vttoth — December 29th, 2008
… and CBC Radio 2 is not faring well. After the cultural vandalism by its bureaucrats last September, the ratings of Radio 2 here in Ottawa are down by a full one third compared to the same period last year: in 2007, the market share of CBOQ was 5%, now it’s down to 3.3%.
The theory behind the revamping of Radio 2 was that by going for the lowest common denominator, pop music, Radio 2 will attract a bigger audience and will better represent Canada overall. What was forgotten was that it is not the mandate of a public broadcaster to be popular… commercial radio already does that. The public broadcaster should be the guardian of high culture (and if that sounds elitist, maybe it should be) not a promoter of pop culture.
The ratings prove my point.
Ratings of CBC RAdio 2 in Ottawa
By the way, some people argue that it’s wrong to promote music written by middle aged white men. (Not that the CBC was exclusively about music written by middle aged white men. I learned a lot about jazz, Canadian folk, South American music, African music, and more on the “old” CBC.) Anyhow, when I hear that argument, I feel the urge to respond by asking, are you also upset that science classes teach the physics or math of middle aged white men? That engineering schools teach the engineering of middle aged white men? For better or for worse, much of our world’s science and technology was developed by Europeans, and until recently European civilization was very male-oriented (some argue it still is.) This doesn’t change the validity of, say, Boltzmann’s thermodynamics, Einstein’s gravity, or Feynman’s QED. Why should it be different when it comes to music? Is the music of Beethoven less valuable because there weren’t that many symphonic orchestras in the 19th century (or even today) in sub-Saharan Africa? I don’t think so. In any case, if we think that an area of science or culture is dominated by middle aged white men, the correct solution is not to banish their contributions, but to make sure that they become accessible to others… which is precisely what the CBC is no longer doing. Now that’s real “elitism” in the most pejorative sense of the word.
Categories: Radio |
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vttoth — December 29th, 2008
Sometimes, programmers do physics, for better or for worse. Sometimes, physicists do programming, and the result is not always disastrous, sometimes quite the contrary. Bruce Allen, for instance, is a gravitational physicist who developed an extremely useful set of programs for Linux, allowing one to monitor the health status of a hard drive using the drive’s SMART (Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology) capabilities. He certainly needed it… his cluster has several hundred disk drives in operation. I only have a few, but nevertheless it is reassuring to know that they’ll send me an e-mail, presumably before a catastrophic failure wipes out all my data.
Which of course can still happen. I’ve seen hard drives die a sudden death, with no advance warning whatsoever, becoming an expensive but useless boat anchor.
Categories: Computers |
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vttoth — December 29th, 2008
A candidate for the leadership of the US Republican party sent to several politicians a Christmas CD that contained, among other things, a song called “Barack the Magic Negro.” Many people are outraged, and many are surprised.
I’m not. After all, isn’t this precisely the kind of behavior one expects from Sarah Palin’s party?
Categories: Politics |
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vttoth — December 26th, 2008
At last, Google News is now available in Hungarian.
Categories: Internet, Media |
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vttoth — December 25th, 2008
… these were the words with which the crew of Apollo 8 wished a Merry Christmas to the citizens of Earth, during the 9th lunar revolution, some 380,000 kilometers from their home planet… 40 years ago today.
Earthrise from Apollo 8
Categories: Space |
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vttoth — December 22nd, 2008
This is not what I usually expect to see when I glance at CNN:
CNN and integrals
It almost makes me believe that we live in a mathematically literate society. If only!
The topic, by the way, was a British Medical Journal paper on brain damage caused by a dancing style called headbanging. I must say, even though I grew up during the disco era, I never much liked dancing. But, for what it’s worth, I not only know how to do integrals, I actually enjoy doing them…
Categories: Health, Mathematics, Pop culture, Television |
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vttoth — December 22nd, 2008
The other day, David Letterman had a segment called The Ten Most Hated Christmas Songs. They were well known Christmas tunes with twisted lyrics. All of them were funny, but two I found especially memorable. The first said,
“Joy to the world, George Bush is done.”
The second one was really creepy:
“It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas,
“Nineteen-twenty-nine…”
Indeed.
Categories: Economy, Physics, Television |
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vttoth — December 21st, 2008
No, it’s not the name of a heavy metal group or a German curse word, just an appropriate way to describe the cats in our house, now six in number, given that we have a guest cat again. Poppy is back with us for a month.
Poppy in August
Categories: Cats |
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vttoth — December 19th, 2008
CNN has a report about health care workers’ right to refuse to provide services, or information about services such as abortion, if it goes against their conscience. Not unreasonable, but it is also not unreasonable for patients to expect services according to their own beliefs, not the health care workers’.
Yet there seems to be a simple solution: health care workers should be obliged to disclose to patients their beliefs and the fact that they may be withholding specific information as a result of those beliefs. Health care workers may have a right to refuse to provide services or advice that they consider unethical, but patients also have a right to know that they are not receiving objective advice.
Categories: Health |
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vttoth — December 19th, 2008
Sad news today: at the age of 76, Majel Roddenberry, aka. Nurse Christine Chapel from Star Trek and Lwaxana Troi from Star Trek: TNG, has passed away today. My she rest in peace.
Her husband, Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, passed away over 17 years ago, on October 24, 1991. That date is memorable to me for another reason: it was on the morning of that day that I became a wizard of Richard Bartle’s classic multiplayer computer game, MUD (Multi-User Dungeon), aka British Legends, a game that I have ported to modern 32-bit platforms nearly a decade later and that I have been hosting ever since.
Categories: MUD, Television |
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