
James Burke: Connections, Episodes 1-10 (1978) [video] - rfreytag
https://archive.org/search.php?query=collection%3A%28opensource_media%29+AND+subject%3A%28connections%29+AND+subject%3A%28burke%29&sort=titleSorter
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salgernon
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.

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CWuestefeld
_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.

~~~
xsmasher
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.

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jdub
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 :-)

~~~
digi_owl
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.

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

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doctat
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.

~~~
tclancy
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.

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akeck
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.

~~~
tclancy
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.

~~~
Joeboy
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.

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soylentcola
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).

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tobr
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.

~~~
HCIdivision17
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!

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tclancy
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/](http://www.pbs.org/show/how-we-got-now/)

~~~
ArkyBeagle
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.

~~~
digi_owl
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.

~~~
ArkyBeagle
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."

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LaFolle
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...](http://www.dominoprinciple.com/2015/02/15/connections-trigger-
effect-james-burke/)

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

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

~~~
soylentcola
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.

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nkurz
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)](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](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.

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

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtp51eZkwoI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gtp51eZkwoI)

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tobiaswk
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!

~~~
tdicola
Try to track down How We Got To Now ([http://www.pbs.org/show/how-we-got-
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.

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

~~~
andyjohnson0
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...](https://archive.org/search.php?query=the%20day%20the%20universe%20changed)

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725686
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.

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mchahn
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.

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tinfoilman
This is one of the best series around

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

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soylentcola
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.

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

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selimthegrim
He wrote a column in Scientific American too.

