Robots everywhere

Last night we saw sports shows produced, and today we can watch them online. And here they are now. This is the highlight show, all the lights that worth holding up high, and the stories to go with them.

And this is the famous talk show. They’ve got a new host this year. This is his first episode, and he’s hit the ground running.

Also last night, in another studio, one of the creative groups blocked out shots for their upcoming season. This morning there was a morning show to shoot, and so another group of people shot that. Between all of that and the Tuesday productions … it’s been a busy first week in the studio for all of them, is what I’m saying.

Our cameras are controlled from another room. We use robots to produce shows, and that’s never not neat.

Did I mention it is cold? It was seven degrees when I left the house this morning. Felt like two below. I don’t want to say I’m used to it, because I am a human being with self-awareness and a penchant for the finer things in life like, you know, desirable weather. And I can’t say I’m surprised because I am, in fact, numb to this whole thing after the last few weeks of invasive Canadian weather. But, somehow, it didn’t phase me this morning.

I looked out the window and looked at the weather and said, Well, at least the sun is out. If it has to be cold it should at least be bright. That sounds like a case of Stockholm syndrome, but it is really an acknowledgement of our dimly lit circumstance. Days and weeks of overcast skies are demoralizing, but at least, in a few weeks, maybe, that’ll be behind us … until next Thanksgiving or so.

We’ll try not to fixate on that.

Colder on parts of Mars today. And the photos that are coming back to us from Perseverance are impressive.

NASA had a little feature for that rover where you could put your name on board. They were coded on a microchip or the head of a pin or just added to a database somewhere. But I took the opportunity to put my grandfather’s name on the list with thousands of others. And then I put a lot of other people’s names on it, too. When that rover landed yesterday I was thinking of my grandfather. I bet he would be amused by the progress we’ve made toward Mars in the last few years. I have a lot of his books, and there’s a lot of real science interest there. High-definition cameras on another planet, they’re the 16th cousin 45 times removed from what we use in our television studio. Only we’re cabled and they are operating via a signal broadcast 127 million miles away.

My mother, his daughter, asked me once if the moon landing is impressive to me. We’ve always been there to my way of thinking, you see, where she was one of the many millions who watched and held their breath when Neil and Buzz landed.

It is impressive, but I love that question. It’s a great feat, but there’s no mystery about whether we can pull it off — only when we’ll do it again.

But Mars, well, we have other rovers there, sure, but that’s another planet. And there’s a video camera there now. And a helicopter. And we’re just getting started. We’re making real progress on Mars. Another planet. And we might put people there in short order. On another planet.

Until then, the robots are impressing us nicely.

I wonder if they get the weekends off.

This entry was posted on Friday, February 19th, 2021 at 9:08 pm and is filed under Friday, IU, television, Twitter, video. You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.

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