Carnival of Monsters

Carnival of Monsters is a story from Jon Pertwee era Doctor Who. The Doctor and Jo encounter an alien called Vorg, kind of a travelling galactic showman. He charges passers-by for a look in his miniscope, a cabinet device that contains a zoo of miniaturised monsters from across the Universe: one cyberman, one ice warrior, a couple of giant worm things that want to eat Jo and the Doctor, some humans, a funny dinosaur, etc.

It struck me that the old Department of Adult and Continuing Education (the DACE of this blog's title) was a similar collection, though not miniaturised and of university academics rather than exotic beasties: one astronomer, one zoologist, one historian, one literature specialist, one philosopher... It didn't travel around in the same way, although we did run courses across a very wide swathe of the West of Scotland. Like the miniscope we were not cherished by bureaucratic mentalities.

I really liked our DACE Carnival of Monsters and I believe it was very valuable, in a hundred different ways, to lots of people - possibly too diffuse and diverse a range of outcomes to survive now that Statistics has usurped Philosophy. For some decades it was the sort of cabinet that universities thought they should be constructing but that time has passed, for now anyway. I certainly became a rather rare sort of academic world monstrosity while working there; that time also has passed.

This blog was born in a time of change. The original intention was to keep the multi-disciplinary character of DACE alive virtually when it seemed it might otherwise be swallowed up in institutional restructuring. That didn't quite work out but I kept "sounding off about things that amuse me" anyway, Physics and Astronomy among them. However it's become dominated by my attempts to understand what happened to us and why, something I've given increasing amounts of thought to (possibly as the attempts at optimism and the notes of threat became more and more pronounced). Perhaps that will be the main focus from now: my developing thoughts on the value of adult education - no doubt a rediscovery of what clever people already understood some decades ago - and the particular perspective on universities and their purpose that results from that. For other stories, music, science, there's always Twitter. Maybe this will be a different but equally appropriate Memorial to the DACE Carnival of Monsters.

A rogue DVD

There's a rogue DVD in the DVD drive of my laptop. I'm calling it "rogue" because it's been there, far from home, for much longer than it should have been. I need to remember to take it out and put it back in its case next time me and my laptop are in my office.

It's a DVD of the Doctor Who Xmas special from a few years ago, The Runaway Bride". This is the story that introduced Catherine Tate as Donna, who became a Doctor's assistant. Poor Donna, her wedding day didn't work out the way she expected. Instead of a honeymoon with her new husband she's been whisked off to the beginnings of the solar system by a quirky alien guy. You can watch for yourself here; head to about the two minute mark.

It's for the brief look at the beginnings of the solar system that I carried this DVD to a class. It's really well done. I think it might really have looked like that, with lots of lumps of icy rock of all sizes, banging into one another, sticking together, breaking up again, and a new Sun in the middle. The Doctor's words about this too are spot on. It's done so well I feel I can let people watch it for a minute and say, "that's probably what it would have looked like" (well, up to the point where the alien spaceship appears). From there we only need a few wee steps to start discussing questions like, "why are the gas giant planets further from the Sun?"

Science done well in TV science fiction, doesn't always happen and other Doctor Who episodes have been, let's be honest, dire.

I wanted to sing the BBC's praises for their solar system origin depiction. Other ingredients of this story really wind me up. It makes me so cross that they decided to show the Tardis flying around in full view with people hanging out of it. That's not how it works! It dematerialises and then materialises again in a different time and place. It doesn't fly around, or not in our conventional spacetime anyway. It's not a helicopter! Grrrr!

(I left the sweary words out)

It's funny, a lot of Doctor Who is so far from any sort of science that it's just fantasy. There's little need to worry about consistency. If the people who make the programme now want to change the rules a bit from those I imbibed as a kid, because they think it'll make it more amusing or visually appealing or something, it shouldn't really matter. But it does.

So, BBC, please, no more TARDIS flying around. Not clever, not funny.