Good News
New episodes soon! I’ve recently finished producing season one, and since this series is young I’ve decided to release it all in the coming weeks. You’ll be able to start watching the rest soon!
Bad News
It will be a little while until I start releasing season two episodes. I like to have a pipeline of several episodes sitting produced and ready to release, so that means I don’t release an episode as soon as I’m done with it. There are a couple of reasons for that.
First, often as I’m writing and producing an episode I find that I should have mentioned something in a previous episode, but either forgot or didn’t think it would be important enough. For example, in S1E2, when explaining how Thales calculated the distance to a ship from the shore, I originally glossed over the details, just saying that since he knew the angles involved, he could calculate it. You need trigonometry to do it properly, which hadn’t been invented yet, and Thales used a geometric construction, and I didn’t want to bog people down with these details. Later, when thinking about how to explain Aristarchus’ measurement of the distance to the sun (coming soon, S2E2), I didn’t think it was fair to Aristarchus to say both Thales and Aristarchus measured some angles and calculated it. You see, Thales made a geometric construction whereby he could physically measure out the distance over land, as you saw. But Aristarchus couldn’t do that. He’d have to measure the distance in outer space! So he had to use some very clever mathematics to approximate trigonometry (which, as I said, hadn’t been invented). I ended up re-doing part of the Thales episode. (And that section sticks out like a sore thumb once you know it!)
Another example is in S1E4 (coming very soon). I originally didn’t elaborate much on objections to Eudoxus’ model of planetary motion. After thinking a bit about Appolonius of Perga and his epicycles and eccentric orbits (coming soon in season two), I felt I should explain better the problems with Eudoxus’ model, so I added a little bit more about how one could tell that the moon and planets get closer and farther from the earth, which Eudoxus’ model doesn’t accommodate.
The second reason I like to have a pipeline of unreleased episodes is that it allows me to give you a firm release date. So when you see in the right-hand sidebar that an episode is supposed to be released June 16th, 2017, then you can have some certainty that it really will be released on that date, if not before. I mean, it’s already finished!
So anyway, since it currently takes about three months to produce a video, it will take a little while to build up the pipeline. But I don’t want you to think that the series is dead, so I’ll be posting updates and possibly bonus clips as I create them. I’ll be posting these here on the web, but not in the video podcast feed because I don’t want to clutter that up with a bunch of random updates and teasers.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy season one!