Yes, indeed, vibrant competition, the miracle of the marketplace, and Adam Smith's "invisible hand" ensure that by golly, no matter what happens, the customer will always win.
The only reason Blockbuster ever used to charge those late fees is because, gosh, it's what customers wanted. And now that customers want something different, Blockbuster is responding to demand.
You can look forward to a ever-brighter future of more and more choice, lower prices, and, of course, better movies.
Because... everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
There has already been a case of carjackers cutting off the owner's finger in order to obtain access to a biometrically secured Mercedes.
The whole idea that a "key" that is a part of your body is somehow more secure than a manufactured gadget you carry with you has more emotional than logical appeal.
Even if the technique works as described, somebody would have to have to spend a lot of time and money generating the decoy files. And it would not affect file sharing unless the generation of these files was so widespread and thorough that they actually displaced most of the valid files.
Even if 25% of the files on P2P networks were garbage, it would not destroy the networks. Presently, a high percentage of all emails is spam, but spam has not yet destroyed email.
And that assumes no countermeasures by file sharers. I can think of some very obvious ones, the most obvious being to counterflood with valid files.
The next most obvious would be to improve the hashing methods for the networks involved.
Shades of Wang Freestyle (circa 1991)
on
Longhorn Preview
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
"document icons are no longer a hint of the type of file, but rather a small picture of the file itself"
Wang was doing this circa 1991 on AT-class hardware.
I didn't think it was all that cool at the time and I don't think it's a particularly good idea now.
So, to repeat: this 1950s contraption used a photocell at the end of a rotating arm: " The intensity of each light in this circle is individually adjustable. At the tip of the arm there is a photo cell. This cell is a part of an electronic sound generating system, so adjusted that the more light the cell 'sees' the higher the pitch of the sound produced. The cell also moves around in a circle at adjustable speeds. One of the controls, above the circle of lights, changes the pitch center of the complete cycle when required. As you will notice, there are many variable functions possible."
The link has sound samples.
I will use the Preview button. I will use the Preview button. I will use the Preview button...
Raymond Scott's circle machine> used a rotating arm: "The intensity of each light in this circle is individually adjustable. At the tip of the arm there is a photo cell. This cell is a part of an electronic sound generating system, so adjusted that the more light the cell 'sees' the higher the pitch of the sound produced. The cell also moves around in a circle at adjustable speeds. One of the controls, above the circle of lights, changes the pitch center of the complete cycle when required. As you will notice, there are many variable functions possible."
I also see great similarities between this plan and Prodigy, an online service of the late eighties and early nineties. Prodigy had discussion forums called "clubs." A club was limited to a specific topic. There was no easy way to start a new one.
All the clubs were on bland, family-friendly, consumer-oriented topics. Nothing controversial or political or off-color.
And they hired people, who for want of a better word I'll call "censors," whose job was to patrol the clubs and remove off-topic notices.
Of course, any mention whatsoever that censorship was occurring, or any attempt to discuss it, was considered off-topic and quickly removed.
People frustrated with the tight control on the "club" system attempted to work around it by using mailing lists. As soon as that started, Prodigy promptly changed its policy, which had allowed unlimited free email, instituting a charge of something like $0.25 per email if you sent more than a rather small number of emails per month.
Attempting to impose quality-control on content from above, rather than moulding a self-sustaining community, didn't work very well for Prodigy.
Nobody wants to give a business something for free and have the business turn around and sell it for profit. Early Wikipedia contributors feared this was Jimbo Wales' stealth plan. This fear seems to have died down.
...this is essentially the same process Wikipedia's predecessor, Nupedia used. After 18 months and $250000 they had a total of 12 articles to show for it.
Microsoft is excellent at deflecting criticism by promising fixes, then delivering what are only modest improvements.
When Microsoft software has an obvious problem that competitive software does not, the general pattern is that a) Microsoft claims the next release will fix it; b) the next release falls far short of a fix but is nevertheless a noticeable improvement; c) applause from Microsoft fanboys drowns out those would observe they still haven't achieved parity with the non-Microsoft state-of-the-art.
Since Microsoft users live in a sealed universe--they're too busy keeping up with security patches, changes in API's, and evolving purchase and licensing plans to have the time to ever use any non-Microsoft software--Microsoft gets away with this pattern of "big promise, partial delivery"
Complaints about Windows 3.0 instability were met by the assertion that you "would never see a UAE in Windows 3.1."
Complaints about FAT fragmentation were met by assertions that NTFS would not require defragmentation.
Comments that Windows 3.X was far less usable than the Mac OS were met by assertions that Windows 95 would be just as good as the Mac.
Complaints that installing software under NT 3.x were met by assertions that NT 4.0 would not require rebooting....
here's one BBC article noting that "Hands-free kits are allowed, but many road safety experts say they do not reduce the risks of having an accident."
I can't find a good reference right now, but I'm sure NPR reported on a research study that showed that it was the distraction caused by ''talking'' on a cell phone, not the use of one hand to hold it, that was the issue.
Giving the brain additional physical channels to use for multitasking isn't going to affect the fact the brain's ability or inability to multitask. It doesn't matter whether you're operating the device with your hand, your voice, your eye movements, or your EEG waves; if that device isn't your car, your attention is going to be distracted.
Lately some cell phone association has been running dignified announcements saying that you should not engage in cell phone conversations that might distract you, which is rather like a liquor company saying you should not drink those kinds of liquor that might impair your driving...
The question of whether CRTs pose a health risk is extremely controversial.
Those that think they do attribute the risk to the low-frequency magnetic fields created by the deflection yokes. The risk was considered serious enough for European countries to regulate magnetic field strength, and almost all modern CRTs are built to meet these European standards and contain shielding. (Similarly, the glass CRT envelope contains enough lead to shield against X-rays, which once were a concern in home television sets of the 1950s and 1960s). So, CRTs contain shielding against the _supposed_ causes of _disputed_ health effects.
The reason why CRTs are suspected of having health effects is that there have been various long-term epidemiological studies showing association of various conditions with CRT use.
I don't think anyone has subjected the relatively new flat panels to any similar studies.
Hold a radio next to a flat-panel display and you will see that these displays have electromagnetic radiation fields of their own. There's no reason to think that they pose any hazard, and no particular reason to think they're any safer than CRTs.
Those that simply do not believe that low-energy electromagnetic fields have health effects obviously won't worry about either technology.
Those who think they might should consider the fact that CRTs have at least been on the market long enough for studies to be done and shielding to be incorporated in their design.
Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know, perhaps.
In an average month, I use regular expressions as implemented in Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0, BBEdit Lite, TextWrangler, Apple MPW, and REALBasic. Every single one of them has _significant_ differences in syntax and semantics.
My understanding is that even the UNIX world sports several different flavors of regular expression in grep, egrep, fgrep, etc.
The biggest barrier to _my_ use of regular expressions is that every time I switch from one regular expression context to another, it takes me a good half hour to refresh my memory of what does and doesn't work in each environment.
Other things that are not dead!
on
The PC Is Not Dead
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
The CRT is not dead! I see dozens of them in use every day and CompUSA has lot of them!
Film is not dead! I can buy those familiar yellow boxes of it right in my supermarket checkout line!
Vinyl LPs are not dead! DJ's still use them and you can buy new turntables in Best Buy!
The vacuum tube is not dead! Audio hobbyists still insist on them!
CP/M is not dead! It survives on in Novell Netware servers! Which are not dead, either!
The Oldsmobile is not dead! I still see them on the road!
VHF analog broadcasts are not dead!
Typewriters are not dead! Carbon paper is not dead! Slide rules are not dead! Rotary calculators are not dead! The Bodoni typeface is not dead! The Cinerama wide-screen process is not dead! Spirit duplicators and mimeograph machines are not dead!
Bill Gates is not dead! And neither am I!
But Bill Gates and I are both older than we used to be.
Yeah, well Prohibition was in effect from 1919 until 1933 and it did QUITE a lot of damage before it became "obvious how ludicrous it was." Bootleggers and mobsters made fortunes and criminals become public idols.
Don't think something like this couldn't happen again.
By the way, forget region codes... can anyone tell me a brand of DVD that will let me skip over the various warning notices at the start of the DVD? I have to sit through as much as a minute and a half of that on some disks...
A chip is no good for ANYthing unless you know exactly what is wrong with it. It might not work AT ALL in a specific "audio application."
By the time you've tested a chip enough to characerize its defects, so that you know they are not going to interfere significantly with the very specific way it is used in a specific application, you've probably added so much cost that it's probably more expensive than a perfect chip.
In fact, you've gone away from the notion of "interchangeable parts" and have gone back to the idea of craftsmen carefully matching parts that fit.
Oh, hell... "The protecting layer for CDs and DVDs (cover layer) is 0.6 mm. in thickness, while Blu-Ray's cover layer is only 0.1 mm. thick, which, roughly, means a better access to the recording area."
And better access to scratches, ball point pens, ink chemistry, label adhesive chemistry.
And the infuriating nuisance of buying marking supplies specifically labelled for use with the media and vice versa, and finding out three years later that everybody who used them is experiencing data loss.
So much for using these things for backup.
DeCSS and DivX major surprises?
on
Blu-Ray vs. HD-DVD
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
"But the main problem remains the poor security. DeCSS and DivX came as major surprises."
All I can say is, what were they thinking?
Edgar Allen Poe got it right in 1863. In _The Gold-Bug_, the narrator says: "Circumstances, and a certain bias of mind, have led me to take interest in such riddles, and it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve."
The movie industry can look forward to many more such "surprises."
using plausible guesses for data rate and integer width.
The ear and brain are very good at hearing patterns and extracting information.
In the days of analog "scrambling" it turned out that it was extremely difficult to scramble speech in such a way as to make it unrecognizable; all sorts of plausible-sounding signal transformations could be interpreted by ear with practice.
It's worth a try. At the beginning, don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether you're decoding it properly. Just do _something_ that will get data off the disk and into a speaker _quickly_ and listen to samples.
1) Collect personal information for years with privacy notice consisting of twenty pages of legal language displayed in a 4"x1" scroll box. First line reads "Your privacy is our foremost concern." Last line reads "Terms may be changed at any time without notice."
2) Don't do anything until you've got enough information to be valuable.
Hee, hee... when I was a kid I could hear the 17,750-cycle horizontal scanning frequency (as it was then... it became 17,734 at about the same time it became "Hz") clearly. I'd ask adults about it. And none of them knew what I was talking about. When I was about ten I finally insisted that someone turn a TV off and on, with the volume all the way down, in an adjacent room, so that I could _prove_ that I could tell whether the TV was on or off and wasn't just imagining things.
When I was in my twenties, I went to a dentist who used an "ultrasonic" cleaning device that was audible--and painfully loud--to me. I complained. They insisted that I couldn't possibly be hearing it because it was "ultrasonic." I said, "Oh? How do kids react to it?" They said, "Oh, we don't use it on kids, they jump out of the chair when we do." But they still didn't believe that it was because I, and the kids, heard it.
Also in my twenties, I visited the mineral and gem room of the American Museum of Natural History, which I had visited many times with pleasure, and this time I confronted with the loudest "ultrasonic" sound I've ever heard the displeasure of hearing. I'm pretty sure it was higher than 15,750 Hz. Heaven only knows how many DB it was. It didn't even sound like a high-pitched done; it sounded like someone was clamping my head in a vise. It gave me a splitting headache within about five minutes. There was obviously some kind of standing-wave effect because if I moved my head or walked around it would fluctuate; I probably could have determined the wavelength if I'd thought about it, but I didn't.
It got louder whenever I got near some little boxes mounted on the wall about ten feet. They were inconspicuous and painted black but in plain sight.
I went to the guard, and said that it was daytime and he was on duty, would he mind turning off the ultrasonic burglar alarm because it was giving me a headache. He sort of freaked out. He said that they didn't have any ultrasonic burglar alarm and what was I talking about? I said I was talking about the extremely high-pitched, extremely loud sound that was coming from those boxes on the wall, and pointed to them. He insisted that they were not part of a burglar alarm system and were not making any noise.
I don't know if he a) thought I was delusional, or b) was upset because the system was supposed to be top-secret, or whether c) I _was_ delusional... you figure it out.
Well time took its toll on the old hair cells, and I got the twentieth-anniversary special CD of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 2000 and listened to the band that supposedly has an ultrasonic tone at the end of it... on my headphones... with the volume turned pretty high... and you know what? I couldn't hear a thing.
Maybe I can visit the American Museum's gem room in comfort now.
Deck prisms and SOLF tubes
on
Sunlight in a Tube
·
· Score: 4, Informative
Sailing ships used compact prisms to convey light to interior rooms without the need for large areas of fragile glass.
And 3M had a material called SOLF, a vaguely Scotchlite-like material with tiny prism that could be made into tubes with highly efficient nearly-total internal reflection, that could carry light in, say, six-inch pipes over distances of many yards with negligible loss. Not terribly expensive, either.
In the days when colorized videos of black-and-white films were common, I watched a few. The so-called "colorization" had some very serious problems, and I wonder whether this new method addresses them.
The problems tended to be in the background, and they probably thought people's attention would stay on the foreground, but I think like many things in film you notice them subconsciously. Either the background is out of focus, in which case there are no sharp edges for the colorization to work on, or it contains a basically infinite quantity of detail as the background gets farther and farther way. Either way, it was extremely common to see uncolored areas in the background.
It was fairly common to see black-and-white paintings hanging on walls, for example. The walls would be some fairly uniform wash of plausible wall color, but nobody was going to take the time to handcolor the paintings hanging on them.
A similar problem concerned scenes with machinery in them, or anything with lots of complex, detailed motion (so that successive frames weren't similar). Thus, you'd see black-and-white printing presses operating in a colorized newspaper building...
In addition, the fact that the colorized faces, for example, were a uniformly colored wash, rather than varying in color as well as brightness, created a subtle kind of phoniness. To me, the result was the conveyance of a sort of emotional coldness. The colorized movies looked colored, but they didn't feel colored.
The exact opposite of the kind of lift you couldn't help feeling in the fifties when you saw a Technicolor spectacular--in the days when "Technicolor" meant that by golly you were watching genuine dye-imbibation prints from real color separations. Sweet as candy, but irresistable. (The effect does come through in the best DVD restorations).
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, indeed, vibrant competition, the miracle of the marketplace, and Adam Smith's "invisible hand" ensure that by golly, no matter what happens, the customer will always win.
The only reason Blockbuster ever used to charge those late fees is because, gosh, it's what customers wanted. And now that customers want something different, Blockbuster is responding to demand.
You can look forward to a ever-brighter future of more and more choice, lower prices, and, of course, better movies.
Because... everything is for the best in this best of all possible worlds.
There has already been a case of carjackers cutting off the owner's finger in order to obtain access to a biometrically secured Mercedes.
The whole idea that a "key" that is a part of your body is somehow more secure than a manufactured gadget you carry with you has more emotional than logical appeal.
Even if the technique works as described, somebody would have to have to spend a lot of time and money generating the decoy files. And it would not affect file sharing unless the generation of these files was so widespread and thorough that they actually displaced most of the valid files.
Even if 25% of the files on P2P networks were garbage, it would not destroy the networks. Presently, a high percentage of all emails is spam, but spam has not yet destroyed email.
And that assumes no countermeasures by file sharers. I can think of some very obvious ones, the most obvious being to counterflood with valid files.
The next most obvious would be to improve the hashing methods for the networks involved.
"document icons are no longer a hint of the type of file, but rather a small picture of the file itself"
Wang was doing this circa 1991 on AT-class hardware.
I didn't think it was all that cool at the time and I don't think it's a particularly good idea now.
Oh, that link should have been: Raymond Scott's circle machine.
So, to repeat: this 1950s contraption used a photocell at the end of a rotating arm: " The intensity of each light in this circle is individually adjustable. At the tip of the arm there is a photo cell. This cell is a part of an electronic sound generating system, so adjusted that the more light the cell 'sees' the higher the pitch of the sound produced. The cell also moves around in a circle at adjustable speeds. One of the controls, above the circle of lights, changes the pitch center of the complete cycle when required. As you will notice, there are many variable functions possible."
The link has sound samples.
I will use the Preview button. I will use the Preview button. I will use the Preview button...
Raymond Scott's circle machine> used a rotating arm: "The intensity of each light in this circle is individually adjustable. At the tip of the arm there is a photo cell. This cell is a part of an electronic sound generating system, so adjusted that the more light the cell 'sees' the higher the pitch of the sound produced. The cell also moves around in a circle at adjustable speeds. One of the controls, above the circle of lights, changes the pitch center of the complete cycle when required. As you will notice, there are many variable functions possible."
The above link includes sound samples.
I also see great similarities between this plan and Prodigy, an online service of the late eighties and early nineties. Prodigy had discussion forums called "clubs." A club was limited to a specific topic. There was no easy way to start a new one.
All the clubs were on bland, family-friendly, consumer-oriented topics. Nothing controversial or political or off-color.
And they hired people, who for want of a better word I'll call "censors," whose job was to patrol the clubs and remove off-topic notices.
Of course, any mention whatsoever that censorship was occurring, or any attempt to discuss it, was considered off-topic and quickly removed.
People frustrated with the tight control on the "club" system attempted to work around it by using mailing lists. As soon as that started, Prodigy promptly changed its policy, which had allowed unlimited free email, instituting a charge of something like $0.25 per email if you sent more than a rather small number of emails per month.
Attempting to impose quality-control on content from above, rather than moulding a self-sustaining community, didn't work very well for Prodigy.
Nobody wants to give a business something for free and have the business turn around and sell it for profit. Early Wikipedia contributors feared this was Jimbo Wales' stealth plan. This fear seems to have died down.
...this is essentially the same process Wikipedia's predecessor, Nupedia used. After 18 months and $250000 they had a total of 12 articles to show for it.
Microsoft is excellent at deflecting criticism by promising fixes, then delivering what are only modest improvements.
When Microsoft software has an obvious problem that competitive software does not, the general pattern is that a) Microsoft claims the next release will fix it; b) the next release falls far short of a fix but is nevertheless a noticeable improvement; c) applause from Microsoft fanboys drowns out those would observe they still haven't achieved parity with the non-Microsoft state-of-the-art.
Since Microsoft users live in a sealed universe--they're too busy keeping up with security patches, changes in API's, and evolving purchase and licensing plans to have the time to ever use any non-Microsoft software--Microsoft gets away with this pattern of "big promise, partial delivery"
Complaints about Windows 3.0 instability were met by the assertion that you "would never see a UAE in Windows 3.1."
Complaints about FAT fragmentation were met by assertions that NTFS would not require defragmentation.
Comments that Windows 3.X was far less usable than the Mac OS were met by assertions that Windows 95 would be just as good as the Mac.
Complaints that installing software under NT 3.x were met by assertions that NT 4.0 would not require rebooting....
here's one BBC article noting that "Hands-free kits are allowed, but many road safety experts say they do not reduce the risks of having an accident."
I can't find a good reference right now, but I'm sure NPR reported on a research study that showed that it was the distraction caused by ''talking'' on a cell phone, not the use of one hand to hold it, that was the issue.
Giving the brain additional physical channels to use for multitasking isn't going to affect the fact the brain's ability or inability to multitask. It doesn't matter whether you're operating the device with your hand, your voice, your eye movements, or your EEG waves; if that device isn't your car, your attention is going to be distracted.
Lately some cell phone association has been running dignified announcements saying that you should not engage in cell phone conversations that might distract you, which is rather like a liquor company saying you should not drink those kinds of liquor that might impair your driving...
The question of whether CRTs pose a health risk is extremely controversial.
Those that think they do attribute the risk to the low-frequency magnetic fields created by the deflection yokes. The risk was considered serious enough for European countries to regulate magnetic field strength, and almost all modern CRTs are built to meet these European standards and contain shielding. (Similarly, the glass CRT envelope contains enough lead to shield against X-rays, which once were a concern in home television sets of the 1950s and 1960s). So, CRTs contain shielding against the _supposed_ causes of _disputed_ health effects.
The reason why CRTs are suspected of having health effects is that there have been various long-term epidemiological studies showing association of various conditions with CRT use.
I don't think anyone has subjected the relatively new flat panels to any similar studies.
Hold a radio next to a flat-panel display and you will see that these displays have electromagnetic radiation fields of their own. There's no reason to think that they pose any hazard, and no particular reason to think they're any safer than CRTs.
Those that simply do not believe that low-energy electromagnetic fields have health effects obviously won't worry about either technology.
Those who think they might should consider the fact that CRTs have at least been on the market long enough for studies to be done and shielding to be incorporated in their design.
Better the devil you know than the devil you don't know, perhaps.
...they would never lie about that.
In an average month, I use regular expressions as implemented in Microsoft Visual C++ 6.0, BBEdit Lite, TextWrangler, Apple MPW, and REALBasic. Every single one of them has _significant_ differences in syntax and semantics.
My understanding is that even the UNIX world sports several different flavors of regular expression in grep, egrep, fgrep, etc.
The biggest barrier to _my_ use of regular expressions is that every time I switch from one regular expression context to another, it takes me a good half hour to refresh my memory of what does and doesn't work in each environment.
The CRT is not dead! I see dozens of them in use every day and CompUSA has lot of them!
Film is not dead! I can buy those familiar yellow boxes of it right in my supermarket checkout line!
Vinyl LPs are not dead! DJ's still use them and you can buy new turntables in Best Buy!
The vacuum tube is not dead! Audio hobbyists still insist on them!
CP/M is not dead! It survives on in Novell Netware servers! Which are not dead, either!
The Oldsmobile is not dead! I still see them on the road!
VHF analog broadcasts are not dead!
Typewriters are not dead! Carbon paper is not dead! Slide rules are not dead! Rotary calculators are not dead! The Bodoni typeface is not dead! The Cinerama wide-screen process is not dead! Spirit duplicators and mimeograph machines are not dead!
Bill Gates is not dead! And neither am I!
But Bill Gates and I are both older than we used to be.
Yeah, well Prohibition was in effect from 1919 until 1933 and it did QUITE a lot of damage before it became "obvious how ludicrous it was." Bootleggers and mobsters made fortunes and criminals become public idols.
Don't think something like this couldn't happen again.
By the way, forget region codes... can anyone tell me a brand of DVD that will let me skip over the various warning notices at the start of the DVD? I have to sit through as much as a minute and a half of that on some disks...
...is to _test_ them.
A chip is no good for ANYthing unless you know exactly what is wrong with it. It might not work AT ALL in a specific "audio application."
By the time you've tested a chip enough to characerize its defects, so that you know they are not going to interfere significantly with the very specific way it is used in a specific application, you've probably added so much cost that it's probably more expensive than a perfect chip.
In fact, you've gone away from the notion of "interchangeable parts" and have gone back to the idea of craftsmen carefully matching parts that fit.
Oh, hell... "The protecting layer for CDs and DVDs (cover layer) is 0.6 mm. in thickness, while Blu-Ray's cover layer is only 0.1 mm. thick, which, roughly, means a better access to the recording area."
And better access to scratches, ball point pens, ink chemistry, label adhesive chemistry.
And the infuriating nuisance of buying marking supplies specifically labelled for use with the media and vice versa, and finding out three years later that everybody who used them is experiencing data loss.
So much for using these things for backup.
"But the main problem remains the poor security. DeCSS and DivX came as major surprises."
All I can say is, what were they thinking?
Edgar Allen Poe got it right in 1863. In _The Gold-Bug_, the narrator says: "Circumstances, and a certain bias of mind, have led me to take interest in such riddles, and it may well be doubted whether human ingenuity can construct an enigma of the kind which human ingenuity may not, by proper application, resolve."
The movie industry can look forward to many more such "surprises."
using plausible guesses for data rate and integer width.
The ear and brain are very good at hearing patterns and extracting information.
In the days of analog "scrambling" it turned out that it was extremely difficult to scramble speech in such a way as to make it unrecognizable; all sorts of plausible-sounding signal transformations could be interpreted by ear with practice.
It's worth a try. At the beginning, don't spend a lot of time trying to figure out whether you're decoding it properly. Just do _something_ that will get data off the disk and into a speaker _quickly_ and listen to samples.
1) Collect personal information for years with privacy notice consisting of twenty pages of legal language displayed in a 4"x1" scroll box. First line reads "Your privacy is our foremost concern." Last line reads "Terms may be changed at any time without notice."
2) Don't do anything until you've got enough information to be valuable.
3) Change terms without notice.
4) Sell personal information and PROFIT!
Hee, hee... when I was a kid I could hear the 17,750-cycle horizontal scanning frequency (as it was then... it became 17,734 at about the same time it became "Hz") clearly. I'd ask adults about it. And none of them knew what I was talking about. When I was about ten I finally insisted that someone turn a TV off and on, with the volume all the way down, in an adjacent room, so that I could _prove_ that I could tell whether the TV was on or off and wasn't just imagining things.
When I was in my twenties, I went to a dentist who used an "ultrasonic" cleaning device that was audible--and painfully loud--to me. I complained. They insisted that I couldn't possibly be hearing it because it was "ultrasonic." I said, "Oh? How do kids react to it?" They said, "Oh, we don't use it on kids, they jump out of the chair when we do." But they still didn't believe that it was because I, and the kids, heard it.
Also in my twenties, I visited the mineral and gem room of the American Museum of Natural History, which I had visited many times with pleasure, and this time I confronted with the loudest "ultrasonic" sound I've ever heard the displeasure of hearing. I'm pretty sure it was higher than 15,750 Hz. Heaven only knows how many DB it was. It didn't even sound like a high-pitched done; it sounded like someone was clamping my head in a vise. It gave me a splitting headache within about five minutes. There was obviously some kind of standing-wave effect because if I moved my head or walked around it would fluctuate; I probably could have determined the wavelength if I'd thought about it, but I didn't.
It got louder whenever I got near some little boxes mounted on the wall about ten feet. They were inconspicuous and painted black but in plain sight.
I went to the guard, and said that it was daytime and he was on duty, would he mind turning off the ultrasonic burglar alarm because it was giving me a headache. He sort of freaked out. He said that they didn't have any ultrasonic burglar alarm and what was I talking about? I said I was talking about the extremely high-pitched, extremely loud sound that was coming from those boxes on the wall, and pointed to them. He insisted that they were not part of a burglar alarm system and were not making any noise.
I don't know if he a) thought I was delusional, or b) was upset because the system was supposed to be top-secret, or whether c) I _was_ delusional... you figure it out.
Well time took its toll on the old hair cells, and I got the twentieth-anniversary special CD of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in 2000 and listened to the band that supposedly has an ultrasonic tone at the end of it... on my headphones... with the volume turned pretty high... and you know what? I couldn't hear a thing.
Maybe I can visit the American Museum's gem room in comfort now.
Sailing ships used compact prisms to convey light to interior rooms without the need for large areas of fragile glass.
And 3M had a material called SOLF, a vaguely Scotchlite-like material with tiny prism that could be made into tubes with highly efficient nearly-total internal reflection, that could carry light in, say, six-inch pipes over distances of many yards with negligible loss. Not terribly expensive, either.
In the days when colorized videos of black-and-white films were common, I watched a few. The so-called "colorization" had some very serious problems, and I wonder whether this new method addresses them.
The problems tended to be in the background, and they probably thought people's attention would stay on the foreground, but I think like many things in film you notice them subconsciously. Either the background is out of focus, in which case there are no sharp edges for the colorization to work on, or it contains a basically infinite quantity of detail as the background gets farther and farther way. Either way, it was extremely common to see uncolored areas in the background.
It was fairly common to see black-and-white paintings hanging on walls, for example. The walls would be some fairly uniform wash of plausible wall color, but nobody was going to take the time to handcolor the paintings hanging on them.
A similar problem concerned scenes with machinery in them, or anything with lots of complex, detailed motion (so that successive frames weren't similar). Thus, you'd see black-and-white printing presses operating in a colorized newspaper building...
In addition, the fact that the colorized faces, for example, were a uniformly colored wash, rather than varying in color as well as brightness, created a subtle kind of phoniness. To me, the result was the conveyance of a sort of emotional coldness. The colorized movies looked colored, but they didn't feel colored.
The exact opposite of the kind of lift you couldn't help feeling in the fifties when you saw a Technicolor spectacular--in the days when "Technicolor" meant that by golly you were watching genuine dye-imbibation prints from real color separations. Sweet as candy, but irresistable. (The effect does come through in the best DVD restorations).
5048.62.