Slashdot Mirror
Digitally Filtering Out the Drone of the World Cup
qubezz writes "World Cup soccer fans may think a hornet's nest has infiltrated their TVs. However the buzz that is the background soundtrack of the South African-hosted games comes from tens of thousands of plastic horns called vuvuzelas, that are South Africa's version of ringing cowbells or throwing rats. It looks like the horns won't be banned anytime soon though. A savvy German hacker, 'Tube,' discovered that the horn sound can be effectively filtered out by applying a couple of digital notch filters to the audio at the frequencies the horn produces (another summary in English). Now it looks like even broadcasters like the the BBC and others are considering using such filters on their broadcasts."
My TV already has a digital filter. Its called the off switch.
was at a bar watching a brewers game while the world cup was on the other tv... very annoying. i claimed it would be simple to filter it out, and confused why broadcasters weren't already doing it. no one else cared.
person who doesn't find the noise annoying? (Just curious.)
Cheers and yelling add to the excitement. These plastic toys just add to the irritation. I had to listen to a segment this morning just talking about it, and was forced to mute the volume it was so grating. Easier to just ban the damn things and then they can go 'unfiltered'.
1. Cricket bat.
2. Hearing Aid.
3. Petrol funnel.
4. Water sprayer. (force trumpet side down into water)
5. Drinking funnel. Nuff said.
6. 4G mobile communication
7. Walking stick,
8. Light saber. (Just insert a torch) as seen on Starwars...
9. Jousting Stick (simply insert one into another.)
10. And of coarse... supporting any team/thing you like...
there is no spoon. or fork. there is a butter knife, and it's dull.
Am I the only...person who doesn't find the noise annoying? (Just curious.)
No, you're not, I'm in the same position. I'm not watching BTW ;)
Talk about cultural intolerance...
Oh, but starting your answer in the title, however, IS definitely annoying ;)
I have discovered a truly marvelous proof of killer sig, which this margin is too narrow to contain.
Because it is something foreign, and probably also because it is African, they're all upset.
Bull shit.
People are upset because the noise is extremely distracting, conveys nothing about the fans' excitement with the game, and according to a South African audiologist who was on the news yesterday, the sound is well past the threshold for causing hearing damage.
It would be one thing if the sound changed to reflect the excitement of the crowd during the game, but it doesn't. It's just a constant loud wall of sound at basically the same level from the start of the game to the end.
It's similar in level and monotony to running jet engines at full throttle on test stands in the stadium, throughout the entire game. It doesn't add, it detracts.
What you are saying is that traditions have to be respected, no matter how stupid or disruptive they are.
I propose an alternative. All other countries should create a tradition of randomly setting explosive charges off in their stadiums whenever the South African team is there.
It's our tradition, and you have to respect it.
Putting moderation advice in your
Me and my friend made a Puredata patch (http://puredata.info) to filter the vuvuzela sound. You have the ability to choose the sound also, making it more dynamic.
check it at http://joaomartins.entropiadesign.org/2010/06/15/vuvuzela-filter-a-puredata-approach/
When the World Cup started, I thought of playing around with notch filters to remove the noise, but the whole thing just reeked of effort. The human brain is actually pretty good at filtering out noise if you give it a chance. Just watch the games and don't worry about the vuvuzelas and before long you won't even notice them. I don't. It's a lot like what happens when you live next to a highway.
Turn up your volume and go to Robot 9000. Warning: your sensibilities may be offended by the other content.
The BBC themselves has an article up (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/magazine/8738604.stm) about the ineffectiveness of this filter, the issues filtering out the noise of vuluzelas could cause for the coverage in general, and the rest of their own good reasons for NOT using this shim.
The role of the writer is not to say what we can all say, but what we are unable to say. -Anais Nin
My brain filtered it out after about 30 seconds. I actually think it's slightly less annoying than the background cheering during a typical NFL game.
https://www.eff.org/https-everywhere
Chatroulette and sports broadcasters all trying to filter out the horn on the same day?
South Africa's proud history.
But hey, at least they made District 9!
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
I wrote up a blog post about using Sound eXchange (sox) to filter the sound here: http://www.russellbeattie.com/blog/linux-command-line-streaming-vuvuzela-filter , but the short version is this:
rec -d vol .5 equalizer 233 .1o -48 equalizer 466 .03o -48 equalizer 932 .02o -48 equalizer 1864 .2o -24 | play -d
or from a response to my post here: http://www.yusufk.za.net/?p=520
rec -d | play -d vol 0.9 bandreject 116.56 3.4q bandreject 233.12 3.4q bandreject 466.24 3.4q bandreject 932.48 3.4q bandreject 1864 3.4q
After testing, I feel the parameters could be tweaked a bit more - but these definitely make a difference.
-Russ
Me
No, so you can watch the entire game without a beehive buzzing in your ear. Come to think of it, this will probably resolve on it's own via the advertisers. When they figure out everyone is muting the game, and no one can hear their ads as a result, you can bet pressure will be applied on the stadiums to ban them. Although there may be thousands who go to the game to watch, there are millions made on commercials from the millions of viewers who catch the game on TV.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pPVlAhK2j2o Watch that !
well, its a bit geeky, but it is cross platform and open source :D
Call me when it works on Glenn Beck or Rush Limbaugh.
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
The notch filtering is probably quite similar to that developed to remove the nasal drone of Howard Cosell from football (American) game broadcasts.
Have gnu, will travel.
An earlier poster wrote:
I've seen a lot of comments around the Internet insinuating that if you hate the sound of vuvuzelas, then you're a colonial racist who hates South African culture.
The funny thing is that the vuvuzelas are a recent introduction into South African culture. They are not only post-Colonial, they are post-Apartheid.
The maker of the horns admits that the prototype came from the USA... http://www.boogieblast.co.za/vuvuzela.htm
and this has been known in wider soccer circles for at least a year... http://www.footballiscominghome.net/the-hosts/the-vuvuzela/
and while the plastic horns have been around since the late 90s in South Africa... http://www.southafrica.info/2010/vuvuzela.htm
the current mass-producer only started up in 2001... http://www.vuvuzelas.com/about.html
Additionally, there's the blaringly obvious notion that the vuvuzela looks nothing like the kudu horn it allegedly comes from and looks everything like a cheap rip-off of the sort of long thin horns you see draped with flags playing fanfares when kings enter in films set in the middle ages, but I suppose it's expecting a lot for everyone to think critically. Last time I checked, kudu horns didn't have embouchures, either, which is what allows the plastic horn blowers to last all game.
As a South African, I wholeheartedly support anything that annoys the opposition.
Just don't expect "the opposition" to bring their shows to your country anytime soon. No FIFA, no Olympics, no big international events of any type. They're all gonna watch at these broadcasts, listen to the worldwide complaints, and mark "don't broadcast events from here" with an arrow pointing to South Africa on their maps of the world.
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
Its probably to late to make a large enough batch that are 180 degrees out of phase with the ones currently being used, but for next time, making 50% of them out of phase would make them self-quieting.
Maybe a ringtone or mp3 that is 180 degrees out could be quickly deployed.
Two negatives make a positive, and two positives make a negative. Yeah, right.
Plus ca change, plus c'est les memes choses.
I thought the MUTE button IS for commercials. At least that's what I use it for.
then you have the attention span of a piece of lawn furniture.
I love it, it adds color and atmosphere to what has so far been several rather ho-hum matchups.
I fell asleep on the couch watching a game the other night... I woke up from a nightmare of being attacked by giant bees.
Oh holy shit, millions of people didn't fly to South Africa to watch some soccer games and you guys had to buy tickets! All this, despite your government putting in a bid for the tournament and having to pay for the infrastructure to support it! The tragedy!
Others are working to bring the joy of vuvuzelas to the rest of the world. Sorta like OLPC, but in the other direction.
http://laughingsquid.com/vuvuzela-iphoneipad-app-annoy-while-on-the-go/
Oh, sure, Steve Jobs would sign off on this. Boobies? No. Vuvuzelas? You betcha.
(And yes, there's a whole bunch of vuvuzelapps for Android too.)
.
Prisencolinensinainciusol. Ol Rait!
"There are only three sports: bullfighting, motor racing, and mountaineering; all the rest are merely games." ~ Earnest Hemingway
(Full disclosure: I race motorcycles.)
Waves Audio is offering a processing chain for their own tool as well as for Cubase and the very popular ProTools.
http://www.waves.com/content.aspx?id=5798
The equalizer is $300 and the noise supressor is $2900. I think they are targeting above my level of concern.
then you have the attention span of a piece of lawn furniture.
My lawn furniture is extremely patient, so I'm not sure what you're trying to say.
And the men who hold high places must be the ones who start
To mold a new reality... closer to the heart
You have it backwards. If the only reason you go to a football game is to blow a stupid horn, maybe you should stay home and wish your father had beaten you more often as a child.
-Billco, Fnarg.com
There you have one of those thingies to control basic settings of huge range of TVs.
One that hath name thou can not otter
I wonder how long before half of what one sees and hears in supposedly "live" TV has been digitally massaged in some manner.
You could take out ugly buildings to make a scene more aesthetically pleasing, notch out one particular persons voice, or remove an 'annoying' five seconds of tape.
This subtle dichotomy between actual real life and tv "real life" could widen to the point of audiences being fed the "Leave it to Beaver" version of the real. We're generally already pissed off enough that our lives don't match the fake TV shows but this could bring a whole new level of cognitive dissonance, since these are supposedly "live" evens.
The horns are there, in the stadium. They may be annoying but they are part of the event. I guess if it turns cloudy, perhaps they can photoshop in some blue sky...
Regards.
This may well go on to be the worst World Cup
Well it already is for me. I suffer from tinnitus, and the vuvuzelas ensure that I can't understand the commentary. I've tried watching with mute on, but that sucks too. Hopefully these filters will rapidly be deployed. Not that that will help the players much.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
If you want refined and quiet, go attend a golf game and leave this to the rest of us.
The broadcasters won't do this anytime soon. Why? Because FIFA will drag on their feet on this because the choice is likely up to FIFA as they would be making a material change to the performance. And so far the word from FIFA is that the vuvuzelas are here to stay.
You'll have 15,000 fans all blowing Didgeridoos.
Umm, what ads? Futbol is played for 45mins straight, per half. There are only a handful of ads along with the sideline video banners.
The Finnish broadcaster YLE reports that it started filtering the vuvuzela sound on Monday:
http://yle.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/2010/06/yle_on_jo_suodattanut_lahetyksista_vuvuzelan_torinaa_1762215.html (Finnish)
(bad Google translation)
One only wonders what portions of those who "did not buy tickets" were put off by the perspective of vuvuzela...
One that hath name thou can not otter
That would be true, were it not for the fact that, unlike most US sports, there aren't many ad breaks in a soccer game. Also, in the UK many of the games are on the BBC, and the BBC doesn't openly advertise -- there's no actual commercial breaks, and all its advertising is done unethically, through covert product placement -- since it's forbidden from advertising. Not that that stops them.
If you stop noticing this noise, it actually demonstrates your short attention span, retard boy.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
You realise you just said that you prefer your team not competing on equal terms? Why you want the help of vuvuzelas for them?...
One that hath name thou can not otter
I've calculated my velocity with such exquisite precision that I have no idea where I am.
I would say the most boring sports to watch are 1)Nascar (driving around in a circle (oval) for hours) 2)golf (the activity for people that can't play real sports) 3 soccer (at least the players have good cardio fitness)
They should at least give the players in ear radios to communicate. Nice noise canceling versions but make sure they are on both a monitored but also encrypted channel.
A fool throws a stone into a well and a thousand sages can not remove it.
All broadcasters have extensive filters in their studios. It is trivially easy for a sound engineer to notch out the horns.
Excuse me, but please get off my Pennisetum Clandestinum, eh!
Also, in the UK many of the games are on the BBC, and the BBC doesn't openly advertise -- there's no actual commercial breaks, and all its advertising is done unethically, through covert product placement -- since it's forbidden from advertising. Not that that stops them.
I knew there was a reason for all the industrial dohickeys on the console of the Doctor's new TARDIS!
English translation
http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fi&tl=en&u=http://yle.fi/uutiset/kotimaa/2010/06/yle_on_jo_suodattanut_lahetyksista_vuvuzelan_torinaa_1762215.html%3Forigin%3Drss
1) Requires a very high level of skill and believe it or not isn't just a bunch of cars going in circles. I can understand it being boring, but theres actually a fair amount to it, personally I prefer F1.
2) Have you ever played Golf? Play 18 holes in one day without a golf cart then come back and talk about 'activity', if you finish. I hate golf and used to think it was for utter pussies, the I tried it. I still don't like it, but go ahead, carry a full set of clubs for 18 holes in one day.
3) Its pretty much the same as every other spectator sport. I fail to see what makes it any different from American football, * racing, basketball, baseball, tennis or whatever, you're just watching someone else do something. They pretty much all suck to watch unless you can fast forward through the slow bits to get the 15 minutes out of the 3-6 hours that are worth watching.
Good for you for pretending to be witty and clever by insulting things you probably aren't even capable of doing half assed, but you fail, especially at trolling.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
They have not looked at the problem in a good way, the commentary can be done isolated from the noise, and they take the original voice of the news guy and splice it in after the notch filters are applied it's a easy fix they could rig up in software.
ads? The only ads I see are at halftime and on the field in the form banners and edisplays. At halftime I go get more beer. Non-stop action leaves little time for commercials...
After a bit, the brain compensates for the notch filter, and they say it's just as annoying. Best to scrub the crowd-track altogether, and dub a repertoire of standard crowd oohs and ahhs (just like the laughter track on too many shows). A dubber representing each side could make the instant selections quickly (like subtitling). Then add-back the commentary track. Result - atmosphere and information. (Pity I don't watch sport).
(On topic, vuvuzelas are annoying as hell, and I hate having to cut out the commentary by turning off the audio)
I've noticed throughout the World Cup, joyfully, that the game isn't interrupted by a blaring car commercial or a shaving advertisement every 10 minutes.
In fact, if you're going to measure the popularity of American sporting events by viewers, the top two, baseball and football are also the most heavily inundated by commercials. (I think the statistic was that only 17 minutes out of every hour is spent watching football during a football game) In addition to that, Basketball and Hockey, which are both high-contact, high-movement sports in comparison, can only have commercials placed during the breaks in the periods, which are every 15 minutes and 20 minutes concurrently.
It makes me wonder, how much of sports fandom in America is about commercialism and how much of it is about physical competition.
My kingdom for a donkey!
That should be "C19th nationalist reaction," obviously.
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
But are you a soccer fan?
No! ;-)
I'm a Football Bat, you insensitive clod!
Well, at least some of the time; other times, I'm a Billiards Iron.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
I think you'll find that's not limited to just South Africa either. In the UK, although we *do* have advert breaks on certain channels for certain things, advertisements over and above the usual pitch-side things tend to cause uproar and stopping for an advert break would probably be grounds for rioting. The US stands out here for doing such things - yes at "half-time" in a "soccer" match there is sometimes / usually an advert break but most of the time from 10 minutes before kick-off (if not a lot earlier) to long after the game is finished is 99%, well, the sport you wanted to watch. That's been like that since the first televised game until today.
Given that people get scholarships for sporting prowess in the US, and that they seem to believe US = "World" (World Series, etc.), it baffles me that they regularly are reported to have ruined sporting coverage. In the last few Olympics they have been criticised for only showing footage of US athletes, or US-centric sports, for instance. And the stop-start nature of many of their sports does give rise to stupid amounts of advertising but it's only encouraged by the populous (given that the *adverts* shown during the big sporting events are eagerly anticipated, and cost the most money to show). Let's be honest - only 17 minutes out of every hour has anything actually *happening* on the field in American Football anyway - it's worse than cricket but thank God it doesn't go on as long.
I would argue, however, that basketball is an almost-zero-contact sport. At least it was last time I checked the rules, maybe they've changed. And if you want a "high-contact" sport, hockey would probably qualify but rugby would then probably be classed as an "extreme" sport because it's basically American Football without the padding. Even with the sports you mentioned - every 15-20 minutes for a *break*? Seriously? What kind of attention span do US athletes have? I think the problem is not just TV networks - it's the nature of US sports (very stop-start-stop-start-break), the attention span of the viewers (apparently minimal), the tradition of things like high-cost adverts that "must be watched", and the fact that viewers *don't* complain about it enough.
This is why other countries point at the US - it's what happens when commercialism takes over from entertainment. They did it to Hollywood (will never forgive such blatant advertising in movies as they've been doing in the last 10 years), they did it to the music business, they did it to sports, they even did it to schools (an idea that the UK are now apparently copying wholesale with their corporate-sponsored-school "academy" program). And the US wonders why it gets a reputation of being involved in everything from wars to sports just to ensure its money supplies. I'm afraid that it's a seed that been sown by the US populous itself - when you get excited about an advert, then that advert will be what you see - and a million copycat ones.
Personally? When TV got boring, I stopped watching it live and now buy pre-recorded content which I know already is good (which I then rip), or watch it on some free service where I complain if there's a single advert on the video (I already ignore static ads on the page anyway). I've actually filed complaints with TV websites for having noisy-flash-adverts - and I wasn't the only one to complain because they were quickly removed. And I'm not alone in such beliefs, which is why most British TV companies are struggling at the moment. "Freeview" gives us hundreds of free digital channels. I've not even seriously looked at it, because it has adverts on most of them (and even entire channels of adverts - a very American invention). Sky's satellite service introduced us to American-style advert breaks and was quickly ditched, though some people still pay a huge monthly fee for the privilege of watching adverts spliced into their favourite programs.
So what's left if you don't want to watch buckets of adverts ruining your programming? You pay a subscription to
someone tag this 'vuvuzela'. i very much think it will become a term soon enough.
Read radical news here
1) Crap... it might not be something I can do but it's something that any professional driver would find piss easy. There is no challenge except not getting in the way of other drivers. Only Americans seem not to understand this. Please watch a proper rally in the Scottish highlands - with a real course, real obstacles, real skill and (most importantly) some excitement to watching it. F1 is actually WORSE because you can't watch it because everything moves too fast to keep track of (especially if you are watching it in person) and the winners are determined by 0.001 of a second (and kept that way by restrictions on vehicles) and anything considered risky/dangerous/shortcut is not allowed, which is just boring as shit in terms of competition - it's *never* clear who actually is the better driver when a slight tailwind could triple the time difference between two cars.
2) Golf is 99.9% walking. And nobody professional carries their clubs very far. Even then, so what? It's a slow walk in a cut-down forest (perfectly tuned to hit balls from) to hit an almost-weightless ball towards a distant flag, and then half-hour of going to catch the ball up. Yawn.
3) Agreed completely.
However, I have to trump all of the commenters in this post by introducing televised snooker, darts, and bowls (not *bowling*, bowls, on a lawn - it's like a non-ice version of curling). It's gone out of fashion now but until you've spent a Sunday with your granddad watching snooker or darts (and even game shows based around snooker/darts like Pot Black, or Bullseye) you have no idea what a boring sport is.
he got it spot on. i posted in this discussion and cant use mod points.
Read radical news here
*picks self up off of the floor*
DON"T click this link![1]
It will make you dizzy, induce vertigo, and cause you to fall out of your chair!
[1] Well, unless you are at work...
*bookmarks link to use at work*
Well done.
Down With Slashdot BETA!!! I've been around the corner and seen the oliphant; you can only abuse me from your perspecti
On commercial channels, the broadcast is about delivering viewers to the advertisers, not football to the viewers. That's why in England''s first match ITV cut to advertisements about 3 minutes into the match, meaning that English viewers didn't get to see England's first goal of the tournament.
Quidnam Latine loqui modo coepi?
Well given that we in the United Kingdom invented the game, then we in the United Kingdom do indeed have standing to say that you should celebrate *OUR* game in a fashion that *WE* approve of :-)
Get a brewery to start giving them away with every case of beer sold.
I have not got a lot of time for football, but the world cup is different, because I find football somewhat boring, I like to surf the 'net whilst its on and take the crowd's voice as my cue to something interesting occurring, them damn vuvuzelas spoil it for me, the relentless droning makes me kill the TV's sound and I keep missing the interesting bits.
The world cup goes way beyond sport or football, it is more about the one world we all live on, the sight of a North Korean player with tears streaming down his face, in the lineup just before kickoff, in the match against Brazil last night spoke volumes.
More than anything the world cup is about dreams, imagine a kid in some village somewhere, his arse hanging out his trousers, no shoes, living barely above malnutrition and he learns to play football then he learns football is the equivalent of 'the yellow brick road', without a dream we die.
Its the scale of it that awes me, every country on the frigging planet sends a team, 204/205 teams started out in 2007 and it got whittled down to a final 32 teams, each representing their country to display their talent for balance, athleticism, coolness under pressure, fairness and a way for all the tribes on our planet to have a knees up.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2010_FIFA_World_Cup_qualification/
Do you know the saddest thing of all, the African people sing nice, try to get a copy of Paul Simon's album Graceland.
Why on earth didn't FIFA ban fart makers at the WC, the only reason they blow the bloody things is because everyone else is blowing them.
I also love the Olympics, but it is not nearly as egalitarian as football, all you need is something resembling a ball and you are good to go.
Because of those wretched things I missed Maicon's amazing goal, interesting how lots of people complained about the new ball, I wonder whether the old ball would have curved so much, considering how little the new ball was rotating.
Good luck to England on Friday.
It's called an elephant's trunk whereas it is in fact, an elephant's nose, a nose by any other name would smell as sweet
I really don't get it. I have watched a couple of games so far and even though my hearing is good, I didn't feel like there was an unusual high level of noise in those games. The commentator is obviously always louder than the background noise because the station creates the audio mix that way. And for the sound of the vuvuzelas: It's an unusual sound, but at least on TV doesn't seem to be any louder than other noisemakers spectators often use. It seems to me that using horns and other noisemakers have been a part of soccer games for quite some time and the vuvuzelas, traditional or not, are just another instance of a noisemaker. They might be louder in the stadium, but on TV, they don't bother me at all.
The strength of a civilization is not measured by its ability to fight wars, but rather by its ability to prevent them.
I don't give a shit about what people do in SA. What gets on my nuts is drunk Germans running around in Germany after a game, blowing into plastic horns. The traditional "driving around in your car while randomly hitting the horn" has the advantage of the idiots moving fast enough that they're out of earshot after a few seconds.
This has nothing to do with South Africa. It has everything to do with annoying pricks now having a new toy to annoy the crap out of me with. I wish you a great World Cup, really. You're not at fault for so many soccer fans being adult-sized noisy brats. But don't expect me to not complain when you give the not-so-little pests new weapons of mass annoyance.
USE HOT GRITS WITH STATUE OF NATALIE PORTMAN (NAKED AND PETRIFIED)
Yes, because a constant droning sound never simply fades into the background after awhile.
Never happens to anyone.
Stupid cunt.
If you have surround sound, just unplug your left and right channel speakers. You'll still get the commentators through the center channel.
(-1, Raw and Uncut is the only way to read)
sort of like the sound canceling headphones do?
I'm sure you couldn't cancel the sound completely but could you mute it?
Have a speaker every 100' or so that transmits the reverse wave at the appropriate volume?
Dumb idea for some reason?
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
You can also filter the sound by training your brain not to notice the awful sound, by a process called autohypnosis. This video can help.
Ni.
The ho-hum matches are pretty much down to the fact the players can't hear each other on the pitch. Brazil should have blown a comically inexperienced North Korea out of the water but ended up being run ragged with a Stalingrad style defence.
[FUCK BETA]
Playing sports well does take a lot of mental acuity. Not the same variety that goes into writing good code, but mental acuity all the same. I think it's entirely likely that even if you weren't a physical wreck, you would find it impossible to compete mentally with a professional team-sport athlete in the context of that sporting event.
There's a quality often revered to as "vision" but doesn't actually refer to the athlete's ability to resolve fine detail optically. It refers to having a brain that very quickly sees opportunities, calculates trajectories, and anticipates the movements and intentions of 9-14 other players. If we stuck your brain in a robot body capable of matching their physical abilities, you would still be too stupid (in that domain) to be better than merely good.
Watching sports is another activity entirely, and while some of it certainly is cretinous, jingoism for people with only a couple neurons to rub together, it's entirely possible to be a nerd, an amateur athlete, and to enjoy watching a sport. There are a lot of interesting complexity, strategic decision-making and other highbrow elements even if you disregard the entertainment that is the spectacle of human physical excellence. Personally, I enjoy seeing a guy jump nearly his own height. I think it's neat. I wouldn't watch nothing but that for hours on end, but it seems a little silly to disregard displays of phenomenal ability out of hand.
Age-old solution: watch on TV, turn down sound, turn on radio.
[FUCK BETA]
uhm, it isn't THAT clever. Surprised they didn't think to do it already. Now Adobe Audition (ever since it was Cool Edit) had a noise filter where you can get a profile of the sound you want removed. Just highlight over a section of something, click the "get profile", then highlight the section you want to remove it from. Now THAT's clever. A notch filter? Not so much.
"They said I probly shouldn't fly with just one eye," "I am Bender. Please insert girder."
yeah... ESPECIALLY loud constant droning sounds that drown out a lot of other sounds... yeah, never.
VAGINA
On commercial channels, the broadcast is about delivering viewers to the advertisers, not football to the viewers. That's why in England''s first match ITV cut to advertisements about 3 minutes into the match, meaning that English viewers didn't get to see England's first goal of the tournament.
In this particular case, you're wrong. I'm not disagreeing with your first sentence; it's just that the second one does not follow in this case. The reason the goal was missed (on HD only, not SD broadcast) was that someone pressed the wrong button. That's it. If it had been intentional (and ITV never *intentionally* show adverts during play) don't you think they would have put adverts on the SD broadcast (which had about 10x as many viewers) as well?
ITV are just incompetent.
But ITV do their best to spoil the atmosphere in other ways by inserting adverts a few seconds before kickoff and twice during half time.
This is why I gave up watching what little sport I do watch on ITV a long time ago. They ruined the F1GP for me (now it's back on the Beeb but the FIA have managed to ruin the sport in the meantime), and in a football match where you might get one or two good goals in a 90 minute game, to risk missing them for an ad break is pretty intolerable and you're better off catching the highlights on the BBC later anyway.
HA!
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
On commercial channels, the broadcast is about delivering viewers to the advertisers, not football to the viewers. That's why in England''s first match ITV cut to advertisements about 3 minutes into the match, meaning that English viewers didn't get to see England's first goal of the tournament.
Wrong
Ceci n'est pas un sig.
Or at least let us bloody win from time to time.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
If someone behind you blows the horn, it's pretty much directly into your ear by definition, no?
I think they should kick it up a notch at World Cup 2014 and let each fan bring acoustic cannons. All in good fun, of course.
In that case, the "World" Cup should be like Major League Baseball's "World" Series.
Except the TV rights are sold years in advance, and the advertisers can't pressure the TV companies as the TV companies don't run the tournament. Lower advertising revenue might mean lower bids for TV rights, but that might not affect anything until 2018 or later, and this is the only tournament which has these horns.
as illustrated here http://i.imgur.com/Rcei4.jpg
hippocracy
A form of government involving rule by hippopotami?
Unity? Screw that: XFCE. Slashdot Beta? Screw that: SoylentNews. Australis? Screw that: Pale Moon. UX developers DIAF
Madam & Eve? I have a book of those somewhere.
My favourite one is where Madam is at confession. She tells the priest how much she pays Eve .. and the priest says "You think she could fit me in one day a week?"
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
2 - "Near superhuman"? HAH! More like "special needs" idiot savants, generally leaning towards simply idiot.
Most of them wouldn't be able to pass simple elementary-school tests. But they can sure as hell run after a ball.
Well, so can dogs and horses - they at least have the excuse of being dumb animals.
Running doesn't require a lot of brains. But dogs and horses can do it much, much better than any human. I'd like to see a human outrun a horse or a greyhound. That'd be worth paying money to watch, but anything less, forget it. Watching humans run or jump is like watching a spelling bee for severely learning-impaired children. None of them are any good at it, so what's so interesting about watching it?
We're talkin androids here. Not one of them iThingies.
Mit der Dummheit kämpfen Götter selbst vergebens
I just wished that this World Cup was all about great goals and power plays.. And not about the "Vuvuzelas"..
You don't seem to understand what proof by assertion means.
Your links prove only that football hooliganism is not exclusively an English problem (which claim was never made). They don't prove that it is specifically a German tradition (quite the opposite), nor do they even prove the it is largely extinct in the UK, true thought that may be.
Or are you (along with that sausage munching pillock) stuck in the 80s?
Fair call, but we are talking tradition here. I agree that English authorities have taken very strong measures to deal with the problem and clearly the problem in the UK simply doesn't compare to the 80s. I know this first hand, having lived in London (or out of it) for half a year in '97. We had to jump through hoops to get tickets to a game round the corner at Selhurst Park which eventually involved a character reference for my wife who was working as a nurse and a slight bending of the rules (they shouldn't, apparently, on that basis have sold us the tickets). Man! By comparison when visiting Germany we simply bought tickets at the game (admittedly only 2nd Liga).
I concede that writing "English phenomenon," in place of 'tradition' was clumsy. OTOH, football hooliganism is as much an English cultural export as the beautiful game itself. But my point, as your links bare out, is that characterising neo-nazi, or far-right nationalist, football hooliganism as a particularly German tradition, is to trade in national stereotypes. I want to apologise to you that in dispelling that notion I may have fallen victim to perpetuating such stereotypes myself. It was certainly not my intention to insult you or your countrymen. Who, after all, form the other half of my genetic/cultural heritage. I have to quote the bard (but only from memory) "shot an arrow over my house and stuck my brother."
Good luck in the cup!
Better to be despised for too anxious apprehensions, than ruined by too confident a security. --Edmund Burke
So you have some friends over...to watch the game. The droning gets annoying. You turn on some music and talk while the game plays. Cut to ads. No one hears them. Advertisers call and complain that plastic horns are killing their massive media buy.....
they had a say in the matter, and that was when they bought, or more accurately, did not buy, tickets. If they bought enough tickets, FIFA wouldn't have had to pack the stadiums at the last minute by selling a bunch of cheap tickets to us South Africans
Wow... just wow.. That is the first time I've heard someone complaining about affordable seats for locals in an international sporting event. Bravo.
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