Harnessing the Wind, Saving Libraries

There’s a lovely article over at Brain Pickings about William Kamkwampa, a 14 year old forced to drop out of school but who used his local library and a bunch of scrap parts to MacGyver a windmill that provides electricity to his Malawian village (another example of why we need libraries!).

The story has now been turned into a children’s book, with the added twist that, for every e-book read at We Give Books, a physical book will be donated to a library in Africa, supporting both literacy and the entrepreneurship represented by William Kamkwampa. It’s a fantastic initiative inspired by a fantastic story and it’s well worth checking out.

 

Happy Birthday Richard Dean Anderson: A Tribute to MacGyver

In my last post, I talked about the importance of TV shows that make being smart aspirational, that inspire interest in subjects like science and engineering. Well, to honour the birthday of Richard Dean Anderson, here’s a tribute to one of those shows.

MacGyver has become iconic because of a simple but fundamentally cool premise – the idea that a secret agent could carry out his duties not through guns and violence but by being incredibly well versed in physics and chemistry. An agent picking a lock with a skeleton key is routine; when MacGyver escapes a cell using a lightbulb it becomes cool.

That’s why the show is remembered – Anderson’s likeable, easy-going performance of a guy who can turn pinecones into hand grenades. It would be easy to turn a character like that into an arrogant Schwartzenegger type, using junk to rain down vengeance on his enemies, but Anderson plays against that – MacGyver genuinely loves science and engineering and hates guns because of the destruction they cause. He’s a builder, a creator, a scientist, not a killer, not someone who exists only to tear things down. The world may be a better place because James Bond is around; communities are better places for MacGyver’s presence.

Of course, the question that always comes up is whether or not any of MacGyver’s improvisations would actually work. Well, another fantastic show, Mythbusters (which, in a perfect geek coincidence, was also born on January 23rd), checked this out, finding that the smaller scale stuff worked (like fixing a broken wire with chewing gum foil), while bigger tricks (making a glider out of wood and an old car engine) would be… Well, impossible.

And yet that doesn’t matter, because the important thing about MacGyver wasn’t that we thought his tricks were possible (we hoped, of course, but deep down we all know there’s such a thing as artistic licence) but that it promoted a way of thinking – watching the show, you immediately turn to the person next to you and start arguing about whether or not you could stop leaking acid with chocolate. And that’s a basis for scientific inquiry – asking questions, applying knowledge, figuring stuff out and using your imagination. It doesn’t matter whether or not you can plug a leaky car radiator with egg yolk – it matters that you’re asking the question.

So happy birthday, Mr. Anderson, and thanks for MacGyver, a show that demonstrated the coolness of science, engineering and Swiss Army Knives. You were also great in Stargate: SG1, but that’s a post for another day…

 

Happy Birthday Tom Baker

Sometimes an actor is born to play a role. Christopher Reeve was perfect for Superman, Schwartzenegger was epic as the Terminator, and while Tom Selleck may have originally won the role, I find it impossible to imagine anyone other than Harrison Ford playing Indiana Jones. The actors just ‘fit’, and when they do, something special happens.

This happened in 1974, as Jon Pertwee regenerated into Tom Baker, and Doctor Who entered what was to become its most popular and iconic era. It’s hard to come up with anything new to say about Doctor Who – very few shows have been as documented, analysed and dissected – but Tom’s contribution to the programme was immeasurable and worthy of tribute. I think it’s summed up by a story Tom tells in his autobiography – the excerpt is here - in which, after a day of personal appearences in Blackpool, the actor realises that Doctor Who is about to be broadcast. Wanting to catch the episode, he knocks on the door of a nearby house, whereupon he’s invited in, amazing the children who are sitting there watching him on TV.

It’s a great story, not only showing Tom’s committment to the show (never being caught drinking or smoking in public when kids were around, lest their hero be tarnished), but also the power of Doctor Who in general, its ability to take the everyday and make it scary, exotic, magical. Tom was the most otherworldly Doctor, the one who could be funny or furious or frightening, but always alien. Heck, half the time he’s like that in real life, leaving us never entirely sure where the Doctor ends and the real Tom Baker begins – or even if we ever actually see the real Tom Baker.

And this is at least partly why Baker’s era was so successful – Baker’s outsider charisma not only works for children, who live in an almost-fairytale world of Santa Claus and pavement crack avoidance, but for geeks, who can see in Tom’s portrayal something of their own social dilemmas. As the fantastic TARDIS Eruditorum blog points out, “I think another part of why fandom started to crystalize in the Tom Baker years was that Tom Baker was unusually well-poised to be liked by geeks. Because Tom Baker played what is, in many ways, one of the fundamental fantasies of a socially ostracized smart person. He’s adored precisely because he’s clever.”

Professor Brian Cox was interviewed on Kerrang Radio this morning, pointing out that we wouldn’t be able to replicate the Saturn rocket programme nowadays because the skills have been lost. The importance of science, engineering, and other pursuits dependent on celebrating intellience, curiousity and inspiration can’t be over-estimated, and Tom’s Doctor was, by default, a cheerleader for this. Often films and TV are said to have villians that are more fun than the heroes; Doctor Who largly flouts that rule. Tom’s Doctor was the smartest, funniest, most charismatic person in every room he walked into. He made intelligence and humour aspirational, and that’s why the Fourth Doctor remains relevant. And it’s why, thirty years after he last regularly played the Doctor on TV, that Tom Baker is remembered and loved.

Happy birthday Tom.