Aha. I have finished my first run-through, but definitely not the last, of Prof. Stephen Ressler’s new Great Course Understanding the Marvels of Medieval Technology.

Best. Great Course. Ever.

Like his medieval artisan subjects, Ressler and the GC vid crew have clearly learned incrementally from all their prior practice. Models, visual aids, and animations have evolved, clarity of presentation has grown even better than the previous excellence, and, just wow, as the internet kids so succinctly say.

Do not skip the credits, which are pretty brilliant, using every bit of air time to include yet another layer of meta-information. Also, I was very chuffed that my guess that Ressler was now using 3-D printing to generate some of his more complex models was proved right, as we got therein to watch a printer producing an exactly replicated cathedral column (to scale.)

I spent so much time, earlier in my career, being baffled by written descriptions and woodcuts of a lot of these early (and not so early) machines and techniques, sometimes from some of the same sources Ressler quotes including De Re Metallica, hah… I did a lot of the usual writerly trick of ducking behind the limitations of my viewpoint characters to disguise my own, rather the way ancient Asian artists used foggy valleys to fudge perspective. Apparently, one must already know how most of those devices work before the woodcuts could make any sense. But damn, now I want to go reread my copy of Agricola and see if it works any better for me now, I mean, besides the footnote on the hazards of kobold infestations in German mines. Bet it would.

Also, unexpected vocabulary and etymology building!

I kind of want to go right back to the beginning and start over, but I see I’d skipped one of the prior Ressler courses -- Do-It-Yourself Engineering, because I have no desire to do anything myself these days -- but I suspect it might cross-illuminate some of the material here, so maybe I’ll break it up a bit.

Recommended summa cum laude.

The Great Courses, back in the day, started out as audio lectures, meant to be listened to on tape (remember tape?) Once they added visual, it’s been rather fascinating to watch the change of the presentations and sets over time, from just sticking a prof up behind a lectern and continuing as before, through the occasional wrong turn such as the unfortunate period where they were using random moving images on screens in the background that, instead of “adding visual interest”, just distracted from the central elements -- there’s a chemistry course I’d wanted to watch that I had to abandon after one episode, it was so headache-inducing -- to much more fully modern exploitation of really increasing the information visual density. Because many of the older courses are still up, one can study this progression even if one missed the last 30 years. Technological evolution in action, in real time.

Ta, L.

(To find this, google "Great Courses Plus" for their streaming site.) (Speaking of, they could do to add something on the history of Asian art to their menu, just sayin'.)