February 26 movie: The Ascent of Man. Parts 3-5 of Dr. Bronowski's science series. "The Grain in the Stone" talked about the history of agriculture. "The Hidden Structure" addressed stone masonry and architecture, specifically the invention and development of the arch. "Music of the Spheres" dealt with mathematics and metallurgy. Those brief descriptions make it sound dry, which really isn't fair at all. It's really a vibrant series, full of Dr. Bronowski's joy in knowledge.
"Music of the Spheres" includes an image I remember from when I first saw this series as a kid: a Japanese swordsman chopping a sheaf of straw in half. The first time around I did not remember Dr. Bronowski drily explaining that the cut is one of the classic ways to slice through a human body, but they use straw for practice "nowadays."
For some reason the DVD runs with the subtitles turned on by default, and I've been leaving them on out of inertia. There are some funny flubs in the subtitles, such as "here outside the minister" instead of "outside the minster." I think the best subtitle flub was "The astrolabe was the wristwatch and slide door [slide rule] of its time."
I forgot to mention, in the episode about metallurgy Dr. Bronowski gives a wonderful definition of scientific inquiry: "Ask an impertinent question and you're on the way to a pertinent answer."
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