Unless said content is a service, and it could be argued pretty effectively that news content is pretty much as serviceable as content can get. Accuracy might be another matter.
All right, this is an interesting discussion, even though I think it has very little to do with whether or not one watches television, but onward.
The point I was trying to make was that there is more to a relationship than just respecting a person perspective and ideas, etc.
Of course, and I agree with that. I was not trying to say that the respect of others is the only thing I seek, or the only thing of importance in a relationship. It is important, but obviously not the only thing.
I define popular culture as the aspects of a culture that indivisuals of that culture share in common - common experiences, common knowledge, etc.
In that case, yes we are having a semantic disagreement. I would lump more of that into general culture. I define "pop culture" as the ageless fascination with collectively recognized people of importance whose actual benefit of importance is simply that they are recognized. In other words, not the people that are actually making big changes in the world, such as Hawkings, but people like Spears. The latter will have an extremely minimal impact on the world in the grand scale of things while the former's ideas and actions will resonate for centuries. Spears is popular for one reason -- because she is popular -- and that is what I call pop culture. It exists merely, as you put it, to provide a common ground for the masses to equate importance with and have something to collectively admire.
This is incidentally one of the main differences of the "geek" mindset. Being a group of people more fascinated by ideas that popularity for popularities sake, they are drawn to people of great ideas, and hold them in the same position that others might hold a pop character. That isn't to say one is better than the other, that is just how it is.
So back to my new understanding of what you are referring to as pop culture. I would disagree with the notion that television is important to that. Whenever I have watched television at a friend's house or whatnot, I have seen that it is filled with nothing but what my definition of pop culture is (and that is probably where our confusion of semantics arose). A fascination with popularity for the sake of popularity and very little time spent on popularity for the sake of ideas. It does exist in small doses, but the vast majority of television programming focusses on the celebration of the celebrity in one way or another.
All of the other forms of culture that can be extracted from television, can be found in much more concentrated and effective doses from other sources. To point at a television and say it does indeed provide things beyond the banal is true, but it neglects to make known that it is:
The mote in a sea of flotsom.
Not the only source of this information
Indeed, all of the information that can be obtained from television can be obtained from other sources, some just as quickly if not more quickly. So you are then arguing for the format that television provides, not the actual content, speed of delivery, or anything else, but the method of delivery -- that being an audio visual, pre-programmed, largely non-interactive stream.
I find that very curious, because I see no reason why such a format would be necessary to bind culture together. How do you think people got along with each other before the advent of such streams, even the purely audio streams of the golden radio days?
The answer is they got along just as they do now. Small communities of individuals with little awareness of communities outside their sphere. Television and radio have not changed that. They might sometimes make it seem as if that has changed, but since it is non-interactive there is no bind form anywhere except in the minds if those who watch it. To those that do no watch it, there is no connection whatsoever. Take no offense, but it is frighteningly similar to delusion. Do you realize there have been studies that show people who watch the same television s
I realized that I was exempt when I wrote the message, that was my intention in writing it, because your statements did not include any exemptions. I showed one such path that allows a "non-tv" child to grow up with a healthy world view, thus implying there are others. So my example does work for what I intended it to do.
They may have respected you but did you really make any difference?
I am not sure I follow your question. Absolutely everything "makes a difference" to some degree, human or not; animate or inanimate. These questions are you are asking have very little to do with popular culture.:) They are good old staples of philosophical wonder, right up there with the meaning of life. Do you honestly think it makes a difference whether a person is steeped in pop culture or not, ten years after high school? Twenty years? Thirty?... It doesn't matter, either way the question of whether or not they would have changed as a result of being in contact with you is as idle as the tree falling in a forest question.
Your example of reading a book and saying that reading that book didn't mystically change you is firstly, false, and secondly not even a proper comparison. Reading a book is not like being in physical contact with a person, let alone a close friend! What on earth does reading a book have to do with knowing a non-tv person.
You state you didn't have a circle of friends but treated everyone equally
As in: I do not view friendships in a closed circuit fashion. In other words, I have close friends who might never all hang together because of their pop-culture induced dislike of each other -- as opposed to a circle of friends that are all alike. Your "not close relationships with anyone" remark is stereotypical and not applicable to what I was referring to. I am not referring to "knowing everybody." I am referring to not knowing everybody! The exact opposite. Approaching every person as a unique and interesting soul no matter what they look or act like. To truly not know what they are until you really get to know them. It's the complete opposite of your assumptions, and a classic example of how not ruling your life with pop can be healthy.
If you can't really relate with them, your not going to make any real difference.
This is false on two scores. Firstly, some of the most influential people who have literally changed the way the entire world thinks could relate to nobody. The second false notion is this obsession you have with making a difference. Everything makes a difference. If you are referring to a level of how much a difference you make, then who on earth decides where that line is drawn? Seriously? It is totally subjective. My line is very low. I find beauty in the most very subtle of differences. Other people find beauty in very massive differences. Life is way more complicated then you are painting it to be.
The third thing you have false is that outsiders have less of a feel for culture. Please. Why do you think people value the opinions of other people? Because the opinions of an outsider not only provide insight into blind spots -- they define the very characteristics that build who you are. Do you really believe that you know yourself better than an intimate observer? I have a wake-up call for you: You do not. We all operate under a nearly total blanket of blindness in regards to ourselves. Our very understanding of how we think is tainted by the way we think, because of how we think. The difference with culture is minimal once you realize that culture is an expression of homogenous consciousness. The things that you do not see about yourself are expressed in culture, and thus you do not see the things of that culture unless you step out of it.
Lastly, your twilight zone example is again off, because you are making the assumption that I am trying to make a difference in the world. I am not. I am indeed making a difference, and that is lovely. People are making a difference in me, and that is lovely too -- but I have no intent or drive to change the world into something I feel is better.
Whew, it is rather complicated. Well, in a nutshell, the brain learns things best by actively utilizing as many of the senses as possible. A large part of that is the use of imagination to "conjur" elements you do not have access to. The process of conjuring sense based information in tandem with provided information enhances the provided information. It's the classic: You can read about swimming all your life, but you'll never learn how to swim until you jump in. Note this is active use of the senses, not to be confused with stimulation.
The problem with television is that it is providing stimulation for several of the senses to such an intense degree, that they become latent and no longer active.Thus, these senses are not being uses to anchor the memory. Anchoring is vital to the efficiency (not ability) of memory. You can memorize a list of numbers with brute force, but that isn't very efficient internally. A small amount of stimulation is good, in fact it can be conducive to good learning. This is why subtle noises like water or crickets (or whatever else you grew up with, some people relax to traffic) can relax your mind and allow you to function at a higher level of efficiency.
This is where balance comes in to the picture, and it it is a good rule of thumb. The problem with television is that it is by its very nature an over-balance. It is a saturation of sense stimulation through two paths with causes two things to happen. As already mentioned, those sense paths become latent, and secondly, the other senses become "blind" to their surroundings. In effect, the mind shuts down most of its ability to function imaginatively, which is vital for healthy learning.
That raises the question of why the mind learns that way, but that is where things start to become a good deal more complex. If you are really interested in the why, do some research on information theory in relation to brain bandwidth, recent research on the "sub-conscious," and how the conscious mind is not intended to be used as the primary vehicle for true, healthy, wisdom building learning.
As I read through your list of ways in which television has benefit you, I couldn't help but notice that in all cases you used some small detail in a particular show to springboard a session of research or further experience without the further help of the televison. In other words, you are not actually doing your learning with the TV, you are using it as a nearly random topic generator. The same thing could just as easily be accomplished with a careful mix of random encylopaedia and Internet usage. Using these two as springboards you could accomplish just as much research into things that interest you. So it is not the TV that is at stake there, it is simple your preference for a dynamic base of trivia from which you can pull interesting facts from.
That's great! But recognize that it is simply that, not the television.
Actually, they listened to the radio programs before there was television.
Re:Its current content, not the medium
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TV's Tipping Point
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That's odd, my friend had a dish and one of those digital subscription programs; some 400 or 500 channels -- and they were pouring on the same massive quantity of pointless advertising, shit-stupid programing, and knuckle dragging all while charging him half-a-hundred a month!
Seemed pretty darn stupid to me. You might as well just dangle the rabbit ears. A waste of time is a waste of time, no matter how you butter it up.
Heh, what? Okay, I grew up without television. My parents were world travelers. Before I was a teenager I knew more about other cultures, history, and the way life really is in this world than people twice my age. I didn't have a "clique" or circle of friends. I knew how to accept everyone equally, and was able to associate with the in crowd just as easily as the not-so-in crowds.
I didn't see the world in "circles of friends," because I had not grown up with a box that depicted life that way. My knowledge of culture was the way people smile, the way their dust smells and their food tastes. Not by the sparse trivia you get on a "documentary" show.
As far as relating to popular culture. You don't need that. It is a myth that you do. Popular culture is a vast expanse of pointlessness. I didn't know the first thing about modern music groups or anything when I hit highschool, but that didn't effect my ability to be a person with the people around me. They respected me for my unique perspective and ideas, not for whether or not I knew which hand Michael Jackson wore a glove on.
Yet, I don't think balance is necessarily the solution there. You must learn to balance your use of balance, as well.
The problem is content in many cases, but universally it is the format It doesn't matter how much you learned on those three stations out of thousands. You could have learned the same material through other methods, the use of which are more healthy for the brain than having nearly the entire show run for you automatically.
This is one problem that I see a lot with open source software.
That's funny, this modifier key constraint behavior has been a staple of open and closed source drawing packages for as long as I have been using them, which would be around the Photoshop version 2 days (though I am not sure if it had it then.) Furthermore, some programs even let you apply multiple constraints at once! Allowing such things as 45 degree increment straight lines.
Anyway. The purpose of a drawing package is to create a set of tools that allow the user to combine these tools in such a way that they can do much much more than the programmers will ever be able to anticipate. Photoshop functions with a very simple set of tools which can be extrapolated by clever users into doing a wild variety of things. That is why there is no "straight line" tool, because the program and interface would quickly become consumed by thousands (literally!) of very specific tools, all of which could be emulated by a more basic set.
It is not a design flaw. It is a toolset for professionals who have been trained to think and innovate. If you want MS Paint functionality, which is designed for people who might not even know what a pixel is -- there are plenty of programs for that.
A head knocking the platter during use rare does enough damage to completely hose the drive. At worse you get a few bad blocks, the controller notes them and omits them from the allocation table. You might have a little data loss, save the file from the buffer a second time and it will be fine as the bad block(s) will be skipped.
It was more of an issue before dynamic block de-allocation. The only time that happened was during a format, so if you got a mess of bad blocks over a few years without formating, it could potentially screw up your system enough to require a reformat.
Ha! I had fun with this once. Right after they started doing that crap. I don't drive, I walk everywhere, so I carry a decent amount of stuff around with me. When they informed me that I couldn't bring the bag into the theatre, I ask if it would be alright to leave it in the manager's care. The manager was there, hesitated for a moment, and agreed. So I then asked if it would be okay if I got some stuff out of it that I needed with me like pens and paper. She agreed.
Now I walk around with a lot of pockets. So I open up the pack and start pulling all manner of things out. Pocket dictionaries, thesaurus, a laptop computer, journals, and on and on. Stuff everything into my pockets, tuck the computer under my arm, and handed her the completely empty bag.
"It's a good thing you don't let people bring backpacks into the theatre!" I said, "I feel much safer already."
The social aspect is slipping too. Now that they play the damn Twenty. You have to arrive at the theatre a good forty minutes early if you want any peace before the show, because as soon as twenty-till-start hits, it is a solid wall of deafening advertisments and tripe. I've started bringing ear-plugs so I can continue doing what I have always done before a movie, read or get some writing done in peace -- or if I am with friends, actually talk with them. Now you have to yell like it is a nightclub while some air-headed whore rambles on about her apartment decorations (pruh pruh pruh prod product placement) at 115 decibals.
If anything, the last few years have done more to drive me out of the theatre than any other factor. The pre-show annoyance has become so severe I can hardly handle it. I just go to movies I really want to see on the big screen -- or avoid Regal altogether, which is extremely difficult in most places. They are doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing.
The addition of a few extra I-Frames around the dots is seriously not going to double the size of the encode! You do realize that encoders automatically insert I-Frames at most things that have a sudden transition. That means any scene that cuts directly without a fade (pretty much every cut in the typical movie) has an I-Frame injected. In addition to that, depending on the IPB pattern and GOP size used, there are I-Frames anywhere from every three to fifteen frames. That is roughly 10 to 2 times per second at NTSC output rates. The addition of three I-Frames in a row is so pitifully small it would be lost below the standard deviation frequency.
Secondly, I would question whether or not the encoder would even merit these small dots worthy an I-Frame! They would be about 2 to 3 pixels in size, based on what I saw flicker by in the theatre. That's the size of dust. You have that much random gunk all over the reel, yet you don't see encode filesizes exploding through the roof from a dusty take!
Yeah, I thought the spots were really obvious and annoying and I'm not even trained to spot them. I do see reel-change marks too though, perhaps I just catch that stuff better. At least the changer marks are up in the corner and not at random places in the middle of the frame. I would be awfully pissed if I were the director of a movie and they threw those awful distracting dot patterns in the middle of a scene I had spent weeks labouring over.
Granted, I am a human and not a script, but they are really easy to spot. I was about halfway through Underworld, which turned out to be such a steaming pile of crap that I spent the rest of the time Hunting for Dots. They are blatently obvious, more so than a scratch, or dust. I hadn't even heard about this, and I knew what was going on while watching the movie -- that is how obvious they are. It really does ruin the movie, though. If it had been something I was actually enjoying I would have been annoyed at the distraction it caused.
While you might be spot on target with ballpoint pens (I wouldn't really know, I am not a fan of any), there are definitely areas of the pen world where price does make a difference. Specifically along the lines of archival quality inks and such. The difference in using a cheap brand of ink, and a finely ground more expensive variety can mean having your handwritten documents in 50 years, and not. Also the actual usage of them varies. Good inks flow right off the nib and do not stick to the metal. Cheap inks clot up in the metalworks and produce lumpy results on the paper.
To be fair though, we are talking about a difference between a $2.00 bottle of ink and an $8.00 bottle. Not even near the magnitude of differences I have seen in the ballpoint pen market, where most of the mark-up seems to go to the designer -- not the workmanship, much like a pair of Gucci sunglasses versus a $20 pair at the local superstore.
To get off topic as you did, the same holds true for things like tea. A minimal increase in price per pound means the difference between a cup of tea you'll remember savoring a year later, and dried out, utterly forgettable Liptons.
In general I do agree with you though, especially in the things that have huge price differences. People will fight tooth and nail to defend their multi-thousand dollar audio systems which produce very minimal (and often subjective) gains over much cheaper varieties.
When I go retro, which is quite often, I prefer to go really retro. Bottles of ink, nibs, and nib holders still, after all of these years, maintain the most expressive and challenging script. My writing process starts in a scratchbook where I'll use a typical gel pen, and then later gets transferred and re-written on a PDA with a keyboard, or a laptop. When the final product is on the PDA, it then gets transferred to my "final" journals -- and that is where I start to get very picky (and elitist) about paper quality, ink, and pen.
I write fairly small in my journals, so I spent a lot of time trying out nibs looking for a fine line that still had a degree of dynamic expression. My favorite everyday nib is the Hunt#104, a lithography grade nib which can produce lines as fine as the crosshatching you see on currency, while also being able to dump out a.5mm thick line. This range is perfect for the size of writing I do.
When I am sketching I like something that can go a bit wider. While initially a very tricky nib to get a hang of, the Gillot#659 quick became my favorite. It can produce a fine line that is on par with most "marker" style technical pens, while putting out thick 2mm lines.If I want to get an even bolder line, the hefty Gillot#404 serves well.
The actual nib holder is mostly up to preference. After finding one that will fit the nib of choice, that is. Personally I like things with a smaller grip. The Mitchell Mapping holder fits both the H104 and G659, and has a thin, light feel to it with a nice swell at the grip to fit the hand. Koh-li-noor's black wood nib holder (not sure of the name) holds the larger nib styles I use, and while it is a bit thick for my taste, I like the general balance and heft of it.
That of course leaves ink. There are many hundreds of styles just within the "black ink" range to choose from. Generally, non-waterproof inks work better with finer nibs, as waterproof inks are thicker and tend to clog things up quickly. The same goes for quick drying variations, for obvious reasons. The biggest drawback to non-waterproof, other than the obvious, is that they are not quite as durable under the hand. Lines that have already been penned generally have to be protected by a light cloth. They also do not dry as darkly in most cases. Waterproofs can work with the larger nibs, however, though I still prefer non-waterproof. For black ink, I prefer J. Herbin's Perle des Encre, which is a bit expensive, but well worth the cost. It dries slowly, meaning you can keep a loaded nib for minutes on end. Inks that dry faster require constant rinsing or re-dipping, often times at 20 to 30 second intervals. With J. Herbin, I can keep a pen sitting beside my book for around five minutes before it starts to clog. Of course, the slow drying time means you have to be more careful with the lines you have already written.
For sepia ink, I like the naturally derived Walnut brand. It dries artistically, and handles itself well, as the Herbin does. Inks I stay far away from are the cheap brands you find in typical "hobby and craft" shops. Many of these inks are designed for airbrush use also, which requires much less room for error as far as delivery equipment is concerned. Another brand I steer clear from is Winston & Newton. I have found their inks to be a clogging nightmare. Mixing your own inks using Japanese Sumi ink sticks in a stone grinder can be a lot of fun, but these inks are really designed for brushes.
The last, and most important consideration for ink, is the longevity of it. Herbin's black inks are rated very highly in this regard. Undergoing tests where written pages are set in the sun for years, Herbin holds up very strongly against competitors (but their coloured inks do not fare as well as other brands for some reason). Sitting in the sun for a year is equal to decades inside the closed pages of a book, and thus it can be considered "archival" quality.
I am always on the lookout for improvements though. This t
Eh, I have the same laptop. Here is a benchmark: I can close the lid, slip it in a backpack, and walk out the door in under twenty seconds and edit 35 megabyte 16bbp images with just as much grace as 90% of the desktops and workstations, while riding the bus. Let us see you do that with that G5 desktop (literally). Yes, this thing is a beast of a laptop, I knew that when I purchased it, but that's the point of it. It's for people that need massive power on the go, and little else, certainly not "stylish cases." Oh, and as for battery time, I get roughly what I get with my 896mhz Titanium laptop -- around two hours. The main difference is that I can get much more done in those two hours on the Sager.
You missed the fundamental point of the parent's post -- this laptop (as beastly as it is) is running neck to neck with Apple's latest and greatest workstation. You cannot even get close to that with your six pound Powerbook -- I know because I use them too.
Perhaps because the people they primarily market to neither have use nor money for $5,000 worth of RAM (putting the base computer cost to eight grand).Only specialist software would really require that much right now, and of that software which runs on a Mac -- the market is extremely narrow indeed.
The people that signed big made a mistake. Some genuinely did not understand the ramifactions, others might have, but were too greedy to care. Labels like the one featured are nothing novel. Small labels like that have existed for ages, and artists know about them. They generally still choose the oppressors because it is a choice between having [Insert Small Town] knowing your work and [Insert Large Portion of the Globe]. Or at least the chance of that; as I said, greed. I'm not saying all of the ones under large labels are greedy -- but a vast majority are -- and I don't really have any sympathy for them.
There are plenty of artists who stuck with the small labels, plenty of really talented artists. And I reward their with my support. As for the rest, I don't even know what that babble is up to, and I certainly do not buy anything from them.
Another vote for the Palm T|T. After much deliberation, I decided to give eBooks a try about half a year ago, and I've been happy with my choice. I am an avid reader, and for someone my age, I have a large library of paper books that I would never part with. While it is impossible to say now, I don't know if I'll ever give up paper books entirely, but you never know.
As for digital, I have no problems reading them using the Palm. I went ahead and purchased Palm Reader Pro and a set of monospace fonts, this made a world of difference. I can use a font and size that more closely resembles traditional text, and use sub-pixel anti-aliasing to keep them smooth. Another nice thing with Pro is it comes with a pocket dictionary. I guess this would be nice for some people, but most of the words I have to look up are not even in the pocket version -- so I went ahead and bought the full Webster's Collegiate. The dictionary integrates very well with the reader. Looking up a word is as simple as highlighting it with a pen. That convenience, along with the ability to tote around the equal of a small bookshelf around with you, are very compelling reasons to stick with eBooks for me.
I sometimes read in the computer -- usually when I am at work and things are slow. Generally I prefer to use a handheld device, though. It is more like reading a book. I don't sit posture perfect and stare straight ahead to read -- I lay on the couch. I don't think I'd ever voluntarily read an eBook on my desktop/laptop in my leisure time. To each their own, however.
I still buy a lot of paper books. Usually things that are not available in eBook, or special things I want a physical copy of. Annotations to Finnegans Wake, for example, would never work well on a handheld because each line is carefully formatted to match the original text of Joyce's Wake.
Slashdot Mirror
Unless said content is a service, and it could be argued pretty effectively that news content is pretty much as serviceable as content can get. Accuracy might be another matter.
Thi friquincy at whech E sii 'i' to 'e' swaps es segnefecantly lowir than ri/re-deculous swaps. En fact, E cannot ricall thi last temi E saw oni.
Interesting theory, except that people have been hearing voices since long before the advent of wave transmitted information.
The point I was trying to make was that there is more to a relationship than just respecting a person perspective and ideas, etc.
Of course, and I agree with that. I was not trying to say that the respect of others is the only thing I seek, or the only thing of importance in a relationship. It is important, but obviously not the only thing.
I define popular culture as the aspects of a culture that indivisuals of that culture share in common - common experiences, common knowledge, etc.
In that case, yes we are having a semantic disagreement. I would lump more of that into general culture. I define "pop culture" as the ageless fascination with collectively recognized people of importance whose actual benefit of importance is simply that they are recognized. In other words, not the people that are actually making big changes in the world, such as Hawkings, but people like Spears. The latter will have an extremely minimal impact on the world in the grand scale of things while the former's ideas and actions will resonate for centuries. Spears is popular for one reason -- because she is popular -- and that is what I call pop culture. It exists merely, as you put it, to provide a common ground for the masses to equate importance with and have something to collectively admire.
This is incidentally one of the main differences of the "geek" mindset. Being a group of people more fascinated by ideas that popularity for popularities sake, they are drawn to people of great ideas, and hold them in the same position that others might hold a pop character. That isn't to say one is better than the other, that is just how it is.
So back to my new understanding of what you are referring to as pop culture. I would disagree with the notion that television is important to that. Whenever I have watched television at a friend's house or whatnot, I have seen that it is filled with nothing but what my definition of pop culture is (and that is probably where our confusion of semantics arose). A fascination with popularity for the sake of popularity and very little time spent on popularity for the sake of ideas. It does exist in small doses, but the vast majority of television programming focusses on the celebration of the celebrity in one way or another.
All of the other forms of culture that can be extracted from television, can be found in much more concentrated and effective doses from other sources. To point at a television and say it does indeed provide things beyond the banal is true, but it neglects to make known that it is:
Indeed, all of the information that can be obtained from television can be obtained from other sources, some just as quickly if not more quickly. So you are then arguing for the format that television provides, not the actual content, speed of delivery, or anything else, but the method of delivery -- that being an audio visual, pre-programmed, largely non-interactive stream.
I find that very curious, because I see no reason why such a format would be necessary to bind culture together. How do you think people got along with each other before the advent of such streams, even the purely audio streams of the golden radio days?
The answer is they got along just as they do now. Small communities of individuals with little awareness of communities outside their sphere. Television and radio have not changed that. They might sometimes make it seem as if that has changed, but since it is non-interactive there is no bind form anywhere except in the minds if those who watch it. To those that do no watch it, there is no connection whatsoever. Take no offense, but it is frighteningly similar to delusion. Do you realize there have been studies that show people who watch the same television s
They may have respected you but did you really make any difference?
I am not sure I follow your question. Absolutely everything "makes a difference" to some degree, human or not; animate or inanimate. These questions are you are asking have very little to do with popular culture. :) They are good old staples of philosophical wonder, right up there with the meaning of life. Do you honestly think it makes a difference whether a person is steeped in pop culture or not, ten years after high school? Twenty years? Thirty?... It doesn't matter, either way the question of whether or not they would have changed as a result of being in contact with you is as idle as the tree falling in a forest question.
Your example of reading a book and saying that reading that book didn't mystically change you is firstly, false, and secondly not even a proper comparison. Reading a book is not like being in physical contact with a person, let alone a close friend! What on earth does reading a book have to do with knowing a non-tv person.
You state you didn't have a circle of friends but treated everyone equally
As in: I do not view friendships in a closed circuit fashion. In other words, I have close friends who might never all hang together because of their pop-culture induced dislike of each other -- as opposed to a circle of friends that are all alike. Your "not close relationships with anyone" remark is stereotypical and not applicable to what I was referring to. I am not referring to "knowing everybody." I am referring to not knowing everybody! The exact opposite. Approaching every person as a unique and interesting soul no matter what they look or act like. To truly not know what they are until you really get to know them. It's the complete opposite of your assumptions, and a classic example of how not ruling your life with pop can be healthy.
If you can't really relate with them, your not going to make any real difference.
This is false on two scores. Firstly, some of the most influential people who have literally changed the way the entire world thinks could relate to nobody. The second false notion is this obsession you have with making a difference. Everything makes a difference. If you are referring to a level of how much a difference you make, then who on earth decides where that line is drawn? Seriously? It is totally subjective. My line is very low. I find beauty in the most very subtle of differences. Other people find beauty in very massive differences. Life is way more complicated then you are painting it to be.
The third thing you have false is that outsiders have less of a feel for culture. Please. Why do you think people value the opinions of other people? Because the opinions of an outsider not only provide insight into blind spots -- they define the very characteristics that build who you are. Do you really believe that you know yourself better than an intimate observer? I have a wake-up call for you: You do not. We all operate under a nearly total blanket of blindness in regards to ourselves. Our very understanding of how we think is tainted by the way we think, because of how we think. The difference with culture is minimal once you realize that culture is an expression of homogenous consciousness. The things that you do not see about yourself are expressed in culture, and thus you do not see the things of that culture unless you step out of it.
Lastly, your twilight zone example is again off, because you are making the assumption that I am trying to make a difference in the world. I am not. I am indeed making a difference, and that is lovely. People are making a difference in me, and that is lovely too -- but I have no intent or drive to change the world into something I feel is better.
That would be silly.
The problem with television is that it is providing stimulation for several of the senses to such an intense degree, that they become latent and no longer active.Thus, these senses are not being uses to anchor the memory. Anchoring is vital to the efficiency (not ability) of memory. You can memorize a list of numbers with brute force, but that isn't very efficient internally. A small amount of stimulation is good, in fact it can be conducive to good learning. This is why subtle noises like water or crickets (or whatever else you grew up with, some people relax to traffic) can relax your mind and allow you to function at a higher level of efficiency.
This is where balance comes in to the picture, and it it is a good rule of thumb. The problem with television is that it is by its very nature an over-balance. It is a saturation of sense stimulation through two paths with causes two things to happen. As already mentioned, those sense paths become latent, and secondly, the other senses become "blind" to their surroundings. In effect, the mind shuts down most of its ability to function imaginatively, which is vital for healthy learning.
That raises the question of why the mind learns that way, but that is where things start to become a good deal more complex. If you are really interested in the why, do some research on information theory in relation to brain bandwidth, recent research on the "sub-conscious," and how the conscious mind is not intended to be used as the primary vehicle for true, healthy, wisdom building learning.
As I read through your list of ways in which television has benefit you, I couldn't help but notice that in all cases you used some small detail in a particular show to springboard a session of research or further experience without the further help of the televison. In other words, you are not actually doing your learning with the TV, you are using it as a nearly random topic generator. The same thing could just as easily be accomplished with a careful mix of random encylopaedia and Internet usage. Using these two as springboards you could accomplish just as much research into things that interest you. So it is not the TV that is at stake there, it is simple your preference for a dynamic base of trivia from which you can pull interesting facts from.
That's great! But recognize that it is simply that, not the television.
Actually, they listened to the radio programs before there was television.
Seemed pretty darn stupid to me. You might as well just dangle the rabbit ears. A waste of time is a waste of time, no matter how you butter it up.
I didn't see the world in "circles of friends," because I had not grown up with a box that depicted life that way. My knowledge of culture was the way people smile, the way their dust smells and their food tastes. Not by the sparse trivia you get on a "documentary" show.
As far as relating to popular culture. You don't need that. It is a myth that you do. Popular culture is a vast expanse of pointlessness. I didn't know the first thing about modern music groups or anything when I hit highschool, but that didn't effect my ability to be a person with the people around me. They respected me for my unique perspective and ideas, not for whether or not I knew which hand Michael Jackson wore a glove on.
Yet, I don't think balance is necessarily the solution there. You must learn to balance your use of balance, as well.
The problem is content in many cases, but universally it is the format It doesn't matter how much you learned on those three stations out of thousands. You could have learned the same material through other methods, the use of which are more healthy for the brain than having nearly the entire show run for you automatically.
That's funny, this modifier key constraint behavior has been a staple of open and closed source drawing packages for as long as I have been using them, which would be around the Photoshop version 2 days (though I am not sure if it had it then.) Furthermore, some programs even let you apply multiple constraints at once! Allowing such things as 45 degree increment straight lines.
Anyway. The purpose of a drawing package is to create a set of tools that allow the user to combine these tools in such a way that they can do much much more than the programmers will ever be able to anticipate. Photoshop functions with a very simple set of tools which can be extrapolated by clever users into doing a wild variety of things. That is why there is no "straight line" tool, because the program and interface would quickly become consumed by thousands (literally!) of very specific tools, all of which could be emulated by a more basic set.
It is not a design flaw. It is a toolset for professionals who have been trained to think and innovate. If you want MS Paint functionality, which is designed for people who might not even know what a pixel is -- there are plenty of programs for that.
A head knocking the platter during use rare does enough damage to completely hose the drive. At worse you get a few bad blocks, the controller notes them and omits them from the allocation table. You might have a little data loss, save the file from the buffer a second time and it will be fine as the bad block(s) will be skipped. It was more of an issue before dynamic block de-allocation. The only time that happened was during a format, so if you got a mess of bad blocks over a few years without formating, it could potentially screw up your system enough to require a reformat.
Ha! I had fun with this once. Right after they started doing that crap. I don't drive, I walk everywhere, so I carry a decent amount of stuff around with me. When they informed me that I couldn't bring the bag into the theatre, I ask if it would be alright to leave it in the manager's care. The manager was there, hesitated for a moment, and agreed. So I then asked if it would be okay if I got some stuff out of it that I needed with me like pens and paper. She agreed.
Now I walk around with a lot of pockets. So I open up the pack and start pulling all manner of things out. Pocket dictionaries, thesaurus, a laptop computer, journals, and on and on. Stuff everything into my pockets, tuck the computer under my arm, and handed her the completely empty bag.
"It's a good thing you don't let people bring backpacks into the theatre!" I said, "I feel much safer already."
If anything, the last few years have done more to drive me out of the theatre than any other factor. The pre-show annoyance has become so severe I can hardly handle it. I just go to movies I really want to see on the big screen -- or avoid Regal altogether, which is extremely difficult in most places. They are doing the exact opposite of what they should be doing.
The addition of a few extra I-Frames around the dots is seriously not going to double the size of the encode! You do realize that encoders automatically insert I-Frames at most things that have a sudden transition. That means any scene that cuts directly without a fade (pretty much every cut in the typical movie) has an I-Frame injected. In addition to that, depending on the IPB pattern and GOP size used, there are I-Frames anywhere from every three to fifteen frames. That is roughly 10 to 2 times per second at NTSC output rates. The addition of three I-Frames in a row is so pitifully small it would be lost below the standard deviation frequency.
Secondly, I would question whether or not the encoder would even merit these small dots worthy an I-Frame! They would be about 2 to 3 pixels in size, based on what I saw flicker by in the theatre. That's the size of dust. You have that much random gunk all over the reel, yet you don't see encode filesizes exploding through the roof from a dusty take!
Yeah, I thought the spots were really obvious and annoying and I'm not even trained to spot them. I do see reel-change marks too though, perhaps I just catch that stuff better. At least the changer marks are up in the corner and not at random places in the middle of the frame. I would be awfully pissed if I were the director of a movie and they threw those awful distracting dot patterns in the middle of a scene I had spent weeks labouring over.
Granted, I am a human and not a script, but they are really easy to spot. I was about halfway through Underworld, which turned out to be such a steaming pile of crap that I spent the rest of the time Hunting for Dots. They are blatently obvious, more so than a scratch, or dust. I hadn't even heard about this, and I knew what was going on while watching the movie -- that is how obvious they are. It really does ruin the movie, though. If it had been something I was actually enjoying I would have been annoyed at the distraction it caused.
Oh heavens, I just typed it in wrong as I was running out the door. Obviously I have an 762mhz PowerBook. Wink.
To be fair though, we are talking about a difference between a $2.00 bottle of ink and an $8.00 bottle. Not even near the magnitude of differences I have seen in the ballpoint pen market, where most of the mark-up seems to go to the designer -- not the workmanship, much like a pair of Gucci sunglasses versus a $20 pair at the local superstore.
To get off topic as you did, the same holds true for things like tea. A minimal increase in price per pound means the difference between a cup of tea you'll remember savoring a year later, and dried out, utterly forgettable Liptons.
In general I do agree with you though, especially in the things that have huge price differences. People will fight tooth and nail to defend their multi-thousand dollar audio systems which produce very minimal (and often subjective) gains over much cheaper varieties.
I write fairly small in my journals, so I spent a lot of time trying out nibs looking for a fine line that still had a degree of dynamic expression. My favorite everyday nib is the Hunt#104, a lithography grade nib which can produce lines as fine as the crosshatching you see on currency, while also being able to dump out a .5mm thick line. This range is perfect for the size of writing I do.
When I am sketching I like something that can go a bit wider. While initially a very tricky nib to get a hang of, the Gillot#659 quick became my favorite. It can produce a fine line that is on par with most "marker" style technical pens, while putting out thick 2mm lines.If I want to get an even bolder line, the hefty Gillot#404 serves well.
The actual nib holder is mostly up to preference. After finding one that will fit the nib of choice, that is. Personally I like things with a smaller grip. The Mitchell Mapping holder fits both the H104 and G659, and has a thin, light feel to it with a nice swell at the grip to fit the hand. Koh-li-noor's black wood nib holder (not sure of the name) holds the larger nib styles I use, and while it is a bit thick for my taste, I like the general balance and heft of it.
That of course leaves ink. There are many hundreds of styles just within the "black ink" range to choose from. Generally, non-waterproof inks work better with finer nibs, as waterproof inks are thicker and tend to clog things up quickly. The same goes for quick drying variations, for obvious reasons. The biggest drawback to non-waterproof, other than the obvious, is that they are not quite as durable under the hand. Lines that have already been penned generally have to be protected by a light cloth. They also do not dry as darkly in most cases. Waterproofs can work with the larger nibs, however, though I still prefer non-waterproof. For black ink, I prefer J. Herbin's Perle des Encre, which is a bit expensive, but well worth the cost. It dries slowly, meaning you can keep a loaded nib for minutes on end. Inks that dry faster require constant rinsing or re-dipping, often times at 20 to 30 second intervals. With J. Herbin, I can keep a pen sitting beside my book for around five minutes before it starts to clog. Of course, the slow drying time means you have to be more careful with the lines you have already written.
For sepia ink, I like the naturally derived Walnut brand. It dries artistically, and handles itself well, as the Herbin does. Inks I stay far away from are the cheap brands you find in typical "hobby and craft" shops. Many of these inks are designed for airbrush use also, which requires much less room for error as far as delivery equipment is concerned. Another brand I steer clear from is Winston & Newton. I have found their inks to be a clogging nightmare. Mixing your own inks using Japanese Sumi ink sticks in a stone grinder can be a lot of fun, but these inks are really designed for brushes.
The last, and most important consideration for ink, is the longevity of it. Herbin's black inks are rated very highly in this regard. Undergoing tests where written pages are set in the sun for years, Herbin holds up very strongly against competitors (but their coloured inks do not fare as well as other brands for some reason). Sitting in the sun for a year is equal to decades inside the closed pages of a book, and thus it can be considered "archival" quality.
I am always on the lookout for improvements though. This t
You missed the fundamental point of the parent's post -- this laptop (as beastly as it is) is running neck to neck with Apple's latest and greatest workstation. You cannot even get close to that with your six pound Powerbook -- I know because I use them too.
Perhaps because the people they primarily market to neither have use nor money for $5,000 worth of RAM (putting the base computer cost to eight grand).Only specialist software would really require that much right now, and of that software which runs on a Mac -- the market is extremely narrow indeed.
This is a pretty decent resource:
Wikipedia.
There are plenty of artists who stuck with the small labels, plenty of really talented artists. And I reward their with my support. As for the rest, I don't even know what that babble is up to, and I certainly do not buy anything from them.
Another vote for the Palm T|T. After much deliberation, I decided to give eBooks a try about half a year ago, and I've been happy with my choice. I am an avid reader, and for someone my age, I have a large library of paper books that I would never part with. While it is impossible to say now, I don't know if I'll ever give up paper books entirely, but you never know.
As for digital, I have no problems reading them using the Palm. I went ahead and purchased Palm Reader Pro and a set of monospace fonts, this made a world of difference. I can use a font and size that more closely resembles traditional text, and use sub-pixel anti-aliasing to keep them smooth. Another nice thing with Pro is it comes with a pocket dictionary. I guess this would be nice for some people, but most of the words I have to look up are not even in the pocket version -- so I went ahead and bought the full Webster's Collegiate. The dictionary integrates very well with the reader. Looking up a word is as simple as highlighting it with a pen. That convenience, along with the ability to tote around the equal of a small bookshelf around with you, are very compelling reasons to stick with eBooks for me.
I sometimes read in the computer -- usually when I am at work and things are slow. Generally I prefer to use a handheld device, though. It is more like reading a book. I don't sit posture perfect and stare straight ahead to read -- I lay on the couch. I don't think I'd ever voluntarily read an eBook on my desktop/laptop in my leisure time. To each their own, however.
I still buy a lot of paper books. Usually things that are not available in eBook, or special things I want a physical copy of. Annotations to Finnegans Wake, for example, would never work well on a handheld because each line is carefully formatted to match the original text of Joyce's Wake.