James Burke: Connections, Episodes 1-10 (1978) [video] | Hacker News Reader

James Burke: Connections, Episodes 1-10 (1978) [video]

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159 pointsrfreytag42 comments

I've always been fascinated by his follow up series "the day the universe changed". He points out that as our beliefs and understandings shift, our universally perceived reality changes.

He demonstrates this with a witch burning three hundred years ago. Those people believed that everything the felt and did was absolutely justified - if not required - by the universe they inhabited.

It has always made me wonder what a future society will not be able to relate to how we live now. Personally, I suspect eating meat will be off the table, as it were. (And I say this as a carnivore with a tin of bacon fat in the fridge.)

When informing people whom they should vote for (I can be annoying like that) I try to get them to vote for someone that can inch us to the future they want to see.

Not surprisingly, universal healthcare, decreased poverty and things that taste like bacon but aren't really bacon are all things people seem to expect in 1000 years.

I try to get them to vote for someone that can inch us to the future they want to see.

I don't mean to get too political. But I want to point out the widespread fallacy that our increasing scientific understanding of the world around us will somehow enable us to engineer a better social order.

Things like society and the economy are emergent phenomena. They're incredibly complex, involving (literally) countless forces that tug at various phenomena in unforeseeable ways. Because of their distributed nature, it's impossible for any entity to have access to the entire set of data that the system is operating on, and thus impossible to direct it with any confidence. And because of its vast interconnectivity, its also impossible for us to make changes to its infrastructure without changing the effects of those forces.

The complexity of these things is no less than the complexity of the human organism. It seems pretty well accepted that it would be absurd folly to engineer changes into that organism; even tweaking around the margins is fraught. We should be every bit as wary of meddling with the operation of our society or economy.

That sounds pretty defeatist; you can't stay inactive just because you lack 100% certainty, especially if someone else is meddling in a manner contrary to your long-term interests.

I doubt meat will be off the table. If anything I expect it to be there so long as there's an economical meats to produce it. Global warming may end it's consumption among the middle class, but I bet there will be restaurants in the future that boost of serving burgers as it is was gourmet. Hah, that would be a trip.

Lobsters, at least the American kind, used to be considered trash food. Even prisoners rioted to avoid being served it.

But then the fish stocks got depleted, and various restaurants started putting them on the menu...

Regarding meat, I think lab grown meat will replace "real" meat. I guess it can be produced more cheaply, it's ethically clean, and it's a lot less disgusting to think about where it comes from.

To my ear, Connections hangs on the conceptual nail that that future is already being formed and nudging people towards it may or may not have any affect. It nearly screams "change is like a lightning bolt but one that may take a long time."

It's one of the most Whiggish-progress things I can think of. For me, this is Useful because it makes it less frustrating when I try to advocate for change. The last 200 years are vanishingly close to inexplicable in terms of the rest of human history.

The witch inquiry was an amazing example of how cause & effect changed over time.

"Did you not have angry words with him, and his cow later became ill?"

Thanks, now i have Soylent Green passing before my eyes...

Absolutely amazing series. The conclusion is mind-bogglingly relevant to 2016, despite being delivered almost 40 years ago, in a room of "the world's most powerful computers", all vastly less powerful than what we carry in our pockets today.

I was already radicalised* by the time I saw the series only 10 or so years ago, but the last episode had me on my feet, pointing at the television, shouting, "He warned us! He warned us!"

* by software freedom :-)

His episode on the corporate office sadly had it ass backwards though. Rather than computers making managers simply executors of the computed plan, they, via robotics, replaced much the workforce instead.

BTW, the ending of the last episode was shot in one take. At the very last moment he was finding himself standing with one foot in an anthill no less. Now thats dedication to ones craft.

I loved the old Myst-like Connections game.

Might take some work to figure out how to run this on modern hardware, but I found it on myabandonware[0] if anyone's interested. They do have a guide[1] for how to play it.

I also just discovered there was a clip from it in recently-released and HN-discussed The Witness!

[0]: http://www.myabandonware.com/game/connections-3i2 [1]: http://www.myabandonware.com/howto/#mac

Fantastic series - I remember watching this as a kid with my dad, and reading the book of the same name over and over. One of my fondest memories.

I remember my dad boring me to death with it until one day I paid attention and he went from a cannonball to the invention of television and I was hooked. Rented them all from Netflix a few years ago to introduce my wife to them.

Me too. Up there with the first Cosmos.

I worry about archive.org's long term health, if people continue posting clearly under-copyright media. If I recall correctly, they operate on a fairly limited budget, so defending one mega-lawsuit could kill them. They don't have technical or legal resources that Google leverages to manage such content on YouTube.

Are they at risk of copyright infringement? I thought I'd seen the rights reverted to Burke himself. At one point I had a youtube subscription to a channel of all the episodes that was posted by James Burke. Felt like his interest was in making them permanently available, not in making money.

It's possible there's something exceptional about Connections, but in general there's a lot of copyrighted material on there. It's a real problem if you're looking for genuinely public domain stuff. I'm not sure how archive.org would go about fixing this though.

I don't know about this particular issue, but the Internet Archive actually has a special exemption from the DMCA for bypassing copyright protection in the games it holds. It's actually designated a library in California and no doubt has a few lawyers who would happily represent them if something untoward happens.

Most likely, at worst, the Archive will be notified that it can't host the material and take it down (and I strongly suspect that Burke wouldn't do that). I find it hard to think there will be any major assault on it after all these years and it's long-standing reputation.

This series (the first series at least) is one of my favorite documentary series of all time. I've always been vaguely interested in history but usually in terms of the occasional specific topic or passing interest. The way this series dives into history in terms of interconnections rather than chronology makes it immensely more engaging. I watched the entire thing over the course of a couple of weeks maybe 10 years ago and enjoyed every bit.

Chances are, this sort of presentation is a bit too close to "pop history" or layman's terms for serious history scholars but in the same way that Cosmos brought a lot of physics, astronomy, and cosmology to an audience that may not have much background knowledge, I found Connections to be a great way to learn about history in an engaging way.

I never did get around to watching later series but with this reminder, maybe I'll dig around for it (especially since I seem to have exhausted my supply of shows to binge-watch on Netflix and Amazon).

Thanks for posting this link! I've been playing and thoroughly enjoying The Witness these past couple of weeks; it seems like this series might be relevant to follow up with, to bring some perspective on the experience.

It was just so delightful when I saw his face fade in and snark at the puzzle. The clip reminded me about Connections, and I just figured it was unavailable online (dumb assumption, but it can be a hassle navigation all those broadcaster sites). Finding out it's on Archive.org is just a great way to welcome the weekend!

The closest I've ever seen a show get to the brilliance of Connections was Steven Johnson's "How We Got to Now" - http://www.pbs.org/show/how-we-got-now/

It's not bad. He could have used better direction.

It does have one of my favorite technology hobby-horses - clean water. We don't think about how recent it is. We may or may not realize how dangerous not having it was.

I hate to say this, but Burke is simply a better performer and Connections was more of an outlier because of when it first showed.

I think it helps that Burke has the deadpan British delivery, and its not spruced up for the "reality tv" generation (cuts, animations, piles of piles of distracting eyecandy). Much of it is just Burke talking, walking, and providing the occasional simple demonstration.

Yeah - and that "deadpan" is laced with copious amounts of both earnestness and irony. I'd also guess it was done with a smaller 16MM camera, which looks "newsreelish" and somehow signals credibility to me.

To my eye, it's "this is less about what you see than what is said."

I thought so too I just watched it on Netflix.

I like how he or maybe it was Burke linked sand, glass, grape presses, books, eyeglasses, telescope, and microscopes.

Nice. Never heard of it. Its always great to know how technology was perceived in 90s and what we have evolved into.

PS: while searching for "the trigger effect burke" in Google, stumbled upon http://www.dominoprinciple.com/2015/02/15/connections-trigge...

Whats even better is that the show was made in the '70s

Connections holds up really well and Burke's presentation is great.

Additionally, I really love the more "film-style" production they relied on in the absence of easy non-linear editing and digital effects. That's not to say I am against those things because I do a bit of video production work and they're immensely helpful. Still, it was nice to see how skilled production was carried out using a style and technique that's not as common anymore.

Likely because they first encountered it on PBS, some Americans are unaware Connections was a BBC production: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Connections_(TV_series)

Even less known these days (by Americans, at least) is that Connections was but one of many extraordinary educational science series that the BBC produced in the 1970's.

Original footage of one of the best of these was recently rediscovered and finally made available on the web: Look Around You: Season 1 Pilot - Calcium

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FBaVwwuErmU

Watching it again today, it's hard to understate the positive impact this series had on British science education, and the obvious "leg up" it gave for Britain's technological prowess.

Not from that era, but I love BBC's "Shock and Awe: The Story of Electricity"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtp51eZkwoI

This series is a must-see. I haven't seen anything as detailed as this series. It's easy to follow regardless of all the great details. Really worth your while!

Try to track down How We Got To Now (http://www.pbs.org/show/how-we-got-now/), it was a science series PBS aired a couple years ago and it's absolutely fantastic. It's very much in the style of Connections and follows how one invention led to another and another, etc. I'm pretty sure I remember reading the producers say they wanted to make a spiritual successor to Connections.

I love this series, along with The Day the Universe Changed.

Also on Archive.org [1], although there doesn't appear to be a search collection.

[1] https://archive.org/search.php?query=the%20day%20the%20unive...

Absolutely fantastic show. The opening of chapter 1 is placed on the NYC WTC Building, and 9 minutes into the chapter is a flight 911... he, he for all you conspiracy/Nostradamus freaks.

I will never forge his episode about warfare technology. He described a thousand warriors coming down a hill with another thousand enemy coming down another hill. He was standing in that valley for the scene.

The new technology was broadswords. Each side hacked the other side into pieces. And then to demonstrate that, he had a side of beef (?) hanging and he hacked it with a broadsword. I will never get that image out of my mind.

This is one of the best series around

There are 3 seasons, they might be torrent-able, I am not admitting anything :/

Eh, it's how I originally watched it maybe 10 years ago when I couldn't find it anywhere else and someone strongly recommended it to me. Glad to see at least some of it on archive.org which would suggest the licensing and legality are sorted out.

This is (at least in part) how I became a geek :)

He wrote a column in Scientific American too.

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