Phil Plait destroys the earth 23 Jul 2010 The Bad Astronomer has a TV show! Bad Universe: [youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yiSJ73pckw4] I hope it gets to Australia before the Big One hits. [Why can’t we do a philosophy show like this? Oh, wait…] Education General Science Humor
Evolution NYT article on genes 10 Nov 2008 Here, by the incredibly young, handsome and way too successful Carl Zimmer, late of the Seed stable. Carl brings to mind my favourite Truman Capote saying: It is not enough to succeed. Friends must be seen to have failed. Anyway, go read the bastard’s excellent essay. I will just sit… Read More
Ecology and Biodiversity The mind of the ecological engineer 27 Oct 201127 Oct 2011 I watched a very interesting documentary episode recently, entitled “All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace” (a phrase of poet Richard Brautigan’s), in which the maker Adam Curtis put forward the view that ecology was founded (at least in its modern iteration) in direct analogy with the view of… Read More
We could do a philosophy show like this. One episode could examine the best methods for dealing with an outbreak of P-Zombies. Much gunfire and explosions would be used. Note that P-Zombies can be destroyed by head shots and decapitation. The next episode will deal with issues in the philosophy of science, including what to do when you are attacked by a horde of purple ravens, and if you are in a dark room with blue walls how not to be eaten by grues. Then we’ll have Johnny Depp in a special guest appearance in Curse of the Ship of Theseus. There’s plenty of material for a show on philosophy.
Get started on the script, while I find a producer… Just promise me that you won’t make Chalmers the presenter. Bastard’s way too camera-friendly…
Well, Eliezer Yudkowsky’s already proposed a script for a movie with P-Zombie villains: http://lesswrong.com/lw/pn/zombies_the_movie/ Maybe parts of that could be adopted for a TV episode.
On BBC radio a short while ago, they had a two-part philosophy series about the trolley problem called “Would you kill the big guy?” It was done in a pretty accessible manner without sacrificing content. What I’d love to see actually is a video production of David Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion.
You could do a “live like Diogenes” reality show. If you’d include the masturbation in public bit, it would be a sure fire hit.
It is hard to see how a philosophy show could fit in enough explosions to attract the attention of the proto-geeks. You guys don’t even demolish arguments anymore. You dissolve problems. Just doesn’t work on television. But Kel may be right about what might work. Dialogs. A series consisting of college bullsessions. Photogenic youth in a co-ed dorm struggling with the Big Questions. Throw in some humor, some character development, a little romance, and a good repertory cast, and you have something which just might be watchable. It would take some damn-good script-writing, though. And it can’t succeed if it seems preachy or partisan. So, Kel, as much as I like Hume’s “Dialogs”, I don’t think that something so one-sided will draw and hold an audience.
Off topic, but it relates to today: I liked your Venice header (or banner, or whatever it’s called) better. The colors remind me of “zombie day” in Sb.