"brass monkey" wrote in message
eb.com...

"Arfa Daily" wrote in message
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"Huge" wrote in message
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On 2013-01-07, geoff wrote:
In message , tim.....
writes

"Brian Gaff" wrote in message
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That Irish guy, if you mean Science club. I watched the first one and
thought, a bit infantile this, and watched the second one and it was
even more rubbishy. Surely there is more knowledge out there than
what he spouts. Its like going back to the Junior school.

Oh, I quite liked it

The truth of the matter is that we have a country that is so dumbed
down
that he has to aim at the lowest common denominator and people seem
embarrassed at any display of scientific knowledge or intelligence.
Dara
seems to be someone who is bucking the trend - good luck to him

Quite. I suspect the agenda of the show is to try and show that science
isn't as geeky as most of the public think.



But they already had a good show in that respect. It was called
Tomorrow's World (I was on it once .... )

Arfa

Selling burgers?



Nope. That's the missus's business ! I only get roped in on the building and
maintenance side of things.

At the time, I was employed as an engineer for an American company that
built very high end computer graphics engines, used mainly for CAD purposes
to design aircraft and so on. Back in the days of VAXs and PDP11s :-)

We had this bit of kit called 'Spacegraph' that produced a true
'holographic' 3D image that floated in space in front of your face. It was a
truly remarkable system, but was very expensive, and was a solution looking
for a problem, really. One of the sales guys had a contact at the Beeb, and
he got it on Tomorrow's World, hoping it would generate some interest, but
other than academic, it didn't. As far as I know, the sales demo unit was
eventually sold off cheap to some university in the UK, but I can't remember
which one. I seem to recall that there was some NASA project to radar-map
the surface of Venus from one of the Voyagers or some other sat at the time,
and that this university was involved. They were hoping to use the
Spacegraph for the visual output of the processed data. Soon after that, the
UK arm of the company was absorbed into our head to head competitors as part
of a reverse technology deal, and we all left and let them get on with it.
It would be a shame to think that Spacegraph was broken up for scrap in the
end. I like to think that it's sitting quietly in a university cellar
somewhere, waiting to be re-discovered ...

Arfa