Idle Analytics

This September 11th thing (I hate the whole 9/11 abbreviation, don't know why, it's just icky). It puzzles me that people still get all upset about it--it was a terrible thing that happened--of course!--but for the vast majority of people, it was not a terrible thing that happened to them. So I don't get why it's everyone's personal tragedy, why people who live on the opposite coast and have no connection to anyone even remotely involved still claim to tear up when they see photos of, for instance, the "falling man." I just don't get that reaction.

I do get that it was an attack not just on a building full of people, that it was an attack on this country. But why people should make the logical leap from "an attack on my country" to "an attack on me" is utterly baffling. It seems so attention-whory, these people making it all about them. It really wasn't. It might have had something to do with Bush, or even with Clinton, or with foreign policy, but most of the people who brag about how upset they were and are on September 11th are not Bush, not Clinton, and had nothing to do with the forumlation of U.S. foreign policy. So why do these people feel personally attacked? They weren't.

And the "Never forget" campaign--oh, please. Like there's any danger of that.

I go to the gym from time to time, since just paying is not sufficient, and they have a few tvs near the cardio equipment. If you tune a radio to particular stations, you can hear the sound, otherwise, they have the closed captioning on. Which is where the disgrace part comes in. If I were a deaf person I would be seriously pissed off about the quality of closed captioning these days; I believe it is now done by computer rather than by a fast-typing human, and it is absolutely horrible. There are entire lines of just boxes where the captioning couldn't figure it out, and when there are letters they often spell out nonsense, with ampersands in the middle of words and words mashed together. It's just terrible. Either computers need to get way better, or they need to get good humans; preferably both--get the humans to do it until the computers are better.

Because, you see, I can't tell the difference between a triple lutz and a double salchow unless the narrator tells me.

I was reading a Fark thread (I know, stupid stupid stupid) and someone in it mentioned that sharks don't get cancer. Which sounded rather improbable, and indeed, sharks do get cancer. But anyway. Because people were, for so long, under the impression that sharks do not get cancer, shark cartilage became a fringe anti-cancer supplement. This seems a little silly to me--even accepting that sharks could not, in fact, get cancer, how exactly, I wonder, would eating their cartilage bestow that immunity upon a human? I don't see how a human could take advantage of a shark's supposed immunity to cancer except by, perhaps, turning into a shark. And eating shark cartilage does not, in fact, turn people into sharks. Unfortunately.

I just find it so revolting when people harm or kill animals for stupid reasons--eating them is one thing, but worthless "medical" treatments? (I'm looking at you, some parts of traditional Chinese medicine) Stupid. I mean, yeah, sometimes you harm or kill animals in the process of finding out that a treatment is worthless, and that's ok, so long as once you find out that it is worthless, you stop it.

Eh. This is what I do when no one calls the helpdesk. Stupid people not breaking anything today.

In about a year, maybe less, the movie industry is going to try to foist a new standard or two upon us. These new discs will have "high definition" movies, as presumably the current crop of dvd is not nearly sufficient. But do people really care?

More than a third of people surveyed by Scientific Atlanta didn't realize that their HDTVs weren't actually displaying an HD signal. More than a quarter said that the picture looked better on their HDTV set even when the TV was receiving an SD signal. So some people care, but the technology is evidently too complicated for them to reckon with. My impression from speaking with people is that many of them don't see a difference on their high-end sets between DVDs (at 720 horizontal pixels) as 1080i broadcasts (at almost 1920 horizontal pixels).

People go to movie theaters (I've heard) and either don't know or don't care that the movies are almost always poorly projected. Theaters used to have proper projectionists on employ; now it's just a guy. For $9.50 per person you'd think they could actually get the picture in focus, centered on the screen and sync the sound.

Certainly DVD picture is better than VHS was. But did people switch because of the higher resolution, or were there many more reasons? DVDs are cheaper than tapes were, on account of lower materials and transport costs. The players are cheap, compact, and have the ability to randomly access the disc (with no rewinding, instant scene access, etc.). They also came along at the right time: there are tons of new video releases with old and new material, with new movies coming out mere months after theatrical releases.

I guess that the new standard will probably eventually catch on, and if not Blu-ray and HD-DVD, then something else. Of course, the industry intends to make everyone buy all-new equipment with copyright protection built into the hardware. Without "certified" equipment, the player will play at a lower resolution. I can't wait to see the backlash from that.

Fortunately, even though we'll all probably have to replace our current HD sets, we shouldn't have to do it many more times. Jessica and I watch TV from about 8.5' away on a screen that's 3.5' wide, giving us a horizontal angle of about 23 degrees. The very most that a person with 20/20 vision can resolve is 1 pixel per 0.3 arc minute, translating to 200 pixels per degree. So, with the current setup, the resolution of our TV can only go to about 4660 horizontal pixels before it's just a waste. Currently it's at about half of that. One or two more generations out and we can start having family heirloom TVs that last for decades.

So there's this guy in Louisiana who is suing Apple because it may have damaged his hearing; he isn't sure, but he's suing anyway because the device could, potentially, do so.

Except--no it couldn't. Just like only you have the power to prevent forest fires, only you have the power to turn your iPod up so goddamn loud you damage your hearing. It's not the device's fault if you're a jackass, and it's not a design flaw.

Headphones and speakers are different (well, not really, but keep reading). Headphones are "louder" in that a weaker signal will produce a stronger-seeming sound, since it's going directly into your ear. If my iPod were designed such that it could not get loud enough to damage my hearing when I wear headphones, I would be unable to hear it when it's plugged into my little speakers, unless I had some fancy amplifier thingy. The answer is, therefore, not for Apple to limit the volume that the iPod can output (although they have, in fact, done so in France), but for people to turn the damn thing down. How loud does music need to be when it's being pumped directly into one's skull, anyway?

And why (and this is a separate peeve) do people need to be listening to something all the time, anyway? I see very, very few people walking around who aren't either listening to an iPod or similar device, or else yakking into a cellphone. Is paying attention to one's surroundings really so horrible? Does everything need a soundtrack, or a voiceover?