A TV show, of all things

[TC Chris]

I'm the guy who doesn't have a TV but my sister alerted me to this Nova program and I just watched it online. It should appeal to the electronics/engineering inner nerds in most of us who tinker with old electronics and mechanics.

> https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/video/augmented/

It's a program about development of proprioceptive (is that a word?) artificial limbs. A young man, a rock climber, is lost in the wilderness and loses his legs to cold. One of the searchers was killed in an avalanche. The amputee resolves to make his life worthwhile as compensation for the searcher's death and becomes an engineer working in prosthetics at MIT. After the Boston Marathon bombing, a surgeon decided there must be a better way to amputate so as to preserve the possibility of adapting functional replacement parts. Those two and their associates work with amputees to create highly functional devices. The two rock climbers featured in the video can return to rock climbing, more capably than before. It's astonishing.

I just watched the whole thing. Ninety minutes in the company of remarkably bright and thoughtful people. Can't beat that.

We humans are such an odd species. There are evil folks in the world who can make us despair. But then there are people like these, filled with competency, decency, and determination, and they redeem us.

Chris Campbell

[William]

Unbelievable. Thanks, Chris.

Bill

[Firedome]

As Newton Minnow once said TV is a vast wasteland, but with the overwhelming glut of stuff on TV, if one is very selective there's some excellent programming. We've never had cable or satellite or Netflix etc, only free over-the-air TV. We watch PBS 98% of the time as the ads on commercial stations drive me crazy, so it[s public TV with the rare exception of very occasional views of '50s/60s classics on MeTV in order to wallow in nostalgia. When the 3 kids were at home they were allowed 1 hour of PBS a day: Reading Rainbow, Carmen SanDiego (geography), Nova and Newton's Apple (science), Nature, Wild America, Masterpiece (classic literature). It pays to pick & choose, and seems to have paid off in the long run: 2 are now scientists (medicine and physics) and 1 an archeologist (with FEMA).

[hermitcrab]

Reminds me of the old Bruce Springsteen song ... 57 channels and nothing on.... now it is up to about 500 ... and still nothing on

[William]

So true, Elton, so true. What's worse, we pay big money for nothing to watch.

Bill

[Firedome]

We don't pay a cent! Just get out the ol' antenna.