WORTH NOTING ON TV

* FRIDAY

Evening News From Moscow (C-Span, 6- 6:30 p.m.): A report in Russian with simultaneous English translation. * SATURDAY

NCAA basketball championships (CBS, 5- 10 p.m., EST): The ``final four'' men's teams that have emerged from college basketball's tournament face off in a national semifinal doubleheader: Arkansas vs. Arizona, and Florida vs. Duke.

Think Tank (On many public stations - please check listings for day and time): This new series moderated by columnist and author Ben Wattenberg is a kind of anti-``McLaughlin Group'' talk show: panelists will not be journalists but academics and think-tank people. They will not leap in and out of topics but stick to one throughout each show. The topic for the premiere - ``Does Punishment Pay?'' - is discussed by an impressive lineup of thinkers: Judge Robert Bork and Professors Lani Guinier, Philip Heymann, and John Dilulio. * SUNDAY

Connections2 (The Learning Channel, 8-8:30 p.m.): In 1979, a loquacious Irishman named James Burke hosted an unusual PBS series called ``Connections.'' This strangely compelling show tied together all kinds of seemingly unrelated things: events, people, places, and facts. Yet it wasn't these ``missing links of history'' themselves that mattered so much as the way Burke got from one to the other.

Now Burke is back with a new weekly series that roams the globe - visiting some 175 locations in the first 10 episodes - looking for things to relate. His ``scientific detective stories,'' make viewers say to themselves, ``Aha! So we have that to thank for this.''

In ``Revolutions,'' the premiere episode, he shows how the invention of James Watt - who perfected a steam engine in the 18th century - has affected everything from today's office work to lunar landings. * MONDAY

NCAA basketball championships (9:15 p.m., EST to conclusion): Men's championship game.

Please check local listings for these programs.