Stephen Fry is a supreme technophile with the aura of a bookish technophobe. There is nobody better to present a documentary about early printing technology and how it changed the world. Great stuff – this is the first of six chunks.
via Kottke
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People have been saying some very nice things about Smashingtelly recently, so thank you to:
Fimoculous, who chose us as number 4 in their respected list of the best blogs of 2007.
Elle Magazine, who said that Smashingtelly was “the future of Television” in their March issue.
Will Not Be Televised, who also chose us in their top list for 2007.
Treehugger founder, Graham Hill, who chose Smashingtelly as one of his top 5 websites that provide him with inspiration at the PSFK conference.
A touching documentary about Ian Shaw, whose daughter died on the Swiss Air flight 111 from New York to Geneva in 1998. Shaw, a very successful Geneva business man, moved on his own to the site of the crash in Novia Scotia, where he bought a diner.
My wife, who is from near Geneva, had a friend who died on this flight, on his way home after a year traveling.
John Wheeler was a collaborator of Einstein who brought General Relativity out of ‘relative’ obscurity, and searched for a unified field theory. He dies in the same year that a major experimental milestone this search, the Large Hadron Collider, is switched on. There is a long interview of Wheeler preserved for prosperity on the fabulous People’s Archive. In this segment, after the link, he talks about coining the term ‘Black Hole’.
Edward Lorentz was the father of Chaos Theory, the person who discovered, the ‘Butterfly Effect’, hugely complex and unpredictable behaviors that appeared when the results of very simple ‘toy’ mathematical models of weather patterns were fed back into themselves. I can’t find a single video of Lorentz, unfortunately.
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A very good news feature piece about Tibet. Its a shame, but I can’t find anything this intelligent floating around about what is going on in Iraq.
48 mn 26 s
The celebrated film critic, Leslie Halliwell awarded the TV adaptation of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited 5 stars. Supposedly, it was the only TV program he ever gave 5 stars to. Here is a passable documentary about it.
This is the first of five parts.
For Wealth and Empire-NHD-Conflict and Compromise
This video, a State finalist, in National History Day looks at the history of massive scale government sanctioned drug dealing by the British in China, that created Hong Kong. I’m posting it after spotting the first, of what I think will be many, hand wringing pieces in newspapers about how China doesn’t share “Western Values” and is taking over the world. These articles will be trotted out as people get terrified by how modern China looks in Olympic TV coverage and continue to get worked up about Tibet while being bored by Iraq.
The Daily Mail, a UK national newspaper, is best described to an American audience a the kind of paper Lou Dobbs would read. Its a tabloid without the humor and a broadsheet without the brains. A couple of days ago, this Daily Mail fear piece on China became a minor Internet meme, hitting the front page on Digg etc. I’ll summarize: it suggests that an evil China that doesn’t share Western values, will inevitably take over the world and that American hegemony was preferable, if not as good as Britain’s.
Here is my summary of why this point of view is moronic and dangerous, based on the history that follows the video:
Britain’s obsession with cups of tea made its trade deficit with China a problem, rather like the US obsession with consuming Chinese made, injection molded, plastic crap from Walmart is currently doing the same. To solve this they grew Opium in India, shipped it East and pushed it illegally to the Chinese who bought it in exchange for the tea, thus eliminating the deficit.
The Chinese government went to war with the British to prevent them from drug dealing, and the British took control of Hong Kong, making it a modern capitalist outpost, when the Chinese disappeared into the productive black hole of the communist cultural revolution.
When the British lease on Hong Kong expired, the communist Chinese could not afford to lose its revenue, so they let it remain capitalist, with a buffer zone. Capitalism spread through the buffer zone and beyond. Chinese cities became like British industrial cities at the time when the British were pushing drugs on the Chinese.
While the communist Soviet Union had destroyed itself from within and communist China was rebuilding itself from without, the Americans and British were fighting against the people in Afghanistan that they supported against the communists – who were now funded by Opium which they sold illegally to places like Britain and America – how ironic.
In the US, t-shirts and lawnmowers and electric can openers and the Apple computer that I am writing this on, cost less than they did when the people that bought them were children. People were encouraged to buy some things that they didn’t need, and they became addicted to consumerism itself, which became the opiate of the masses. Since this drug was capitalism itself, it didn’t seem as threatening to society as black tar heroin. Americans borrowed money from banks who repackaged the debt and sold it to other banks as an asset. Banks became addicted to the money to be made from bundling up more and more packaged assets and shaving off a commission, without really knowing what was inside the package.
The money that was loaned to people to buy injection molded crap from China, was made with the same thing that you put in your tank to drive to Walmart to buy it, and was secured on the value of your home and mortgage based on other homes in a package that the bank hadn’t opened. So when the value of your home collapses for one of the first times in history, because of mortgage commitments that were worth nothing but people hadn’t checked, when the gas in your tank goes up, while you are at war with the people in the region where the gas comes from, when the cost of the injection molded crap goes up because inflation and wages increase in China and when the Chinese rub our faces in it with gleaming new airports and stadia and high speed trains, as we watch the Olympics – newspapers like the Daily Mail will bleat “but they don’t share our values”.
Because of our own history, we are not always in a position to complain about China’s values in the West, but we don’t need to sell the Chinese Opium to stop the bleeding this time. If the US economy stumbles badly, so does China’s. The globalization that the zenophobic Daily Mail is a right-wing opponent of, consists of the shared economic values that hold us together.
Ibiza – A Short Film About Chilling
What makes this film important is the timing, sitting between the acid and the ecstasy. It was made in 1990, after Acid House, before the Ministry of Sound, and a decade before binge drinking would once more replace illegal narcotics as the opiate of the masses. In England, house music moved from fields in Essex and impromptu nights in old Warehouses to permanent, alcohol free, clubs under Victorian arches in places like Southwark in South London. These damp, dark, or damp and dark surroundings could not have been more different from the sunshine and stucco of a small island in the Mediterranean that was to become the unlikely holiday home for House. Ibiza decreed mighty, 24 hour, thomping nightclubs, measureless to man and became a cultural phenomenon for today’s social anthropologists to look back on. For some of the people in this film it was apparently their ‘first trip outside of England’.
36 mn 53 s 29 oct. 2006
imdb.com