Sad news for BBC World Service

I listened to the latest episode of The World in Words and the BBC World Service is being cut. 5 languages are being eliminated and it looks like the Balkans are being hit particularly hard: Macedonian, Serbian and Albanian along with Portuguese for Africa and English for the Caribbean. Several more including Mandarin Chinese, Hindi and Russian will be internet only. The one that makes the most sense is they are greatly reducing their presence on shortwave, except for in Africa which shows the most use. The World Service is not only the single impartial news source for parts of the world (well, there's still Voice of America but they've been hit by cuts too and aren't as good, although it was naturally a BBC spokesperson who said this. But I think they are right), but they represent an important source of soft power for Britain.

Finally, some are concerned about what world government could move in to fill the vacuum left in the BBC's wake. The names floated were Iran, Russia, and China who, now that you mention it not surprisingly, have been moving to expand their broadcasts in other languages. They have a Swahili station that is widely listened to in Kenya. The problems with all of these of course is all of them are state mouthpieces. Iran would easily be the most egregious of the three.

There's some grim belt tightening going on in Britain currently. The Guardian Science Weekly podcast has been concerned about the freeze on science funding in the UK and the future of the Royal Society's book prize for science writing. The shortlist for last year can be found here. My favorite based purely on titles is We Need to Talk About Kelvin.

On a completely different topic (but it does concern beloved old England and science), I found a copy of Ken Russell's trippy should-have-been camp classic The Lair of the White Worm for a few bucks and bought it. I always preferred Ken Russell to Nicholas Roeg, the other director that springs to mind when discussing weird British filmmakers of the 70's and 80's. Wikipedia tells me among other things that Ken is 87 years old now and that Crimes of Passion was considered an all-around failure which is news to me. I think that movie is awesomely hilarious ("What are you going to do? Fuck somebody to death?" "Only the right girl." RIP, Tony Perkins.)

Anyways, White Worm. Roman snake gods, a classic performance by Amanda Donahoe, a young Hugh Grant, that chick from Dynasty being nearly violated by a wooden ceremonial dildo (that looked a lot like Tony Perkins' pointy tipped death vibrator in Crimes of Passion come to think of it), blasphemy. Good times. However, I blanched at the scene where the archeologist uncovers the skull of the white worm at a Roman dig site. His girlfriend asked, "Oh, the Romans didn't have pet dinosaurs?" "No," he says, "they were 25 million years apart." 25??? Try 65 million, minimum. Oh, Ken. I know the British school system is superior to ours. Yes, it's a stupid thing to get hung up on but it is still bugging me. At least he didn't say 6000 years ago. That seems to be almost entirely American idiocy thus far.

Finally, timelines. They are important. I always struggle with some of the early man dates. I got a book from the library called Science ASAP by Alan Axelrod that I think I'll have to end up owning. His section on the Bronze and Iron Ages is riveting. By 5000 BC, people were wearing copper ore ornaments. It took them 1000 years to figure out how to smelt copper ore. But some copper was harder than others and some was too soft to do anything practical with. We now know of course this was due to the impurities in the different samples. It took them another 1000 years, ~3000 BC, to figure out that smelting copper and tin together yielded the much tougher alloy bronze and the Bronze Age began.

They knew that there was a still tougher material, iron, but the only easily obtainable source of it was in meteorites (these were the only rocks where iron was not mixed with non-metallic substances and they were somewhat rare.) The problem was wood fires weren't sufficiently hot to free  iron from ore until ~1500 BC when the Hittites invented charcoal by burning wood in a low oxygen environment. Result: no flame but a much hotter fire. And voila.

This process never yielded a product as good as that found in those rare ferrous meteorites though. The smelting process was perfected over a few hundred years to cause the carbon from the fire to combine with the iron until carbonized steel was born ~1000 BC at the advent of the Iron Age. There was a great episode of Nova about the making of Samurai swords which explains some of this.

It's kind of amazing this all happened over millennia. It's more amazing because like many scientific discoveries, it likely resulted from someone paying attention during a happy accident.