein 101

These videos provide excellent overviews of proteins and enzymes – what they are and why they are important.  They are produced by the Research Collaboratory for Structural Bioinformatics (RCSB), a part of the worldwide Protein Data Bank Archive.  The RCSB site has additional educational information for non-specialists through its PDB-101 subdomain including curricula for teachers, video challenges for high school students, and a “molecule of the month” providing interactive views into complex protein structures.

Youtube Channel: RCSBProteinDataBank

Not just hot air: The GE MS9001E gas turbine

Without much further comment, here’s a very deep look into an industrial gas turbine engine. The CAD/CAM work is terrific and one wonders at the design and manufacturing effort put into just this one product.

[Edited 3 September 2018: Original video was taken down by the Youtube poster. Replaced with another link]
[Edited 6 January 2019: No longer available on the backup site, either.  Takedowns suspected]
[Edited 13 March 2019: Aaand it is back.  For now]

Youtube Channel: Ahmed Gaber

 

Giants of the Earth: Bethe, Dyson, and Knuth – oh, my!

The Web of Stories project finds legends of many disciplines and lets them speak at length about their lives and careers.   For years, one could only watch these on the project website and embed up to five videos.  This was an unfortunate limitation since these interviews are broken into well over a hundred short segments.  Now, WoS has uploaded a large fraction of its library to its Youtube channel with embeddable playlists.  Here are three leading lights of the past century, two of whom are still vigorous well into this one: Physicist Hans Bethe, polymath Freeman Dyson, and computer scientist Donald Knuth.  The breadth of their accomplishments and their constancy over decades is astonishing, their modesty likewise even though none  have anything to be modest about.

Youtube Channel: Web of Stories

Measure theory. And practice.

No, not mathematics.  Tools.  Tools which I’ve used for years but never thought about.  The vernier scale is incredibly clever.  Courtesy of The Museum of Our Industrial Heritage, Greenfield Massachusetts.

Youtube channel: Chris Clawson

Doppelgaenger: GE on Management

Management and Leadership are booming cargo-cult businesses.  Certifications in both can be had for a fee regardless of aptitude or ability.    Universities have created valuable profit-centers in this ‘market’ around their  charitable cocoons, touting their programs in airports, magazines, billboards, and online advertising.  Just about everyone in the modern workplace will either have to take a course in some aspect of this or be talked at by someone who has.  The material, to be charitable, is dumbed down to  irrelevance.  The examples are always shiftless or cantankerous employees not fully committed to the bottom line.   Orwell had it right

When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases — bestial, atrocities, iron heel, bloodstained tyranny, free peoples of the world, stand shoulder to shoulder — one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy: a feeling which suddenly becomes stronger at moments when the light catches the speaker’s spectacles and turns them into blank discs which seem to have no eyes behind them.
— George Orwell, Politics and the English Language

The old General Electric company recognized that developing managers means more than a handbook of HR-approved cliches.   This Capraesque short film does not solve but at least acknowledges the crushing bidirectional pressure aspiring and reluctant managers have faced and continue to face.   The protagonist is literally beside himself with stress and gets some medical help.  The ending is refreshingly ambiguous.  Sports fans of a certain age will recognize a young Heywood Hale Broun, long before his coat-of-many-colors phase.

Channel: Jeff Quitney at Vimeo
(New link added 2/2/20 following Jeff Quitney’s remastered upload to his Vimeo pages)

https://vimeo.com/388593822

Channel: Pathescope Productions at The Internet Archive
(Link updated 3/22/19 following Youtube’s deletion of Jeff Quitney’s channel)

 

Ashes to Ashes, Hirst to Hirst

Our last encounter — I remember it well.  Pavilion at Lord’s in ’39, against the West Indies.  Hutton and Compton batting superbly, Constantine bowling, war looming.
— Hirst to Spooner in ‘No Man’s Land’

Pinter, cricket fancier, named his “No Man’s Land” antagonists Hirst and Spooner after two well-known players.  The play nicely mirrors the game –  stretches of  groundwork and moments of  attack, usually ending in a draw.  At one time videos of the 1978 tv adaptation with Ralph Richardson and John Gielgud were available on the web [January 2018 Update: And are again – see below].   I downloaded a full version without knowing why.   The characters are unlikeable, their purposes unclear, and the author famously, contemptuously, refusing to answer any questions about his intentions and denying  meaning to any of it.   Like a lot of Pinter, it is hard to like yet it tends to stick.   I’ve seen three different stagings in person and this grainy recording from the videotape era is more vibrant and three-dimensional than any of them, even the overpraised Stewart/McKellen effort from 2013.   It works surprisingly well without the visuals.  I’ve taken the two Sirs on walks, cellphone in my pocket, headphones in my ear.  Their poetry made time and distance disappear for me as the Pinter does to their characters.

Here is a gem of a short film about the sport narrated by a younger Richardson.  The Pavilion at Lords features prominently as do Hutton and Compton, although not batting as superbly as in ’39.  England’s hope for the Ashes fell to ashes under the captaincy of  Australia’s legendary Donald Bradman.   A short clip from the tv production still on the web follows and then the author himself reading one of the most mournful and beautiful passages from it.

Channel: British Council

 

Channel: hildyjohnson

 

[Update 6 January 2018 – This full performance recently reappeared on the Johnny Cassettes channel]