The "hosts" were animated drawings, which looked surprisingly like the man and woman drawn on the disk that is aboard Pioneer.

Incidentelly, I was watching TV with a friend yesterday as I don't own one, and while we flipped through the channels we stumbled upon that program. In the 10 minutes or so we watched, they showed an interview with Orson Welles, telling that he was shocked to learn that so many people took his radio play of War of the Worlds for real and then a guy who on 9/11 first thought that he, too, was in some kind of fake television play. Then they showed a report about early alien/monster movies and how they spoke of the desire and fear we have of the unknown.

Inbetween segments they had a split screen with one panel showing a guy laying on the grass talking about something or other and in the other panels they showed beautiful nature photography.

Quite entertaining, I must say.

The "hosts" were animated drawings

Actually they are real human beings, look here [www.arte.tv]

Anyway the program is mainly an artform to me, and the "send it to aliens" is just there as a cover.
The idea is funny, but that's it...

The best part was the letters to aliens from some average people, some were quite funny.

I remember reading about a conference on communication with ET's where one person prepared a message, not encrypted, but just expressed in a strange way

Yeah I saw something similar. The guy had made a file containing the binary data and handed to fellow ET researchers, asking if they could decode it. Nobody was able to do it. The trick was that if you printed out the 1's and 0's using a certain column width, it drew a picture.

There's a LOT of ways to encode data, which might seem intuative to some but will baffle others. I don't think you'll have to go further than the various file formats we got to see that ;)

Scary, you never did computer science 101, you don't even know what 'equivalence' means?

Either that, or you never get undressed without having sex in the process.

Being an hopeless astronomy freak, I couldn't help noticing that the article doesn't quite appear to know where they're actually sending the broadcast. On the beginning on the article they're talking about sending the broadcast to a star in Big Dipper. Later, the name of the star turns out to be Errai. All is fine and dandy, except that the Errai resides in Cepheus.

Article does not mention why that particular star was selected, however, it appears to host a known exoplanet, which is quite probably the reason here. Errai also happens to be somewhat more massive than our sun, which means that it progresses through its 'life' faster than the Sol. Any possible life out there has less time to evolve before the star kicks the bucket. It's also a double star, which may make the orbits of the planet(s) in the system somewhat more chaotic.

They used animated versions of the two "sample humans" that were engraved on the pioneer probes.

It was a joke, dammit.

Anyhoo, since people started complaining so much about it, I had to dig this [who.int] up (30kg/m^2+ is apparently the definition [wikipedia.org] of "obese"). The European countries are chosen "randomly" (in other words, I scrolled up and down that list, and picked the ones I noticed, until I had a total of ten).

The CDC has maps breaking down obesity by state.

The 2005 data is here [cdc.gov].