The Bit Player - Claude Shannon
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| a screen cap from: "The Bit Player" |
I remember taking a design class in college where one of the assigned books was: "The Making of Star Trek"
https://archive.org/details/makingofstartrek00whit
One thing I remember from that book was that the short bit of action at the start of each episode (teaser) was also called "the hook".
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| would you rather be teased or hooked ? |
A time honored show business way to get you to stay tuned. In "The Bit Player" they also have an effective hook at the beginning.
I'd heard the name Claude Shannon and knew he was important to communications but never really knew just how important. When I was in college I took a course on communications and the professor gave us a choice: emphasize the current, practical methods used in communication OR look at the "statistics". Nearly all of us wanted to learn how TV, radio and so on worked except for one guy (the smartest guy) - he wanted the "statistics" and if the rest of us had chosen wisely I'd probably know more about Shannon. But we learned about NTSC and Vestigal Sideband and FM and so on, a lot of those modulation methods aren't used anymore or they are kept for compatibility and have been supplanted by digital techniques. It turns out that that the "statistics" are still valid and used in the digital age.
Of course the now irreplaceable worldradiohistory.com site has pdf versions of Shannon's most important paper: "A Mathematical Theory of Communication" in two parts:
https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Bell-System-Technical-Journal/40s/Bell-1948c.o.pdf
https://worldradiohistory.com/Archive-Bell-System-Technical-Journal/40s/Bell-1948d.o.pdf
But the documentary doesn't focus exclusively on technical stuff, it's more the context of how that fits with things as a whole and also it deals (using theatrical re-creations) with the personal life of Shannon. He was a blend of the practical and the theoretical and the offbeat.
I thought it was an interesting documentary. BTW, one weird thing: the subtitles can't be shut off. Also there is an annoying loss of sound/picture synchronization that seemed more notable to me at the end.
Best Regards,
Chuck, WB9KZY
http://wb9kzy.com/ham.htm