I have just, in the past week or two, discovered the BBC in Britain. It's possible to watch their programming over the internet if you pay for an internet proxy service. It's amazing programming. If the BBC would ever see fit to sell television licenses overseas, it would change the world. People in the USA always bemoan the fact that you can spin through hundreds sattelite and cable television channels and find nothing of value to watch. I think anyone comparing BBC programming side by side with the fare you can get in the States would be astonished at the difference in quality; and this competition from across the pond would force usa broadcasters and usa newscasters to improve the quality of their programming.

I was impressed when I discovered Australian television... the ABC and SBS do broadcast some of their programming freely to overseas netizens. However, the BBC just blows me away. I'm in awe. Here, I see the standards in film that I have always longed to see in mainstream media in the USA. In British and Australians I see the kind of reasoning which I admire and which I wish academics in the USA would adopt.

I've seen so many monumentally amazing programs over the past few days. One particularly interesting one that I feel I need to write about today, revolves around a relic which was produced from someone's attic in Britain. It was a child's skeleton that was mummified. Imagine keeping that kind of relic out in the family shed for two hundred years! There's a joke about that, which has even become a metaphor: we talk about people having skeletons in their closet - things in their past which they don't want to publicize to their friends and aquaintances.

So the BBC designed a television program where they researched the history of this skeleton. Apparently, there was no documenation preserved along with this relic. This program was a wonderful glimpse into all these different corners of Britain and British history. You got to see this art supply shop which still had all these traditional materials that were listed in the old books of the anatomists who wrote recipes for embalming in the latter 1700s. You got to see this church with a cemetary which was directly across the street from a hospital, and learn about how the grave robbers would provide fresh corpses for the anatomy students across the way.

The biggest thing I learned from this program, was that it gave me a chance to build a model about why British people reason differently than USAers. I have spent seasons over the past year and two and three studying different English speaking countries through their mass media - television and radio programming - which is often available over the web. And one thing that has really jumped out at me is the vast differences in how people in anglophone countries discuss their national issues, and how people reason about these things with eachother. Here, in the USA, every discussion about national issues is political in nature - that is to say - people take sides and use hyperbole and other debate tactics to win for their side in the discussion. In Canada, people defer to scientists and academics. In Australia - there is a prime directive people have, which is caring for their society - and upbuilding their communities. In Britain there's far too much complaining going on - there seems to be a conception they have that critical thought and deep intellectualism is only found in the midst of earnest complaint; however, the Brits' critical thinking abilities are amazing.

So, I'll go on to talk about my model about why the Europeans and the British reason differently than people in the States: My conclusion is, that one reason for this is the sheer amount of history in the country. The BBC researchers could not have used the "scientific method" to pull together the narrative about where this boy came from, and what happened to him. The folks working on this project needed to induce and deduce. Europeans have this wonderful history which is not always documented well; it seems that there can be these egregious holes in it. It turned out that this little boy whose skeleton they were studying was embalmed and used as a medical student specimen in the late 1700s before it was legal to collect children's corpses. Naturally, because of the illegality of the trade in corpses - the records about where his body came from would have been lost.

It strikes me that this historical time when they robbed graves in order for med students to have cadavers is a lot like this problem we have today with the illegal drug trade in Mexico and the USA. When something that should be legal is made illegal - you end up having organized crime evolve around it - and with that organized crime, you have lots of terrible things happen.

The program series is called "History Cold Case" and the segment I watched appears to be "Episode 2: Mummified Child."

It's available for streaming as long as the BBC chooses to keep it posted on their website: here