These are getting reported because they are significant.
Let's not forget southern Sweden. The last time we had an incident on this scale was in the eighties. And we beefed up our distribution infrastructure as a result that time.
Now, granted, this outage was rather 'unlucky' as such go, with two major unrelated outages in the same part of the country within minutes, while both the backups (sea cables to the continent) were down for maintainance.
It could be argued that taking both of them down at the same time is less than smart, but in all fairness, the scheduled maintenance were both rather big jobs, they needed to be done when the weather cooperated, and summer is when electricity consumption is at it's lowest in Sweden.
as long as the dish will remain pointing at a certain location in an idle state (i.e. you don't need the motor to supply torque to hold the entire apparatus steady (i.e. the center-of-gravity is reasonablly close to the turning axis(es)), then as long as the motors have sufficient step down gearboxes you should be alright.
Yes, but all the gears and the motors not to mention the bearings and swivelmount would add yet more weight to the setup. And I would imagine it's already back breaking. If it only takes 10 minutes to align, and he stays for a couple of days at each location, I don't think I would have bothered with dragging around the extra equipment.
Hmm, but this still doesn't explain much, since landlines in (at least Western) Europe also don't suck. How comes that I hear that myth about the allegedly bad european land line system always when people are trying to explain that mobile phones are more in use in Europe than in the US?
Indeed. While the market area fixed communication is dead as a doornail these days, that wasn't always so. In fact the land lines in western Europe sucked less than their US counterparts since there was more revenue to be made here. Almost no country in Europe have flat fees for local calls ('unmetered rates' in US parlance), and hence there was more money available for infrastructure investements into equipment for land lines.
Only today I saw numbers that 93% of 15 year olds in Sweden have a mobile phone. These aren't people who decided to stay with a land line, as they didn't have any before. True, today kids (i.e. 19-23 year olds) don't get a land line when they move from home, opting for the combination of broadband for Internet access and mobile for phone, but again that's not because the land lines are substandard, it's because they've never had a fixed line to begin with.
Incidentally, the population density argument doesn't work either, since the penetration is the greatest in the nordic countries, with average population densities well below those of the US, and still almost perfect coverage, i.e. even in the wilderness (compared with say Germany, which is geographically perfect for GSM, but still don't have the adoption rates we have). So, there's something else going on here.
It's a social issue more than anything else. A majority of Americans aren't in the mood to be contacted anytime or anyplace. Personally, until I needed to carry one for work, I would never have thought of owning a cell phone.
But you're old, like me...:-) All the 12 year olds have mobiles here, it's their friends calling (or texting) and why wouldn't you want your friends to contact you anytime/anyplace if you aren't at home and don't have a fixed line to begin with?
That's really how Nokia managed to outcompete Ericsson a couple of years ago. They realised the market was 14 year old girls, not corporates. And of course, inevitably their dads had to follow suit, couldn't take the hassling from their sons and daughters about how uncool their mobile was.
By the sound of your post the US is indeed at least 10 years behind in uptake as the same argument was heard from the same type of people about then. These people have since learned that a) people really don't call them that much, and b) there's an 'off' button for the other occasions.
These days, my office doesn't even have fixed extensions, it's all GSM indoors, with a micro base station in the office, and every employee having a company mobile.
P.S. You're right that pre paid is especially big in Italy, with the overwhelming majority of 'subscriptions' being pre paid there. In the rest of Europe it's for the kids, i.e. you don't want your son/daughter to be able to run up a huge debt on their subscription, and hence give them $10-$15 a month to call for, and when that's up, that's it. No more mobile for you until the next month.
So stop this line of "the US has primitive wireless". It hasn't been true for quite some time now
Well, prices are one thing. Being in the industry I know that the uptake is poor in the US compared to Europe. I don't have the source I have at work available now. But the penetration of US and Canada combined is only arround 20% if memory serves. Compared to more than 50% in northern Europe (and Italy). With places like Taiwan at 80%.
So even if you say it's not prices (something some of my workmates don't really agree with) there's something holding back cellular adoption in the US for sure.
While that may be the case in a 'civilian' setting, I'd venture a guess that this was an oh-so-common case of the CEO thinking that the rules he signed for the rest of the company to follow, didn't apply to him. I mean he's the CEO after all.
Virus infestation or Enron scandals abound as a result.
I tend to notice the flicker quite a bit. I've stopped going to the MEGA-screen theaters due to this effect - on a giant screen the flicker, for me, moves beyond the peripheral vision to the full screen. The medium-sized screen theater with a full surround setup seems preferable. I'm not sure why the bigger screen has this effect. I also have slightly diminished color vision and very good night vision, so perhaps I have a higher rods/cone ratio than average.
Hmm, I know some of my friends complain more about this than other (me included) I don't seem to notice the effect. It could well be that the bigger screen covers more of your field of vision and hence more rods see the picture. But I've never seen a study of this (though I'm sure someone must have made one). I've never thought about the connection to color/night vision, that may well be an effect.
Also the larger the screen the longer (vertical) distance the front of the scan (the electron beam in CRT:s or the edge of the gate in a movie, though some cinema projectors have two gates blanking from both the bottom and the top of the frame) has to travel to complete the frame update. In doing so activating more rods/cones in the eye, probably making the effect more visible. I've noticed this myself in big screen TV:s (PAL), it's really the larger sizes that benefit the most from 100Hz, the smaller sizes look OK at 50Hz.
IMAX runs @ 60 real frames per second, IIRC, to eliminate this problem but makes for huge and heavy film reels. I suppose we need digital distribution first before we can deal with this problem on a large scale - then they can shoot hi-def movies @ 60 frames. The beauty is with delta-frame compression, it won't add a huge amount of size to the transmission.
Well, that and the larger frames. We'll see about the digital distribution of movies, where the formats will go etc. As we've said, for TV it's the opposite, more channels compressed harder, looking like sh*t, rather than higher quality. Then again is all docu-soaps anyway.:-)
What I was trying to say, is that from the point of view of the software developer, human nature should be treated as a given, a factor of the environment....and the design should take it into account. As opposed to designing something that will only work if human nature is ignored or idealized, and then blaming imperfect human nature when bad things happen.
As an aside, the airplane industry is finally catching up to that as well, realising that you cannot always blame the pilot for every mistake he makes. Sometimes it's the design that's at fault.
(This is assuming that the intermediate state of an ink pixel while changing colors lies somwhere between the old color and new color, which seems likely.)
Could well be. I've never seen one, so I'll hold off judgement. I've been fooled by the (some say "wonderful" I'm more leaning towards "screwed up") human visual system more than once in my research
so I'll hold off judgement. It's interesting though.
For CRT refresh rates, it seems like 60 Hz is about the minimum for a display in the center of your vision (at least to my NTSC-tuned eyes, PAL looks noticably flickery
Yeah, I've heard that argument often from Americans. And I'd be inclined to give it to you given that NTSC is inferior to PAL in other important parameters such as colour reproduction and resolution. And for larger screens I agree, "PAL" TV-s in Europe today are more often than not 100Hz (and digital sound). BUT, I've never really experienced this effect myself. Comparing PAL-50 to PAL-60 I cannot see the difference (50-60 vs 100 is clear though). I cannot help but to wonder whether there's something else going on, such as watching PAL on a tube made for NTSC (the 'phosphorus' sometimes have different formulation)?
However, for *frame* rates, it seems like 24 fps is acceptable to most people (e.g., movies), although I think that while 30 fps for CG looks "smooth", 60 fps has this additional "glasslike" quality. The worse cases are rapid pans or trains moving past the screen horizontally. There may be an argument that temporal antialiasing could make a 30 fps rendering look almost as good as 60 fps.
No argument here. I think 24fps is the minimum, it's not for nothing that you don't see that many rapid pans in source material, they just don't look good. I'd like to see the frame rates raised. But unfortunately the trend seems to be in the other direction, compressing the hell out of everything, making it look like crap. Then again most content on TV in particular is crap to begin with...:-)
I also wonder whether a true 24 Hz device would display a 24 fps movie better than an interlaced 60 Hz device due to the annoying 3:2 "beat" pattern you can see on NTSC conversions of movies.
Well, I'd say yes. In Europe we don't usually do any pulldown, but instead just run the movie slightly fast, at 25fps. And it's not the same as watching NTSC at all (add to that the increased vertical resolution which makes letterboxing not quite as horrible). (Cineasts will cringe at the idea, but what the hell).
Have managed to find a few more descriptions. Unfortunately none of them seem to explain why having an extra shutter break the display of each frame helps reduce flicker. I would have thought that reducing the duration of the shutter break (i.e. speeding up the pull down) would have been more effective. Instead it seems that the frequency of the shutter breaks is more important than the duration of the shutter breaks.
Well that's film history by now, I remember reading about when it was discovered, but I cannot remember where. A trip to the library may help.
As for increasing the pull down speed. Yes, that would help. But they were already pulling the film as fast as they could. Much faster and it would break (more often than it already did), and the holes were wearing out quickly enough as it was. As you know, F=ma, and there's no easy way around that if you have to stop the frame to project it. (Incidentally, high speed cameras do that to about 500 fps today if memory serves, above that you cannot stop the frame, but need to use a rotating prism assembly to expose the frame).
So given that you cannot advance the frame any faster, blanking out the projector at 24 fps produces a noticable 'slideshow' effect. A simple experiment with a rotating disc (or propellers with different number of blades) and a flashlight in a dark room will demonstrate it. Cutting off the beam more often will seem to the viewer as a reduction in brightness, while cutting it off more seldom will be more noticable.
So as someone else noted, it's really two things working at once here. 24fps to produce acceptable animation (cartoons do even fewer) (and to be honest 24fps was choosen to give acceptable sound quality, not animation quality, they could have gotten away with less), and 48 Hz to reduce the flickering to acceptable levels.
As far as paying "the medical bills of idiots that flouridate(sic)", I'm interested in any references to peer-reviewed clinical studies showing any harm from using it to prevent tooth decay, including epidemiological ones.
Well, I don't actually have any references, as I said we don't fluoridate so we couldn't really make any such studies, when we're discussing the levels of fluor intake in wester Europe. It was more of a counterpoint to the statement "if I don't have to pay the dental bills of those that do not fluoridate" (paraphrased). There are no proper studies that actually show that fluor would do any good either. As opposed to improved dental hygiene, and a proper intake of calcium. If you have any references to recent studies that suggest that, I'm interested.
That fluor in larger quantities (above 1.5 ppm, which is the WHO limit) is harmful is well known however, check the references that speak of 'skeletal flurosis'. That page also contains a lot of other references that I'm not that familiar with, but you might want to check them out as well.
From the ARTICLE: Switching between dark and bright states takes only about ten milliseconds - fast enough to produce sharp video images
Yeah, that's what I meant. If it takes 10 ms then all we know is that they're not going above 100 Hz. It doesn't actually say that they'll be able to produce steady sharp looking video at 100 Hz. The switch as such could look terrible, and at 100 Hz all you see is switching, there's no time for the image to remain steady.
It could look acceptable, it could also look bad. Too early to tell.
Large portions of most animation is shot "on twos" - each drawing is shot twice, for an effective framerate of 12fps. It saves a lot of time and effort and money. You can go lower, but I find that around 10fps is when the illusion of life really breaks down into a sequence of individual drawings in rapid succession, instead of a magically moving drawing.
Sure, I never really thought about that. For an 'animated' paper that shows cartoon style animation, a few fps is probably enough (depending on what the transitions looks like, and that the image can be held steady in between). I was more thinking along the lines of an animated offset print, i.e. an animated photographic print. Then I'm sure much more than 12 fps would be needed for a life like experience.
We of accept cartoon characters hopping arround because we have no frame of reference. The same low effective frame rate in CGI (say the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park) irritates me to no end. They just don't look like they're moving right.
If that were the case, you'd think that the RIAA would have a hard time finding bands willing to sign contracts, and 7-Elevens would be inundated with job applications from band members who didn't make any money.
I'm tempted to exchange 'prostitute' for 'band members' in the above, because if it were true wouldn't that be a dream. No more prostitution. But alas it's not, while a few (very few) prostitutes who work for themselves aren't on drugs etc, makes a good living, the overwhelming majority dont. Quite the opposite. And yet new ones are still recruited.
And it's the same with musicians. IF it weren't for the fact that bands have another source of revenue, one they're familiar with; playing concerts. Usually a band has made some headway and already established a fan base before there's ever talk of a record deal. And even if that first album doesn't bring in any money per se, the marketing for the album is in some sense 'free' marketing for the tour. That's how they stay alive.
And a few do that a couple of times and actually strike it rich, they become popular enough that their record companies actually have to pay them something for their albums. Most however leave the music business exactly as they entered it; dirt poor.
Case in point, anybody remember Europ, the eighties poodle rockers? Joey Tempest who wrote the songs made of with a nice hunk of cash, but the rest of the band (who in their youthful naivete) mismanaged their tour, and now owe millions to companies and the tax man. They left the business considerably poorer than they entered it. And they sure as hell didn't make a dime on the record sales.
Um, were talking paper here. Paper does not flicker. CRTs (or movie screens) need to use a certain refresh rate as it is flickering light that is supposed to simulate a stable image.
I imagine this electro-ink thing would work and be useful even if it changed only once during a second. 24Hz (and no ghosting) would actually render it useful for believable full-motion video.
Uhmm, yeah. My post was more in response to the original parent, which had gotten most of TV/Movie display wrong on the point of refresh rates.
I'd say that the critical parameter here is what the actual switch looks like. It has to take some time to reconfigure the ink blobs. And if you can see that reconfiguration then you have (paraphrasing yourself) "flickering ink that's supposed to simulate a stable image".
Whether it's emitted light or reflected light that flickers, doesn't matter much to the human eye. It's still flicker.
I'd say that without knowing more about how the electronic ink paper actually works, reponse times and so on, it's still too early to tell what the minimum acceptable refresh rate to achieve a stable image is. Or how palatable the actual reconfiguration will be to the human eye. Might not look like flicker at all! (Might look horrible, who knows).
Now, I'm old enough I've seen other supposedly revolutionary display techniques that never matured, but I have some hopes for this one, at least in niche products. Time will tell.
Got any references to back that up? Everything I've ever seen says movie projectors run at 24 fps (see HowStuffWorks for example).
Sure, see for example the explanation from the Australian film commision. But really searching for '48 fps' and 'projector' will get you tons of hits (though granted many will be about proposed improvements to the current system). Also my original post had a link with the same info, albeit from a TV-guy's perspective.
A movie projector doesn't refresh an image like a CRT - the light source is always on, displaying whatever is on the film in front of it. So you can't really project each frame twice anyway, it's projected for exactly how long it's in front of the light for (1/24th of a second minus transport time). Any perceived flicker in movie projection is due to the border between frames of film, not the light source going on and off.
While howstuff works is generally good, they're wrong on this particular point. However, had you read their description more carefully, you'd see that what you're saying isn't exactly right. While the lamp in the projector is always 'on', the light doesn't actually always reach the screen. There's a shutter (called 'gate' in projectionist circles) that blocks the light path as the film advances. Without it, you'd see the actual film advance, and that would look funny, to say the least. Now, just gating the movie at 24 Hz produced noticable flicker, and hence the film is double gated, i.e. the shutter (really a rotating disc with two holes in it) is closed twice for each film advance.
Now if you want to go into the details of why the human perceptual system has a higher tolerance for the resulting experience, it gets involved and I don't actually know all the details, even though I really should (I do research in visualisation).
It's interesting you make the comparison with a CRT though. It's almost the reverse. The afterglow from the phosphorous in the CRT between electron beam refresh is considerable, much more so than the film frame, the light through which is just cut off between frames (and once during). I've made a post about CRT's before, you might find interesting, though it's not exactly related to the subject at hand.
Movies in theaters are usually run at 24 frames per second, in other words a frequency of 24Hz.
Actually, movies are run at twice that, i.e. in order to reduce the flickering each frame is projected twice. And 48Hz is just barely acceptable for straight on viewing. You'll see the flicker clearly out of the corner of your eye.
So, they actually need more than that, 72Hz is actually about right for something that you're sitting close to (such as a computer screen).
There's a lot of info on the net if you want to dig deeper.
as long as I don't have to pay the dental bills of the idiots that vote out fluoride.
No, as I've said ealier, it's us in western europe that don't flouridate, so you don't have to pay our dental bills. And that's notwithstanding the fact that our teeth are about the same as yours.
Anyway, I'll reply in kind with: "As long as I don't have to pay the medical bills of the idiots that flouridate." Which of course I don't have to.
P.S. And Linus Pauling while being a gifted chemist isn't really in his own field when he's talking about vitamin C. (He got his nobel prizes in Chemistry and Peace). Arvid Carlsson OTOH is a pharmacologist, and recived his prize in medicin. So if you wish to argue by (reference to) authority, I think mine beats yours, hands down. (Quite a common phenomenon that, world renowned experts talking out of their arses when they open their mouths on a subject they really don't know anything about.)
P.P.S. And getting back to the topic; as far as we're concerned Michael Robertson can keep both his Lindows and his flouride.;-)
This evidence, as well as the entire discussion itself, would be more relevant if I had ever met an American or Canadian that drank tap water. [...] They drink bottled water or they just drink juice or soda.
And where do you suppose the water in the juice or soda comes from? You guessed it, the municipal water supply. Same with most beer. And much of the bottled water as well. (I'm guessing here, I don't know the percentages of the various types of bottled water; 'mineral', 'distilled' or 'municipal' sold in the US). Just because it was put in a bottle doesn't mean it magically appeared in the botteling plant. Most of it came there in a pipe from the water works. And the flouride wasn't removed, though the clorine may have.
That's really the beauty of putting stuff in the municipal water supply. Unless you as the consumer don't distill it, it's going to get to you sooner or later.
Also ignore that fact that people who drink water without flouride on a regular basis have far more dental problems.
No, that's not true. We in western Europe have about the same rate of incidende as you in the US (a bit lower actually). And we don't flourinate. Never really have.
Everything is harmful to someone...
Exactly the point. And as no one is seeing any benefits, there doesn't seem to be much point in continuing doing it. But my all means, be my guest, it's not like my water is flourinated.
I love offtopics;)
Oh I don't know, Michael Robertson brought it up.:-)
If some Vegan on a glacially slow Crosswinds account that can't even proofread his site inbetween making childish MS Paint illustrations say it's true, then it quite simply must be! +5 Informative!
Well, even a blind hen... But you needn't take the word of some vegan on the supposed problems of water fluoridation if you don't want to, take the word of Nobel laureate Arvid Carlsson instead.
Yeah, hate those rich government types. All those public sector silver-spoon idiots driving to work in their BMW's, feet-up reading the paper in their spacious high-rise offices, making room only for thier relatives and friends...
Well, I made that substitution myself in the previous post, and I still found that it held. Chosing between the Enron execs and Bush for a role model is a toss up as far as I'm concerned. At least from the perspective we're discussing.
I suspect that Golding was beaten-up a lot as a kid, and believed that (other) children were basically nasty.
Well, no. When asked Golding replied "it's because I've been teaching young boys for twenty years." Golding himself was very much the Naval officer IRL, bringing the order.
Now, I if you whish to read it at face value and not as an allegory of modern society I don't necessarily think the premise of the book is that children are 'nasty' (the title notwithstanding) but rather that children are devoid of the moral maturity to tell one from the other. They're not 'good' or 'evil' per se, but rather just children.
Furthermore aren't moderns society doing just what you protest? I.e. leave the children to their own bloody nature? I mean, we cannot protest 'Lord of the flies' one minute, and raise the reports from that hell that is the American high school---run by the bullies---to the skies, the next (well this is slashdot after all so I guess we can).
T.Vs and Monitors (CRT) don't have a response time (or more to the point its the same as the refresh) because on a CRT screen the previous frame is not remembered as the "pixels" on a CRT so to speak, need to be constatly energised to display anything, so the second that the cathode ray stops hitting the phosphor the image dissapears, thus no reponse time.
What I think you meant to say was that the response time of a CRT is much smaller than the response time of an LCD.
The way a CRT works is that the electron beam hits the phosphorous (that doesn't actually contain any phosporous) which is excited and emits the desired component of light for some time after having been energized.
So there's a definite response time, there has to be otherwise you'd see a very flickery screen, and it's actually shorter than the time to next refresh. If we had faster eyes we'd see it, and with suitable detectors you can actually recover the CRT image (pdf) from the diffuse reflection (TV glow), since the phosphoruous doesn't glow nearly long enough to smear the picture in the time domain. (Cool bit of research that).
Hope you are not in one of those EU countries requiring fingerpring of their own citizens...
That's bullshit and I'm calling it. No EU country requires fingerprinting of all citizens. Never has, probably never will until the US Dept of Homeland Security forces us.
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Let's not forget southern Sweden. The last time we had an incident on this scale was in the eighties. And we beefed up our distribution infrastructure as a result that time.
Now, granted, this outage was rather 'unlucky' as such go, with two major unrelated outages in the same part of the country within minutes, while both the backups (sea cables to the continent) were down for maintainance.
It could be argued that taking both of them down at the same time is less than smart, but in all fairness, the scheduled maintenance were both rather big jobs, they needed to be done when the weather cooperated, and summer is when electricity consumption is at it's lowest in Sweden.
Yes, but all the gears and the motors not to mention the bearings and swivelmount would add yet more weight to the setup. And I would imagine it's already back breaking. If it only takes 10 minutes to align, and he stays for a couple of days at each location, I don't think I would have bothered with dragging around the extra equipment.
Indeed. While the market area fixed communication is dead as a doornail these days, that wasn't always so. In fact the land lines in western Europe sucked less than their US counterparts since there was more revenue to be made here. Almost no country in Europe have flat fees for local calls ('unmetered rates' in US parlance), and hence there was more money available for infrastructure investements into equipment for land lines.
Only today I saw numbers that 93% of 15 year olds in Sweden have a mobile phone. These aren't people who decided to stay with a land line, as they didn't have any before. True, today kids (i.e. 19-23 year olds) don't get a land line when they move from home, opting for the combination of broadband for Internet access and mobile for phone, but again that's not because the land lines are substandard, it's because they've never had a fixed line to begin with.
Incidentally, the population density argument doesn't work either, since the penetration is the greatest in the nordic countries, with average population densities well below those of the US, and still almost perfect coverage, i.e. even in the wilderness (compared with say Germany, which is geographically perfect for GSM, but still don't have the adoption rates we have). So, there's something else going on here.
But you're old, like me... :-) All the 12 year olds have mobiles here, it's their friends calling (or texting) and why wouldn't you want your friends to contact you anytime/anyplace if you aren't at home and don't have a fixed line to begin with?
That's really how Nokia managed to outcompete Ericsson a couple of years ago. They realised the market was 14 year old girls, not corporates. And of course, inevitably their dads had to follow suit, couldn't take the hassling from their sons and daughters about how uncool their mobile was.
By the sound of your post the US is indeed at least 10 years behind in uptake as the same argument was heard from the same type of people about then. These people have since learned that a) people really don't call them that much, and b) there's an 'off' button for the other occasions.
These days, my office doesn't even have fixed extensions, it's all GSM indoors, with a micro base station in the office, and every employee having a company mobile.
P.S. You're right that pre paid is especially big in Italy, with the overwhelming majority of 'subscriptions' being pre paid there. In the rest of Europe it's for the kids, i.e. you don't want your son/daughter to be able to run up a huge debt on their subscription, and hence give them $10-$15 a month to call for, and when that's up, that's it. No more mobile for you until the next month.
Well, prices are one thing. Being in the industry I know that the uptake is poor in the US compared to Europe. I don't have the source I have at work available now. But the penetration of US and Canada combined is only arround 20% if memory serves. Compared to more than 50% in northern Europe (and Italy). With places like Taiwan at 80%.
So even if you say it's not prices (something some of my workmates don't really agree with) there's something holding back cellular adoption in the US for sure.
While that may be the case in a 'civilian' setting, I'd venture a guess that this was an oh-so-common case of the CEO thinking that the rules he signed for the rest of the company to follow, didn't apply to him. I mean he's the CEO after all.
Virus infestation or Enron scandals abound as a result.
Hmm, I know some of my friends complain more about this than other (me included) I don't seem to notice the effect. It could well be that the bigger screen covers more of your field of vision and hence more rods see the picture. But I've never seen a study of this (though I'm sure someone must have made one). I've never thought about the connection to color/night vision, that may well be an effect.
Also the larger the screen the longer (vertical) distance the front of the scan (the electron beam in CRT:s or the edge of the gate in a movie, though some cinema projectors have two gates blanking from both the bottom and the top of the frame) has to travel to complete the frame update. In doing so activating more rods/cones in the eye, probably making the effect more visible. I've noticed this myself in big screen TV:s (PAL), it's really the larger sizes that benefit the most from 100Hz, the smaller sizes look OK at 50Hz.
Well, that and the larger frames. We'll see about the digital distribution of movies, where the formats will go etc. As we've said, for TV it's the opposite, more channels compressed harder, looking like sh*t, rather than higher quality. Then again is all docu-soaps anyway. :-)
As an aside, the airplane industry is finally catching up to that as well, realising that you cannot always blame the pilot for every mistake he makes. Sometimes it's the design that's at fault.
Could well be. I've never seen one, so I'll hold off judgement. I've been fooled by the (some say "wonderful" I'm more leaning towards "screwed up") human visual system more than once in my research so I'll hold off judgement. It's interesting though.
Yeah, I've heard that argument often from Americans. And I'd be inclined to give it to you given that NTSC is inferior to PAL in other important parameters such as colour reproduction and resolution. And for larger screens I agree, "PAL" TV-s in Europe today are more often than not 100Hz (and digital sound). BUT, I've never really experienced this effect myself. Comparing PAL-50 to PAL-60 I cannot see the difference (50-60 vs 100 is clear though). I cannot help but to wonder whether there's something else going on, such as watching PAL on a tube made for NTSC (the 'phosphorus' sometimes have different formulation)?
No argument here. I think 24fps is the minimum, it's not for nothing that you don't see that many rapid pans in source material, they just don't look good. I'd like to see the frame rates raised. But unfortunately the trend seems to be in the other direction, compressing the hell out of everything, making it look like crap. Then again most content on TV in particular is crap to begin with... :-)
Well, I'd say yes. In Europe we don't usually do any pulldown, but instead just run the movie slightly fast, at 25fps. And it's not the same as watching NTSC at all (add to that the increased vertical resolution which makes letterboxing not quite as horrible). (Cineasts will cringe at the idea, but what the hell).
Well that's film history by now, I remember reading about when it was discovered, but I cannot remember where. A trip to the library may help.
As for increasing the pull down speed. Yes, that would help. But they were already pulling the film as fast as they could. Much faster and it would break (more often than it already did), and the holes were wearing out quickly enough as it was. As you know, F=ma, and there's no easy way around that if you have to stop the frame to project it. (Incidentally, high speed cameras do that to about 500 fps today if memory serves, above that you cannot stop the frame, but need to use a rotating prism assembly to expose the frame).
So given that you cannot advance the frame any faster, blanking out the projector at 24 fps produces a noticable 'slideshow' effect. A simple experiment with a rotating disc (or propellers with different number of blades) and a flashlight in a dark room will demonstrate it. Cutting off the beam more often will seem to the viewer as a reduction in brightness, while cutting it off more seldom will be more noticable.
So as someone else noted, it's really two things working at once here. 24fps to produce acceptable animation (cartoons do even fewer) (and to be honest 24fps was choosen to give acceptable sound quality, not animation quality, they could have gotten away with less), and 48 Hz to reduce the flickering to acceptable levels.
Well, I don't actually have any references, as I said we don't fluoridate so we couldn't really make any such studies, when we're discussing the levels of fluor intake in wester Europe. It was more of a counterpoint to the statement "if I don't have to pay the dental bills of those that do not fluoridate" (paraphrased). There are no proper studies that actually show that fluor would do any good either. As opposed to improved dental hygiene, and a proper intake of calcium. If you have any references to recent studies that suggest that, I'm interested.
That fluor in larger quantities (above 1.5 ppm, which is the WHO limit) is harmful is well known however, check the references that speak of 'skeletal flurosis'. That page also contains a lot of other references that I'm not that familiar with, but you might want to check them out as well.
Yeah, that's what I meant. If it takes 10 ms then all we know is that they're not going above 100 Hz. It doesn't actually say that they'll be able to produce steady sharp looking video at 100 Hz. The switch as such could look terrible, and at 100 Hz all you see is switching, there's no time for the image to remain steady.
It could look acceptable, it could also look bad. Too early to tell.
Sure, I never really thought about that. For an 'animated' paper that shows cartoon style animation, a few fps is probably enough (depending on what the transitions looks like, and that the image can be held steady in between). I was more thinking along the lines of an animated offset print, i.e. an animated photographic print. Then I'm sure much more than 12 fps would be needed for a life like experience.
We of accept cartoon characters hopping arround because we have no frame of reference. The same low effective frame rate in CGI (say the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park) irritates me to no end. They just don't look like they're moving right.
I'm tempted to exchange 'prostitute' for 'band members' in the above, because if it were true wouldn't that be a dream. No more prostitution. But alas it's not, while a few (very few) prostitutes who work for themselves aren't on drugs etc, makes a good living, the overwhelming majority dont. Quite the opposite. And yet new ones are still recruited.
And it's the same with musicians. IF it weren't for the fact that bands have another source of revenue, one they're familiar with; playing concerts. Usually a band has made some headway and already established a fan base before there's ever talk of a record deal. And even if that first album doesn't bring in any money per se, the marketing for the album is in some sense 'free' marketing for the tour. That's how they stay alive.
And a few do that a couple of times and actually strike it rich, they become popular enough that their record companies actually have to pay them something for their albums. Most however leave the music business exactly as they entered it; dirt poor.
Case in point, anybody remember Europ, the eighties poodle rockers? Joey Tempest who wrote the songs made of with a nice hunk of cash, but the rest of the band (who in their youthful naivete) mismanaged their tour, and now owe millions to companies and the tax man. They left the business considerably poorer than they entered it. And they sure as hell didn't make a dime on the record sales.
Uhmm, yeah. My post was more in response to the original parent, which had gotten most of TV/Movie display wrong on the point of refresh rates.
I'd say that the critical parameter here is what the actual switch looks like. It has to take some time to reconfigure the ink blobs. And if you can see that reconfiguration then you have (paraphrasing yourself) "flickering ink that's supposed to simulate a stable image".
Whether it's emitted light or reflected light that flickers, doesn't matter much to the human eye. It's still flicker.
I'd say that without knowing more about how the electronic ink paper actually works, reponse times and so on, it's still too early to tell what the minimum acceptable refresh rate to achieve a stable image is. Or how palatable the actual reconfiguration will be to the human eye. Might not look like flicker at all! (Might look horrible, who knows).
Now, I'm old enough I've seen other supposedly revolutionary display techniques that never matured, but I have some hopes for this one, at least in niche products. Time will tell.
Sure, see for example the explanation from the Australian film commision. But really searching for '48 fps' and 'projector' will get you tons of hits (though granted many will be about proposed improvements to the current system). Also my original post had a link with the same info, albeit from a TV-guy's perspective.
While howstuff works is generally good, they're wrong on this particular point. However, had you read their description more carefully, you'd see that what you're saying isn't exactly right. While the lamp in the projector is always 'on', the light doesn't actually always reach the screen. There's a shutter (called 'gate' in projectionist circles) that blocks the light path as the film advances. Without it, you'd see the actual film advance, and that would look funny, to say the least. Now, just gating the movie at 24 Hz produced noticable flicker, and hence the film is double gated, i.e. the shutter (really a rotating disc with two holes in it) is closed twice for each film advance.
Now if you want to go into the details of why the human perceptual system has a higher tolerance for the resulting experience, it gets involved and I don't actually know all the details, even though I really should (I do research in visualisation).
It's interesting you make the comparison with a CRT though. It's almost the reverse. The afterglow from the phosphorous in the CRT between electron beam refresh is considerable, much more so than the film frame, the light through which is just cut off between frames (and once during). I've made a post about CRT's before, you might find interesting, though it's not exactly related to the subject at hand.
Actually, movies are run at twice that, i.e. in order to reduce the flickering each frame is projected twice. And 48Hz is just barely acceptable for straight on viewing. You'll see the flicker clearly out of the corner of your eye.
So, they actually need more than that, 72Hz is actually about right for something that you're sitting close to (such as a computer screen).
There's a lot of info on the net if you want to dig deeper.
No, as I've said ealier, it's us in western europe that don't flouridate, so you don't have to pay our dental bills. And that's notwithstanding the fact that our teeth are about the same as yours.
Anyway, I'll reply in kind with: "As long as I don't have to pay the medical bills of the idiots that flouridate." Which of course I don't have to.
P.S. And Linus Pauling while being a gifted chemist isn't really in his own field when he's talking about vitamin C. (He got his nobel prizes in Chemistry and Peace). Arvid Carlsson OTOH is a pharmacologist, and recived his prize in medicin. So if you wish to argue by (reference to) authority, I think mine beats yours, hands down. (Quite a common phenomenon that, world renowned experts talking out of their arses when they open their mouths on a subject they really don't know anything about.)
P.P.S. And getting back to the topic; as far as we're concerned Michael Robertson can keep both his Lindows and his flouride. ;-)
And where do you suppose the water in the juice or soda comes from? You guessed it, the municipal water supply. Same with most beer. And much of the bottled water as well. (I'm guessing here, I don't know the percentages of the various types of bottled water; 'mineral', 'distilled' or 'municipal' sold in the US). Just because it was put in a bottle doesn't mean it magically appeared in the botteling plant. Most of it came there in a pipe from the water works. And the flouride wasn't removed, though the clorine may have.
That's really the beauty of putting stuff in the municipal water supply. Unless you as the consumer don't distill it, it's going to get to you sooner or later.
No, that's not true. We in western Europe have about the same rate of incidende as you in the US (a bit lower actually). And we don't flourinate. Never really have.
Exactly the point. And as no one is seeing any benefits, there doesn't seem to be much point in continuing doing it. But my all means, be my guest, it's not like my water is flourinated.
Oh I don't know, Michael Robertson brought it up. :-)
Well, even a blind hen... But you needn't take the word of some vegan on the supposed problems of water fluoridation if you don't want to, take the word of Nobel laureate Arvid Carlsson instead.
Well, I made that substitution myself in the previous post, and I still found that it held. Chosing between the Enron execs and Bush for a role model is a toss up as far as I'm concerned. At least from the perspective we're discussing.
Well, no. When asked Golding replied "it's because I've been teaching young boys for twenty years." Golding himself was very much the Naval officer IRL, bringing the order.
Now, I if you whish to read it at face value and not as an allegory of modern society I don't necessarily think the premise of the book is that children are 'nasty' (the title notwithstanding) but rather that children are devoid of the moral maturity to tell one from the other. They're not 'good' or 'evil' per se, but rather just children.
Furthermore aren't moderns society doing just what you protest? I.e. leave the children to their own bloody nature? I mean, we cannot protest 'Lord of the flies' one minute, and raise the reports from that hell that is the American high school---run by the bullies---to the skies, the next (well this is slashdot after all so I guess we can).
So which is it?
What I think you meant to say was that the response time of a CRT is much smaller than the response time of an LCD.
The way a CRT works is that the electron beam hits the phosphorous (that doesn't actually contain any phosporous) which is excited and emits the desired component of light for some time after having been energized.
So there's a definite response time, there has to be otherwise you'd see a very flickery screen, and it's actually shorter than the time to next refresh. If we had faster eyes we'd see it, and with suitable detectors you can actually recover the CRT image (pdf) from the diffuse reflection (TV glow), since the phosphoruous doesn't glow nearly long enough to smear the picture in the time domain. (Cool bit of research that).
That's bullshit and I'm calling it. No EU country requires fingerprinting of all citizens. Never has, probably never will until the US Dept of Homeland Security forces us.