Today on the blog: a TV show recommendation. Season 2 of Going Deep with David Rees started last week and I think it’s a really good show. The basic idea of each episode is that David is trying to figure out how to do something. Something simple, like how to make an ice cube, because it turns out that even simple things are actually really complex and interesting when you break them down. While that premise is immediately interesting to me, one of the things I like best about the show is its warm sense of humor and an open and sincere quest for knowledge of everyday life. It’s this same sense of wonder and propensity for questioning things around me that initially made me want to be a scientist (and now, study how people learn science).
David Rees is a well-known artisanal pencil sharpener. Ok, maybe not well-known to a large number of people, but still, if you send him a pencil he will sharpen it by hand for you. He wrote a book on How To Sharpen Pencils, so he probably knows what he’s talking about. He is probably actually more well-known for being the person responsible for the political cartoon Get Your War On which, at least for me, made the post-9/11 George W Bush years slightly more bearable.
Season 1 of GDDR focused on important questions like How to Open a Door, How to Flip a Coin, How to Shake Hands, and How to Dig a Hole. Those might sound like silly topics for a show, and they are to a certain extent, but that’s not really what episode is totally about.
Sadly, season 1 is not available to stream anywhere at the moment, but it’s not too late to get on the bandwagon for season 2. The first episode was about How to Pet a Dog and tonight’s second episode was about How to Eavesdrop. Tonight’s episode was a really good example of how they can take a simple question and expand it into a really interesting and engaging sciencey show.
How to Eavesdrop is not really about eavesdropping perse. It is about sound. Which is one of my favorite physics topics. As David says in the episode, “how do sound waves get turned into something my brain recognizes as sound?”. Even though he talks to a former CIA spy about actual eavesdropping, the heart of the episode (to me, at least) is talking to the audiologist and learning how the ear works and talking to the cognitive scientist about how we interpret sound waves to understand speech. They even talked about the McGurk illusion which is fascinating and is also something I wrote about on this very blog about four years ago. And, to make my little academic heart even happier, GDDR popped up a citation to the McGurk et al. paper when they talked about it!
If you’re looking for a fun and engaging bit of science on your TV (or computer), you should definitely check this show out.
Cynthia D'Angelo 