James Burke can play the guitar!

While searching YouTube to find the segment (maybe in Connections) where Jame Burke talks about plate tectonics and Wegner (long story) I found this video. Amazing!

Fun with weightlessness over 50 years

James Burke in 1969

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Weightless astronauts and fluids 1973

NASA cat and astronauts, 1980s

Kevin Bacon and Bill Paxton rehearse for the movie "Apollo 13" in 1995

OK Go music video 2016

Space exploration & James Burke

Eleven years ago I was excited to find videos of James Burke talking about the US space exploration project. Including footage of Burke riding the "Vomit Comet."

I just discovered some excellent person has put this hour-long compilation of James Burke space content - including video documentation that Burke had, at one point in the past, hair.

This compilation includes part of the Vomit Comet footage. James Burke sure loved being weightless.

More great stuff from James Burke

BBC: Connections (1978) - The Wheel of Fortune (5/10) from Markus Kocher on Vimeo.

Patriotism postponed

The Burke show is worth watching just for this
explanation of space ship navigation techniques alone.

Looks like I'm not making it to Philly today - I have postponed my get-out-the-vote trip until next month.

In the meantime, I have re-discovered the work of James Burke, which I do every four years or so. He usually does series but he did this fascinating one-off from 1979 called The Men Who Walked on the Moon. He explains the basics of how lunar spacecraft and rockets work. As Spaulding Gray said in Swimming to Cambodia - leave it to a Brit to explain American history to an American.

Jim Lovell makes an appearance along with the men who actually walked on the moon - Lovell was portrayed by Tom Hanks in the movie Apollo 13 - and in just a brief clip it's clear that Lovell is one of the more witty and personable astronauts.

And if you've seen Apollo 13 you're be especially fascinated by the middle of this program, which talks about the things that went wrong. I found it especially interesting to see how this documentary matched up with the movie - it mostly did, although the other two astronaut's response to the crises was much more relaxed in real life than in the movie, according to the interview with Lovell in this documentary. Apparently Haise and Swigert were very confident in Lovell's and NASAs ability to rescue them and so instead were both concerned about taking photos of the dark side of the moon - according to Lovell they were both fiddling with their camera settings soon after the tank explosion.

Towards the end of the video you'll learn more than you'll ever want to know about how astronauts poop in space.

And at the very end, Burke rants about the end of the space program - he's really annoyed by the end of deep space exploration.

You can watch the whole thing here.

Medieval Lives

I just discovered Terry Jones' BBC TV series Medieval Lives. It's informative and fun, in the best BBC series tradition pioneered by James Burke. Here's the first episode:

Jones is best known for being a member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, so I kept hoping that in this episode on the peasant he'd reference the Holy Grail movie, but no such luck. But if you've seen Grail then several parts of Medieval Lives will remind you of it. Including this, my favorite seen of the entire Grail - and that's saying something. Jones himself plays a (female) peasant in this scene.

DENNIS THE PEASANT 

Listen, strange women lying in ponds distributing swords is no basis for a system of government. Supreme executive power derives from a mandate from the masses, not from some farcical aquatic ceremony. You can't expect to wield supreme executive power just cause some watery tart threw a sword at you. I mean, if I went round saying I was an Emperor just because some moistened bint lobbed a scimitar at me, they'd put me away.

the Concorde-Connections irony

So I'm re-watching the James Burke series Connections, first produced in the late 1970s with benefit of almost 40 years worth of hindsight, and because of that, noticed an irony in episode six. The episode, "Thunder in the Skies" recounts all the technological innovations required to create the internal combustion engine leading to cars and airplanes.

At the end of the episode, James Burke recounts the efforts of Wilhelm Kress to create an airplane. Burke explains that thanks to debris in its path, the Kress plane crashed.

Interesting to note that the Wikipedia article on Kress cite's the book version of Connections as its only reference.

The episode ends with James Burke on top of the Concorde which was in commercial service by 1976, so the new exciting thing in air travel when the episode was filmed.

The Concorde was taken out of service in in 2003 due to low passenger numbers as a direct result of the crash of flight 4590 in 2000.

Burke recounts  Kress's failure in a humorous, mocking way:

In 1901 Kress launched his contraption, and, massive engine (too massive) chugging, he spluttered along, far too slow to skip over some debris he suddenly saw, floating in his path. Ah, the rewards of genius. 

(Sound of a crash) 

Still other people did take up the idea of using an engine the way Kress had - well, not quite. It was to be another 30 years or so before the gasoline motorcar engine was dropped in favor of another one, and even then the new one still used Mayboch's fuel system and the scent spray idea. The latest versions of that engine cruise along, carrying hundreds of people at speeds that Kress could never have thought possible. They cross the oceans of the world without a thought for floating debris... so that's where this trail of events has brought us... the direct modern descendent... of Wilhelm Kress's failure is this - the Concorde.  (shot of Burke on the Concorde) The modern jet aircraft and all that implies. Because what Wilhelm Kress was trying to do was to get a sea plane off the water of the lake in Austria. And had he done so he would have beaten the Wright brothers' first flight by two years. And instead of a couple of American bicycle mechanics, all the glory - or the blame - would have gone to an Austrian piano-maker who dreamed he could fly.

The episode ends at that point with a model of Kress's airplane behind the credits.

But apparently it wasn't only Kress who was beaten by the debris-at-take-off problem... according to Wikipedia's entry on the Concorde:

According to the official investigation conducted by the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses pour la Sécurité de l'Aviation Civile (BEA), the (2000 flight 4590) crash was caused by a titanium strip that fell from a Continental Airlines DC-10 that had taken off minutes earlier. This metal fragment punctured a tyre on Concorde's left main wheel bogie during takeoff. The tyre exploded, a piece of rubber hit the fuel tank, and while the fuel tank was not punctured, the impact caused a shock-wave which caused one of the fuel valves in the wing to burst open. This caused a major fuel leak from the tank, which then ignited due to sparking electrical landing gear wiring severed by another piece of the same tyre. The crew shut down engine number 2 in response to a fire warning, and with engine number 1 surging and producing little power, the aircraft was unable to gain height or speed. The aircraft entered a rapid pitch-up then a violent descent, rolling left and crashing tail-low into the Hotelissimo Hotel in Gonesse.[135] On 6 December 2010, Continental Airlines and John Taylor, one of their mechanics, were found guilty of involuntary manslaughter.[136]

I guess Kress has the last, bitter laugh.

Connections: The Trigger Effect

I don't think it's possible to over-estimate the importance of James Burke's televisions series - Connections and The Day the Universe Change - on my intellectual development. His approach to the development of technology has the one-thing-leads-to-another approach of anthropologist Marvin Harris in his books on anthropology. And the focus on the ways that technology shapes human culture.

The entire Connections series is now available free online. The video embed above is the first of the series (in five video segments) and it's fascinating to watch all these years after the first time I saw it in the early 1980s. I could watch this kind of thing for hours on end - it's mental catnip.

An interesting note about this episode is that the opening segment is James Burke walking outside and inside of the World Trade Center. At 0:41 we can see The Sphere, a sculpture that was beat up during the collapse of the WTC. It is now on display in Battery Park- I didn't realize it until I took a walk one day during lunch hour when I was working near Wall Street this summer, and happened on it in the Park:

James Burke and Apollo 13

Youtube is SUCH a treasure trove of James Burke stuff! Here is a clip which includes James Burke's commentary during the radio blackout moment, when Apollo 13 was re-entering the atmosphere, but due to the technical problems during the flight, nobody was sure if the heat shields would hold up. If they hadn't, the astronauts would have been fried alive. The re-entry section of the video clip starts around minute 1:30.

You can watch the same moment in the movie Apollo 13 here. I cry at the end of this movie every damn time.

James Burke rides the "Vomit Comet"

This is too cool.

Although it makes me a little sad... the only person I personally know who enjoys the work of James Burke, who was also a big fan of Connections and The Day the Universe Changed, is my ex-boyfriend John, whom I haven't spoken to in 10 years. I know he would get a big kick out of seeing James Burke floating around weightless.

Moon missions

I've been really enjoying Discovery Channel's When We Left Earth, currently being shown on the Science channel. I'm also a big fan of the movie Apollo 13, which details the trouble that mission experienced. I wasn't aware of how many problems and near misses that the other missions ran into, including Apollo 11, the mission that first landed on the moon. Apparently Buzz Aldrin or Neil Armstrong bumped into the lunar module's control panel and broke off the control switch that turned on the lunar module's engines. Aldrin had to jam a pen into the control to make the engine start. Yikes. Is it me, or does it seem like NASA was always jury-rigging some life-and-death situation? Like this sequence from Apollo 13, which is one of my favorites in the film - the CO2 crisis which you can see on this clip on youtube. This clip, by the way, is what inspired Cathy Rogers, (formerly a member of the band Heavenly, my friend Phoebe Summersquash toured with them) to create the TV show Junkyard Wars.

I had forgotten that James Burke, author/host of Connections and The Day the Universe Changed was a commentator during the NASA missions. You can see James Burke in this clip at minute 1:05, talking about the oxygen supply crisis. Ooh! I just found a clip from Burke's BBC show about the space program. I love youtube. You can watch a clip from Connections here.

James Burke is my pen pal. I wrote to him in the early 1990s, before I had email, and thanked him for influencing my decision to buy a Macintosh. (I also had a huge crush on him, even though he was older and balding.) He wrote back, by snail mail. I'll have to find it in my box of memorabilia and scan it and put it online one of these days.

Ooh! James Burke Fan Companion! I love the Internets.

Here's James Burke's web site today - he has his own Institute now.

There is an entire library of moon mission video clips on one of NASA's web sites.