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For some reason some people are incredibly hostile to this suggestion, but I think the BBC has dumbed down pretty drastically over the years - and this can be p

For some reason some people are incredibly hostile to this suggestion, but I think the BBC has dumbed down pretty drastically over the years - and this can be pretty easily verified by comparing their output from decades past with today's. Older popular science TV programmes sometimes even had - shock horror! - in depth discussion of actual mathematical equations. By contrast, I watched a Brian Cox space series recently in which I recall a single mention of maths, and that was a few animated formulae floating around a beautifully rendered planetary scene as graphics without real explanation, whilst some dreamy ambient synth music played in the background. There's a massive difference in style, content, sophistication of ideas presented, and density of information. The new stuff poses as educational, but delivers very little proper detail. Apart from that, I think that surely it would have served this woman's memory far better to tell us the details of what she achieved, and how her work has been built on, rather than making her victimhood the main thrust. I'll bet she'd have preferred to be remembered as a mathematician rather than a victim.

bonoboTP 7y ago
(Public) TV used to be much more intellectual in several countries (including my own, Hungary). Partially because there weren't so many alternatives to compete with. The managers could afford to not care about dumbing it down and people watched it in lieu of more gratifying things. Clickbait and instant gratification is now the norm and if you don't keep up, you just won't be able to attract enough viewers. Now theoretically publicly funded channels and publications could just ignore viewership/readership numbers, but their management style has also become much more commercial. "Who wants to be a millionaire" used to be incredibly popular in many countries (it was huge in Hungary). In that show sometimes half a minute is just a person thinking in silence, staring at some question about medieval history or about an opera. How many people would watch this nowadays?
- growlist 7y ago
  Thing is there were plenty of programmes on TV when I was younger that would have had a tiny viewership even back then, and were shown as they fulfilled the required 'boring but worthy' percentage of the BBC's output - these have almost all disappeared to be replaced by facsimiles that pretend to be the same thing but are nothing close.

bonoboTP 7y ago

(Public) TV used to be much more intellectual in several countries (including my own, Hungary). Partially because there weren't so many alternatives to compete with. The managers could afford to not care about dumbing it down and people watched it in lieu of more gratifying things. Clickbait and instant gratification is now the norm and if you don't keep up, you just won't be able to attract enough viewers. Now theoretically publicly funded channels and publications could just ignore viewership/readership numbers, but their management style has also become much more commercial. "Who wants to be a millionaire" used to be incredibly popular in many countries (it was huge in Hungary). In that show sometimes half a minute is just a person thinking in silence, staring at some question about medieval history or about an opera. How many people would watch this nowadays?

growlist 7y ago
Thing is there were plenty of programmes on TV when I was younger that would have had a tiny viewership even back then, and were shown as they fulfilled the required 'boring but worthy' percentage of the BBC's output - these have almost all disappeared to be replaced by facsimiles that pretend to be the same thing but are nothing close.