incoherence.net

College life can drain the TV out of you. Well, it did out of me anyway, one of those monthly bills I neatly trimmed from my expenses in favor of traveling the cybertubes. Even now, I don’t think teevee is cost effective unless I have a lot of shows I want to watch, at my pace. (i.e., TiVo) It is nice, though, that more and more of those shows are available online.

Nonetheless, I miss that pleasantness of nothingness which comes from channel surfing, the same way one endures a favorite song on the radio, despite having played it to death on one’s iPod for two weeks straight. Nowadays, though, the only time I have access to cable television is when I’m at Sui’s (the programming tends to be Chinese-family-friendly), or when I travel, either on the plane or in the hotel room.

While I was patiently waiting out a 2.5 hour takeoff delay, in between the Food Network and Comedy Central, I found a pretty interesting program on the History Channel called Human Weapon. The premise is that two fighters go around the world learning different styles of martial arts, get a little feel for the history and culture, and after a week of training come back to fight a champion of said art.

Entertainment value obviously comes from watching the hosts get beat up in the ring, but I’ve found the training and history lessons to be informative and educational, and there are some pretty cool computer graphics illustrating how the moves are supposed to be done and the math/physics beyond the motions. You know it’s special when a popular media program uses, appropriately, mathematical integrals (the same holds true, of course, for The Simpsons).