alt Hacker NewsDavid Attenborough's 100th Birthday
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He was just mentioned on today's Lateral podcast with Tom Scott.
Apparently, he's the reason tennis balls are yellow.
I guess they were traditionally white but when they started broadcasting matches on TV it was too hard to see the ball.
David who was at the BBC at the time suggested they use yellow balls instead so they would come through on camera. Ever since then tennis balls have been yellow.
I wonder how many scientists and engineers were first pulled toward their field by an Attenborough documentary. That kind of slow cultural influence is hard to measure.
I just love those documentaries where he starts off in Europe following some bird and ends up on a rock in the middle of the ocean. And he's been at it since when the world was much bigger. What a life!
One of the most iconic voices.
Searching for David Attenborough on Google also shows a tribute, with drawings of animals and a "Thank You Sir David".
A truly great communicator, we need more like him.
I remember watching blue planet seas of life in middle school in the early 2000s crazy.
He is a legend and has educated more people in natural history than anyone else ever...
Glad to hear. I thought all those videos recently of him were AI.
What's the opposite of the black bar? Should HN have a green bar for things like this?
Legend
He outlasted his brother by quite a while. Managed to travel more miles than nearly anyone else apart from popes and political leaders.
The sad thing is Attenborough has lived to see the destruction of nature he loved so much. His constant warnings have gone mostly unheard. In some ways I think excellent nature programming like his own Nature is doing a disservice by making it seem like there's lots of wild nature left.
I wish humans would come together to re-wild more of the earth. Restoring wild nature and cutting emissions is the only way to really restore natural ecosystems. We're nowhere close to doing that.
A lifestyle impossible for any foreseeable generation.
A Freemason like David Attenborough who was a close friend of Jimmy Savile, claims that humans are a plague on the earth, advocates for human depopulation, promotes and helps back government initiatives around 5g (which has a huge impact on ecosystems and the environment), is not someone I'm going to clap for.
edit: No surprise people are engaging in drive-by downvoting because they don't like the truth being told when it's uncomfortable or inconvenient / threatens their fragile worldview / flies in the face of the propaganda they're attempting to disseminate. HN is such a dogshit website.
I'm surprised none of these threads made it to the front page.
Top man, lives up on Richmond Hill and absolutely loves it - when asked about his travels and adventures and where he would choose to live, he replied, "I already live there"
Fairly well-known locally is that my favourite bookshop, The Open Book in Richmond, stocks signed copies of all his books. They used to be signed directly on the page, but since he got to the mid-to-late nineties in age, tons of hardbacks are too much, so Helena wanders up there to get a load of bookplates signed these days.
Apart from that, I order all my books from them when I'm in London and a subsequent chat with Madeleine usually lasts ten times as long as the book shopping.
Anyway, I digress, yes, Sir David, amazing body of works and the books are wonderful.