William Shatner turned 81 today.
Mar 222012
Feb 272012
This is something I griped about before. Moments ago, I saw the following picture on the CBC Newsworld analog cable channel:
Yes, it does look like a ridiculous amount of blackness surrounding a small-ish picture. It turns out that I was looking at…
- a standard-definition (4:3) broadcast signal on a 16:10 widescreen monitor, containing…
- widescreen (16:9) original material letterboxed into the standard-definition (4:3) frame, containing in turn…
- standard definition (4:3) material letterboxed into a wide-screen (16:9) frame, that in turn contained…
- widescreen (16:9) original material.
Confusing? Well, perhaps this picture clarifies it a little bit:
- The yellow bars at the top and bottom were added when the original 16:9 material was letterboxed into a 4:3 standard-definition frame;
- The blue bars on the sides were added when this 4:3 material was letterboxed into a 16:9 broadcast frame;
- The green bars were added when the widescreen 16:9 broadcast was reformatted for the standard-definition 4:3 analog standard;
- The red bars are the unused area on my 16:10 monitor when I was watching this signal full screen.
Still complicated? Let me make it simpler, then. After years of trying (and failing) to sell us high-definition televisions, manufacturers realized that casual viewers can’t readily tell the difference between resolutions; they can, however, tell the difference if the shape is different. So they opted to develop a widescreen high definition format. (Back in the 1950s, a similar reasoning led the movie industry to change to a widescreen format. It was not for technical or artistic purposes; it was pure marketing.)
The end result? In this example, approximately 65% of my beautiful high-resolution display is unused, with a postage-stamp like picture occupying the center 35%.
Welcome to the 21st century.
Jan 082012
The newest Hungarian Internet meme is alive and well: thanks to the Two-Tailed Dog Party, everyone can now construct their own version of a still television frame with Hungary’s latest celebrity news reporter, Andras Vigh, made famous by reporting on a massive opposition rally earlier this week using an empty street as a backdrop.
I now constructed my own. I just watched “2012” last night for the first time, and it seemed appropriate. Here is the English version.
Jan 042012
The word “meme” is a relatively new one, originally coined by Richard Dawkins in his 1976 book, The Selfish Gene as the cultural analog of a gene. A meme is a concept or an idea that spreads to person to person within a culture. By their very nature, good memes survive even in harsh environments, despite official sanctions, bans, or attempts at censorship.
Two days ago, a massive demonstration took place in Budapest, Hungary, triggered by the country’s new constitution and the increasingly authoritarian behavior of the ruling Fidesz party. The country’s public television channel tried to downplay the significance of these demonstrations in its evening newscast, strategically placing its reporter on a quiet street, away from the crowds.
In protest, Hungary’s pre-eminent frivolous political party, the Two-tailed Dog Party published a satire of the evening newscast. This was too much for the humor-deficient political elite of (no longer The Republic Of) Hungary: the Web site was banned. (For now, the youtube version of the video is still available.)
But it’s a tad harder to ban a meme. Since the ban, a new form of art is spreading on Hungarian Web sites: the image of the same television reporter pasted in front of varying historical backgrounds, with humorous captions. Here is my favorite:
There was little public interest as members of his immediate family joined Jesus C. (33), a felon with multiple convictions known for his anti-regime speeches, on his final voyage.
In English, the on-screen captions read: “Golgota; Live; In three days, no one will remember the storyteller”.
Try banning this, clowns.
Nov 212011
Has anyone noticed that the opening notes of the theme song of Inspector Gadget sound awfully familiar to Bach’s Double Violin Concerto in d minor?
(Not to mention the similarities between the bumblings of Inspector Gadget and a certain well known Doctor…)
Jul 302011
Every summer, on every Canadian TV channel, during just about every commercial break, a commercial for Marineland in Niagara Falls is shown… with a song that just drives me bonkers. I’d sooner listen to a hundred pieces of chalk scratching a hundred chalkboards. Will they ever stop?
May 012011
CNN is wondering why extreme weather keeps happening at 7PM. Funny… I’m pretty sure the windstorm the other day was more or less over by 7PM.
Mar 122011
You gotta love these talking heads on TV.
A few minutes ago, I was listening to a CNN expert (I made a note of his name but it’s not relevant; this is not meant to be a personal attack on anyone but a criticism of television journalism in general, putting talking heads who know little more than the general public in front of live cameras). The expert was discussing the possible fate of the Fukushima nuclear power plant, making comparisons between the events unfolding in Japan and what happened 25 years ago in Chernobyl. This is when he uttered the sentence, “in Chernobyl, the core got uncovered“.
The problem with this utterance is that the core in Chernobyl was never covered (with water) in the first place.
The RBMK reactor used in Chernobyl has a graphite core that is not submerged. Water circulates in channels. What happened in Chernobyl was not that the core was uncovered, but that water boiled away. The resulting voids (containing only steam, far less dense than water) were no longer absorbing neutrons (which were still moderated by the graphite, but now in greater numbers), further accelerating the rise of heat in the reactor, producing more voids in a runaway reaction. Nothing like that can happen in a water-moderated reactor, where boiling the water away reduces the reaction rate, as fewer neutrons are moderated.
That is not to say that such a reactor cannot suffer a catastrophic meltdown. This is what happened at Three Mile Island, when a reactor’s core there was indeed uncovered due to errors in operating procedure and a stuck valve. In Three Mile Island, what saved the day was a reactor containment vessel that prevented a Chernobyl-type release of radioactive material to the environment. I fear that rather soon, we’ll find out just how good the containment vessel is at Fukushima I-1.
Mar 082011
Back in the 1950, movie studios switched to widescreen in order to arrest the loss of audiences due to the emergence of television. The intent was to create a format that was intentionally incompatible with the 4:3 aspect ratio of the television screen.
In the 1990s, various standards for high-definition television were proposed but they never caught on; I suspect that part of the reason was that regular television already provided a signal that was of sufficient quality for most viewers.
So, our masters and secret overlords reinvented the wheel: a new high-definition television standard emerged that not only increased the number of pixels you see, but also changed the width. Instead of 4:3, we now had a new standard with a 16:9 aspect ratio.
I don’t know if 16:9 is in any way “better” than 4:3. I suspect it isn’t, actually (you may think HDTV adds pixels on the left and the right but it’s equally valid to think that it’s taking pixels at the top and the bottom away) but it doesn’t matter. What matters is that in the minds of most people, “HDTV” has little to do with “definition” (i.e., pixel resolution) and a lot more to do with the wide aspect ratio. What they may not realize is just how badly we have been cheated.
Why? Well, take that nice shiny new HDTV that you just unpacked and hung on the wall, verifying that all 100% of its pixels work as they should:
So you turn that TV on and tune it to the first station, which happens to be an analog station (or perhaps a digital station sending a non-HDTV signal). Unless your TV has been factory set to “stretch” (and distort) the picture, chances are that you will see two wide black bars on both sides of the narrow picture:
Not too bad, perhaps, but what if that non-HDTV signal was actually originally an HDTV program? Happens more often than one might think, especially as a growing number of non-HDTV stations are just rebroadcasting an HDTV signal with horizontal bars at the top and bottom:
And that, unfortunately, is not the end of it. That original HDTV signal often contains clips that were shot in the 4:3 aspect ratio, which means… yes, more black bars:
And this is not an extreme case. It happens quite regularly. Here’s an example from CNN just a few minutes ago:
There is the set of horizontal bars at the top and bottom and, apart from the news ticker at the bottom, two sets of vertical black bars framing the picture. That shiny new HDTV with its 42″ full-HD screen is suddenly reduced to a 26″ diagonal visible area with the resolution (1080×810) of a decade-old laptop.
Progress is wonderful, I guess. The good thing is, you can all watch it in stereoscopic vision, I mean “3D”; so long as you don’t mind wearing goofy glasses, taking lots of Aspirin for that nasty headache, and not moving your head around too much, lest the lack of parallax destroy the illusion.
Feb 232011
I swear that when I first saw this news headline frame on BBC World News, I thought I was looking at a herd of sheep in a field:
In reality, I think, these are some of the antennas of the Very Large Array.
Dec 222010
Here’s a wonderful quote from Saturday Night Live’s impersonation of Julian Assange talking about Mark Zuckerberg: “What are the differences between Mark Zuckerberg and me? Let’s take a look. I give you private information about corporations for free. And I’m a villain. Mark Zuckerberg gives your private information to corporations for money and he’s Man of the Year.”
SNL’s Assange also praised Time magazine for being on top of things, discovering Facebook “only weeks after your grandmother”.
Oct 242010
It’s never a good idea for a car to sport three wheels up front, two of them on one side:
Yes, I do occasionally like to watch Formula 1 races.
Aug 312010
May 282010
This Homer Simpson is one smart fellow. While he was trying to compete with Edison as an inventor, he accidentally managed to discover the mass of the Higgs boson, disprove Fermat’s theorem, discover that we live in a closed universe, and he was doing a bit of topology, too.
His Higgs mass estimate is a tad off, though. Whether or not the Higgs exists, the jury is still out, but its mass is definitely not around 775 GeV.
May 252010
Sometimes, CNN uses a “picture-in-picture” format to show an important live feed while they are reporting on something else. It is important to make sure that the resulting composite picture does not convey the wrong impression. Otherwise, you might end up like this poor gentleman, who was talking on CNN about a new portable power source, but ended up appearing as if he was getting a chest X-ray on live television.
May 142010
I was watching the noontime local CTV news today. At around 12:39 (!), in three consecutive reports, the number 39 popped up. First, a report about a youth who is charged with vandalizing 39 tombstones. This report mentioned the number 39 several times, which is probably why I noticed that in the next report, one about the recent terrorism-related arrests in the US, footage shown in the background included the front door of a house bearing the number 39. At this time, I began paying attention. The next report was about Ottawa tourism advertisements in American newspapers; it didn’t seem likely that the number 39 would pop up there until the official being interviewed answered a question about funding and mentioned their 39 member hotels. That’s when I told my wife that this is getting a tad creepy.
The other day, I was watching a Stargate Universe episode in which one of the protagonists was reliving a part of his life while his brain was connected to an alien computer, and a particular number kept popping up as a clue. That number was 46, the number of chromosomes in a human cell. So that’s what makes 46 special. But what about 39?
Or perhaps all this was just a clever form of subliminal advertising for a Web site called The 39 Clues, which happens to be the first hit on Google when one searches for “39”?
May 032010
OK, I don’t usually play the geek game and look for nits to pick in television science programs. But…
Today’s gem comes courtesy of the Canadian History Channel and their Aftermath series, the first episode of which I just watched over the Internet. The show had many eyebrow-raising moments (and I don’t mean the implausible concept itself, about the Earth’s rotation slowing down to zero in a mere five years; I could get over that if the science had been right otherwise). This particular gem of a sentence, complete with fancy animation, especially caught my attention:
“The rotation of the Earth creates constant patterns of east-moving winds in the Northern hemisphere, and west-moving winds in the Southern. This is called the Coriolis effect.”
Oh really. I wonder if pilots flying in the Southern hemisphere know this.
Apr 112010
I’m watching a six-part CBC documentary miniseries titled Love, Hate and Propaganda, which looks, from a perspective of 70 years, at the role of propaganda during WW2. While the series is enjoyable (though shallow, like most historical documentaries are), I am coming to the conclusion that after 70 years, propaganda is still alive and well.
Take these sentences, for instance, explaining the beginning of The Blitz:
In the beginning, Germans attack military and industrial installations, but as time goes by, bombs get closer and closer to the big cities.
September 7th. They hit London. The Blitz begins.
So how does it compare to a more neutral, factual description of the same from Wikipedia? Let’s see:
In late August 1940 […] the Luftwaffe attacked industrial targets in Birmingham and Liverpool. This was part of an increase in night bombing brought about by the high casualty rates inflicted on German bombers in daylight.
During a raid on Thames Haven, on 24 August, some German aircraft […] strayed over London and dropped bombs in the east and northeast parts of the city, Bethnal Green, Hackney, Islington, Tottenham and Finchley. This prompted the British to mount a retaliatory raid on Berlin the next night with bombs falling in Kreuzberg and Wedding, causing 10 deaths. Hitler was said to be furious, and on 5 September, at the urging of the Luftwaffe high command, he issued a directive “for disruptive attacks on the population and air defences of major British cities, including London, by day and night”. The Luftwaffe began day and night attacks on British cities, concentrating on London. This relieved the pressure on the RAF’s airfields.
In the CBC’s version of events, there is no doubt that the indiscriminate bombing of civilian targets was the invention of the evil Nazi state. Wikipedia’s facts are more nuanced: it appears that the first intentional bombing of civilian targets may have actually been conducted by the RAF! This remains true regardless of the evil nature of the Nazi empire or the fact that it was them, not Britain, who started the most devastating war in history.
So, it seems, Love, Hate and Propaganda is guilty of the very thing that it purports to expose: by skewing the facts, it becomes a work of propaganda.
Mar 052010
There are times when I like capitalism. Tropicana’s new commercial, bringing the “sun” to a Canadian community north of the Arctic Circle in the middle of January is one example:
Feb 142010
Something I heard a few days ago on The Big Bang Theory:
“Where in this swamp of unbalanced formulas squatteth the toad of truth?”
What can I say… I know the feeling rather well.