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The Bottom Line
Steve talks to Steven Cook, who's not only got opinions, he's got a book out.

(04-12-2023 22:22 )Doddle Wrote:  Louis Theroux interviews Dame Joan Collins
She's 90, and he's a smug prick.

LT interviews Chelsea Manning
She does some DJing these days. A more positive meeting than her one with Stephen Sackur.

(12-06-2020 20:48 )Dan Volatile Wrote:  How to See a Black Hole: The Universe's Greatest Mystery
BBC - 2019

I would say the Universe's greatest mystery is its origin but despite the hyperbolic title this documentary gives an ok account of the Event Horizon Telescope Project which spent 10 years and 30 million pounds on the effort to produce the first image of a black hole.

Supermassive black holes are known to reside at the centres of galaxies and they produce large amounts of light and other radiation from the gas and dust which is heated to high temperatures as it swirls around the black hole in an accretion disc. The one at the centre of our milky way has the mass of four million suns which can be measured by observing the speeds of stars or gas clouds which orbit it. The EHT team were therefore trying to image the hot disc of matter which should surround the black shadow of the hole itself.

EHT consiste of eight radio telescopes from as wide an area of the Earth's surface as possible (including one at the South pole). The data is combimed using a technique called VLBI (very long baseline interferometry) to produce an image with a resolution as great as one telescope the size of the Earth would have produced. In practice this is extremely difficult as the positions of the instruments has to be know to millimetre precision and the timings have to be coordinated using atomic clocks which are accurate to one second in ten milllion years.

Needless to say the experiment was a success or there would have been no documentary, and the image that they produced was of the hole at the centre of the galaxy M87 in the constellation Virgo. One thing they should have mentioned is that there will be a ring of light surrounding the entire edge of the hole's event horizon because even if it is viewed edge on, light will be bent around the whole surface by the hole's graviational field.

This was repeated a few weeks back, where I saw it. Quite an optimistic if far-fetched project, just as well it worked. Peter Capaldi doing the narration was a nice touch.

Unspun World w/John Simpson
Last show of 2023; discusses Ukraine, the United Nations and Space prospects, nothing on Gaza.

The Footage Detectives
Noel and Mike reach episode 100, marked amongst other things with a look at the Peter Byrne archive, he having been an actor in Dixon of Dock Green among other things.

Reacher Ep 1 “ATM” Season 2

The Bottom Line
Steve talks to Nihad Awad about the rise in religious racism in the USA.

Global Public Square
Not been able to see this for a few weeks. FZ talked to tedious Bernard Henri-Levy, now up to his 3rd documentary film on Ukraine in under 2 years. I somehow doubt FZ would give John Pilger the same opportunity.

Reacher Ep 2 “What Happens In Atlantic City” Season 2

The Listening Post
Another rare interview, this time with Mariam Barghouti.