In Philip K. Dick's obscure 1969 novel Galactic Pot-Healer, the characters play a game based on this very idea. They take common sayings and figures of speech, and feed them through several language-translation computers. The results are then sent to a friend, who attempts to figure out what the original phrase was.
Sometimes when you're reading PKD you get the uncomfortable feeling he really could see into the future.
On the one hand, bullies rarely if ever make a positive contribution to society. They are irrationally violent towards the kids that are smarter, not as socially developed, less physically imposing, and have odd interests.
On the other hand, the intelligent, awkward runts with unusual obsessions are pretty much responsible for every every bit of human progress since the invention of fire.
Guess which group of people the article says must alter its behavior?
After the Cunard ocean liner Lusitania was torpedoed by the German U-Boat U-20 in May, 1915, the great Winsor McCay was asked to animate the disaster. This was not a minor film; McCay was not only the best animator alive, he had invented the medium himself. It was released in 1918 and used as part of the ongoing anti-German propaganda effort.
Curiously, even this 92-year-old pioneering classic demonstrates the dangers of using animation based on incomplete, mistaken or biased reportage and presenting it as fact. The film depicts the liner being hit by two torpedoes, when in fact the second explosion was internal. The Lusitania was described as an innocent passenger liner, but the Germans contend to this day that she was transporting far more munitions than were recorded in her manifest, and was thus a legitimate target. The English have not helped their cause any in the intervening years: they did their best to destroy the wreck with depth charges in the 1950s. More recently, millions of rounds of unrecorded ammunition have been found by divers at the site, lending credence to the German claims.
On a mildly related note, around this time the Hearst papers (and others, but Hearst was notorious for it) routinely used artists and retouched photos to "reenact" extremely lurid depictions of crimes, with helpful arrows and labels presenting their suppositions as fact. This practice was continued for several decades, and Lord knows how many innocent people were sent to prison or executed because of the bias these "reconstructions" introduced into society.
It was bad then. It's bad now. This is a dangerous path to tread.
I would argue that the main advantage of the "get us off this rock crap" is that at some point we are absolutely going to take an extinction-level hit from some other rock, or a massive solar flare that toasts half the planet, or some other damned thing. If we don't spread across several worlds, we vastly increase the likelihood of becoming just another trilobite bed.
It isn't merely a matter of fixing the earth, which I wholeheartedly agree is of prime importance; off-world colonies are essential for the survival of the species. We don't need to colonize only Mars and Luna; we need to colonize other star systems. Gamma-ray bursts, supernovas and asteroid impacts aren't imaginary bogeymen. The universe is an incredibly dangerous place, and so far we've been lucky, but that's only because we're new in the neighborhood. The geologic record is littered with evidence that bad shit happens. Hell, just look at a map of Canada. Lake Manicouagan in Quebec was created by a chunk of rock three miles wide.
At some point terrestrial homo sapiens is guaranteed to take an irrecoverable hit, and if we haven't put down roots elsewhere, that's it for humanity and any of our eventual descendants.
So yes, we have to get off of this goddamned rock, and the sooner the better. I'm astonished anyone even bothers to argue about this.
I'm not sure of the publication date, but probably in the late 1950s to early-1960s Philip K. Dick wrote a novel where the hero had a reel-to-reel stereo system that had to be watered and fed every day because its electronics depended on living brain cells as circuitry. (I think the cells came from some weird sentient slime mold they found on Ganymede.)
Now, aside from the automatic-cool factor of a PKD connection, I find these Frankenstein-type experiments troubling from a moral standpoint. (Anyone that knows me personally probably just blew coffee out of their noses.)
I'm a rabid technophile, but animals do experience terror and therefore are aware on some level. These experiments, admittedly still in the rudimentary stages, are generally headed toward using living animal brains to control machines. I can't imagine a more horrifying situation for a creature that didn't volunteer for it. (I, for one, would actually consider it, but it'd have to be one damned cool robot.)
I guess I feel the same way about these sort of things as I do when reading of consciousness continuing after human decapitations for a minute or longer. Just because something can be done doesn't mean it needs to be. And this feels really, really wrong to me.
I still can't believe anyone was gullible enough to vote for Bush in the first place. We all saw the same guy on TV, and it was blindingly obvious from the beginning that he was a lying neo-fascist prick that would drive the country straight into the ground. You based your vote on promises? How about basing your vote on the guy's record? Hell, a distracted three-year-old could tell Bush was lying just by his tone of voice. Jeez, it's been frustrating having a brain the past six years while the rest of you enabling zombie idiots finally wake the fuck up. Thanks for destroying America, morons.
In my experience all computer languages are learned on the toilet; I've only met one programmer who claimed otherwise, and he was maladjusted in other ways as well.
Roy Hinkley, the Professor on Gilligan's Island, was the only positive scientist role model when I was a kid. All the other scientists were always getting way in over their heads with giant ants, ill-advised experiments in the 4th dimension, or some hare-brained scheme to drill a hole into the center of the earth.
As an aside, in an otherwise terrible 50's movie called "The Monster From Green Hell" there's an America scientist who's experiments result in a bunch of gigantic flightless killer wasps running amok in Africa. He realizes that it's all his fault, and travels halfway around the world to stop the things from killing a bunch of nameless African villagers simply because it's the right thing to do. This sort of social conscience was almost unheard of in films of the time.
I will admit that raytracing is slow, but I'd like to know what is "better" than raytracing. The most recent version of POV-Ray not only does raytracing, radiosity, caustics and photon mapping, but comes with a dizzying array of primitives, lighting effects (including area lights for soft shadows), procedural and image-based textures, dozens of primitives, and a surprisingly powerful macro language. The unofficial patch of POV-Ray, MegaPov, adds many other features, such as visible light sources and cloth simulation.
Furthermore, a raytraced image is mathematically accurate, while a rendered image is merely an approximation. In raytracing, a sphere is an absolutely perfect sphere, where every single surface point is the same distance from the center. A rendered sphere is composed of a mesh of triangles, and its accuracy varies with the size of those triangles.
And let's not leave out the best part of raytracing: the input format is simple human-readable (and writable) text files with an easily-grasped scene-description syntax. There is something very satisfying about sitting down to a text editor with nothing but an idea in your head, describing it to the machine, and watching as that idea becomes a photo-realistic image. I've been raytracing for over a decade, and I still find that thrilling.
I suggest you drop by a bookstore and look the book over before dismissing it. I've been designing and coding sites since '96, and this book is by far the best overall reference to browser-based web technologies I've found. Here at the office, we call it "the Bible." As a side note, for people asking what good DHTML is, the ability to format a complex page without a bazillion nesting table tags seems like an excellent place to start. From a maintenance standpoint, give me well-crafted DHTML over HTML any day.
I stumbled accross this book on Project Gutenberg:
Heroes of the Telegraph by John Munro.
It's a fascinating account of the various inventions that led up to the telegraph. Oddly enough, the book was written when the telephone and phonograph were pretty new, so the author's speculations as to the future of these devices is interesting.
Well, I'm not sure, but from what you're describing it sounds like they just flipped back and forth between stereo pairs rapidly. You can see this effect if you take a standard stereo pair and make a looping animated GIF out of it. I've put up an example I made out of an old stereograph slide here.
By the way, you can get synthetic stereo from any two successive frames of video or film as long as the object being viewed is either slowly rotating, or the camera itself is dollying sideways (NOT panning).
In the late '70s I was assistant manager at the Tiffany Theatre on Sunset Strip, and we showed "Dial M for Murder" with the original two-projector setup for 3D, which hadn't been done since the 1950s and to my knowledge hasn't been done in a regular theater since.
Most Polaroid system 3D movies use a single film with both images in each frame, either one on top of the other or side by side. These images are distorted in order to squeeze them both onto one frame of film. The images are projected through a beam splitter and then sent through an anamorphic lens to get the correct aspect ratio and remove distortion. When viewed through the Polaroid glasses, which are dark like sunglasses, these films tend to appear very dim because the amount of light reaching each eye is less than half of the light from a normally-projected film. There is also a great loss of image detail because each frame is only one-half the size of a normal film frame, and sent through extra optics to boot. Coupled with the fact that theatres tend to project movies much dimmer than they should in a misguided attempt to stretch bulb life, modern 3D projection is pretty damned unsatisfactory.
The two-projector system, which is the way these movies were intended to be viewed, is frankly a bitch to set up, but wow, what a difference. There are two different prints of the film, one for each eye, and each shot from that eye's viewpoint. The films must be threaded into the two projectors, making sure that they both start on exactly the same frame. (This little requirement is the reason for all the "3D causes eyestrain and headaches" bad press 3D got in the 'fifties, by the way. Untrained and/or uncaring projectionists could ruin a 3D movie.) In order to ensure that the projectors remain in sync with each other, a steel rod actually connected the takeup reels with each other across the projection booth. Since each image receives the entire illumination from the projector lamp, after putting on the glasses the 3D film looks just as bright as any other film. There is no loss of image quality because each image is a full frame.
We also showed a 3D Hong-Kong martial-arts period piece called "Dynasty."
On a side note, the article linked to claims that the Soviets never had an operational glasses-less projection system. This is incorrect. A friend of mine saw a 3D movie without glasses in a theater in Moscow in the mid-eighties. It was a lenticular screen, and the theater itself was much narrower than usual to ensure the correct viewing angle.
Now, don't get me started on how morons in suits have ruined every attempt to do 3D on television.
Your ignorance of recent American history is astonishing. Ask the victims of COINTELPRO whether they had anything to hide or not. What are you going to do if what you've done wrong is merely disagree with the government's abridgement of your civil rights as guaranteed under the Constitution? It's happened before, right here in the US of A. Did you know the Bush administration is floating the idea of an internal spy agency? Read your history, people. We are in bad trouble.
Go with the POV-Ray raytracer and do what I do -- TYPE your graphics. I swear, you young punks today don't know what 3D graphics are... mutter, grumble...
I've got news for you: this was done in Uvalde, Texas in the early sixties. I know this because I saw it myself. The sterilized flies were dropped from aircraft in cardboard boxes that broke open upon impact. I remember the boxes were printed with big red bullseyes on them, presumably so the ranchers who found this trash littering their land would use them for target practice instead of complaining. Come to think of it, I remember playing with those boxes... They also used to drive a truck around the neighborhood spraying big clouds of DDT. Fun, huh?
Remember when computers were all about expanding what's possible instead of restricting it? I'm getting goddamn sick and tired of beneficial technology being held hostage by a bunch of greedy assholes.
I've been poking around with this idea for a couple of years, but haven't gotten past the vague musing stage. It seems to me that the ability to identify holes in the information space would be useful, especially if those holes could be correlated with unsuccessful searches. A density of failed searches in an area with little internet coverage would indicate a good niche for further development.
Merely using search engine data to generate the base map wouldn't be effective, since that would only map what people are looking for, not what's out there. Probably the best way would be to use one of the universal catalog systems already in existence (Library of Congress, for example) and create sets of specialized thesaurii. Place these in a 3D coordinate system and then use word-frequency counts on internet documents to match them to subject areas.
With data from search engines, searches can be placed the same way, mapping them to every specialized thesaurus they fit. Clusters of hits in a sparsely-populated area would then indicate possible unsuccessful searches.
G vs E was a twisted little show on USA Network
that only lasted for a few episodes. You can
probably find a review of the series somewhere
on Salon. There were several name changes, so search for G vs E or GvsE or Good vs Evil.
After USA cancelled the show, it was picked up
by SciFi Channel, where it turned into instant crap. They kept the premise, but got rid of the psychotic humor that was the main appeal. (In one episode from the first season they blew up Emmanuel Lewis, and in another a character seduces a woman on an airborne passenger jet, assisted by a spotlit disco ball which mysteriously appears.)
G vs E vanished after a few sorry months on SciFi. The USA season was brilliant, and if you can find it anywhere do yourself a favor and watch it. But the SciFi episodes are just sad.
Reviews of CSI always miss one important point: it is hilariously, magnificently bad. Each episode begins with Grissom's pre-credit cliche (if we're real lucky, it's an inappropriate Shakespeare quote).
After the credits, our heroes investigate the crime scene, during which a character will utter a line setting up the dramatic conclusion. This bit of dialogue will be heavily stressed so that later you will remember it and say "how ironic."
Then comes the establishment of the subplot, usually featuring the Ex-Stripper Who's Trying To Put Her Past Behind Her or the Young Man From The Streets Who Pulled Himself Up By His Bootstraps But Made Mistakes Along The Way.
After that, Grissom explains a forensic technique that's been in common use since 1947 to his fellow investigators. In elaborate detail. A piece of equipment that they've all been using daily since they were hired will also be explained, sometimes with helpful graphics. Everyone but Grissom will express dumbfounded amazement at the Miracles Of Modern Science. At lunch, a ham sandwich is explained.
The action will be punctuated with visualizations of theories of the crime. We know they are visualizations because of the overexposed high-contrast film, jumpy editing and echo-chamber sound track.
Finally, after some breathtaking leaps of logic, the crime will be solved. The subplot will then be wrapped up, and the final shot will be of Grissom pensively considering the Toll This Work Takes On Them All. Once, he did this from a moving roller coaster.
This show is the funniest thing on TV since the first season of G vs E.
Slashdot Mirror
In Philip K. Dick's obscure 1969 novel Galactic Pot-Healer, the characters play a game based on this very idea. They take common sayings and figures of speech, and feed them through several language-translation computers. The results are then sent to a friend, who attempts to figure out what the original phrase was.
Sometimes when you're reading PKD you get the uncomfortable feeling he really could see into the future.
On the one hand, bullies rarely if ever make a positive contribution to society. They are irrationally violent towards the kids that are smarter, not as socially developed, less physically imposing, and have odd interests.
On the other hand, the intelligent, awkward runts with unusual obsessions are pretty much responsible for every every bit of human progress since the invention of fire.
Guess which group of people the article says must alter its behavior?
After the Cunard ocean liner Lusitania was torpedoed by the German U-Boat U-20 in May, 1915, the great Winsor McCay was asked to animate the disaster. This was not a minor film; McCay was not only the best animator alive, he had invented the medium himself. It was released in 1918 and used as part of the ongoing anti-German propaganda effort.
Curiously, even this 92-year-old pioneering classic demonstrates the dangers of using animation based on incomplete, mistaken or biased reportage and presenting it as fact. The film depicts the liner being hit by two torpedoes, when in fact the second explosion was internal. The Lusitania was described as an innocent passenger liner, but the Germans contend to this day that she was transporting far more munitions than were recorded in her manifest, and was thus a legitimate target. The English have not helped their cause any in the intervening years: they did their best to destroy the wreck with depth charges in the 1950s. More recently, millions of rounds of unrecorded ammunition have been found by divers at the site, lending credence to the German claims.
On a mildly related note, around this time the Hearst papers (and others, but Hearst was notorious for it) routinely used artists and retouched photos to "reenact" extremely lurid depictions of crimes, with helpful arrows and labels presenting their suppositions as fact. This practice was continued for several decades, and Lord knows how many innocent people were sent to prison or executed because of the bias these "reconstructions" introduced into society.
It was bad then. It's bad now. This is a dangerous path to tread.
Stop lying.
Complement: to make complete.
Compliment: to tell a falsehood.
I would argue that the main advantage of the "get us off this rock crap" is that at some point we are absolutely going to take an extinction-level hit from some other rock, or a massive solar flare that toasts half the planet, or some other damned thing. If we don't spread across several worlds, we vastly increase the likelihood of becoming just another trilobite bed.
It isn't merely a matter of fixing the earth, which I wholeheartedly agree is of prime importance; off-world colonies are essential for the survival of the species. We don't need to colonize only Mars and Luna; we need to colonize other star systems. Gamma-ray bursts, supernovas and asteroid impacts aren't imaginary bogeymen. The universe is an incredibly dangerous place, and so far we've been lucky, but that's only because we're new in the neighborhood. The geologic record is littered with evidence that bad shit happens. Hell, just look at a map of Canada. Lake Manicouagan in Quebec was created by a chunk of rock three miles wide.
At some point terrestrial homo sapiens is guaranteed to take an irrecoverable hit, and if we haven't put down roots elsewhere, that's it for humanity and any of our eventual descendants.
So yes, we have to get off of this goddamned rock, and the sooner the better. I'm astonished anyone even bothers to argue about this.
I'm not sure of the publication date, but probably in the late 1950s to early-1960s Philip K. Dick wrote a novel where the hero had a reel-to-reel stereo system that had to be watered and fed every day because its electronics depended on living brain cells as circuitry. (I think the cells came from some weird sentient slime mold they found on Ganymede.)
Now, aside from the automatic-cool factor of a PKD connection, I find these Frankenstein-type experiments troubling from a moral standpoint. (Anyone that knows me personally probably just blew coffee out of their noses.)
I'm a rabid technophile, but animals do experience terror and therefore are aware on some level. These experiments, admittedly still in the rudimentary stages, are generally headed toward using living animal brains to control machines. I can't imagine a more horrifying situation for a creature that didn't volunteer for it. (I, for one, would actually consider it, but it'd have to be one damned cool robot.)
I guess I feel the same way about these sort of things as I do when reading of consciousness continuing after human decapitations for a minute or longer. Just because something can be done doesn't mean it needs to be. And this feels really, really wrong to me.
I still can't believe anyone was gullible enough to vote for Bush in the first place. We all saw the same guy on TV, and it was blindingly obvious from the beginning that he was a lying neo-fascist prick that would drive the country straight into the ground. You based your vote on promises? How about basing your vote on the guy's record? Hell, a distracted three-year-old could tell Bush was lying just by his tone of voice. Jeez, it's been frustrating having a brain the past six years while the rest of you enabling zombie idiots finally wake the fuck up. Thanks for destroying America, morons.
In my experience all computer languages are learned on the toilet; I've only met one programmer who claimed otherwise, and he was maladjusted in other ways as well.
Roy Hinkley, the Professor on Gilligan's Island, was the only positive scientist role model when I was a kid. All the other scientists were always getting way in over their heads with giant ants, ill-advised experiments in the 4th dimension, or some hare-brained scheme to drill a hole into the center of the earth.
As an aside, in an otherwise terrible 50's movie called "The Monster From Green Hell" there's an America scientist who's experiments result in a bunch of gigantic flightless killer wasps running amok in Africa. He realizes that it's all his fault, and travels halfway around the world to stop the things from killing a bunch of nameless African villagers simply because it's the right thing to do. This sort of social conscience was almost unheard of in films of the time.
The craters pictured (Google Maps link is http://maps.google.com/maps?ll=37.108040,-116.0454 94&spn=0.146118,0.240704&t=k&hl=en ) are NOT in Area 51. It's the Nevada Test Site, where we did aboveground and underground nuclear testing for decades. There is a museum for the site in Las Vegas, where I live. It's website is here: http://www.ntshf.org/ .
a s&ll=39.037964,-96.763169&spn=0.004566,0.007522&t= k&hl=en . It's the small black blot in the center of the image. More on it can be found at Roadside America: http://www.roadsideamerica.com/attract/KSJUNatomic .html .
By the way, the large crater at the north end of the site is from the biggest underground test ever done by the US, code-named Sedan.
Also, if you want to see an atomic cannon (only fired once, at the Nevada Site), there's one outside Junction City, Kansas. The Google Maps URL is http://maps.google.com/maps?q=Junction+City,+Kans
My wife is a novelist, and has used her Alphasmart for years. She loves it. It's lightweight and easy to type on.
I will admit that raytracing is slow, but I'd like to know what is "better" than raytracing. The most recent version of POV-Ray not only does raytracing, radiosity, caustics and photon mapping, but comes with a dizzying array of primitives, lighting effects (including area lights for soft shadows), procedural and image-based textures, dozens of primitives, and a surprisingly powerful macro language. The unofficial patch of POV-Ray, MegaPov, adds many other features, such as visible light sources and cloth simulation.
Furthermore, a raytraced image is mathematically accurate, while a rendered image is merely an approximation. In raytracing, a sphere is an absolutely perfect sphere, where every single surface point is the same distance from the center. A rendered sphere is composed of a mesh of triangles, and its accuracy varies with the size of those triangles.
And let's not leave out the best part of raytracing: the input format is simple human-readable (and writable) text files with an easily-grasped scene-description syntax. There is something very satisfying about sitting down to a text editor with nothing but an idea in your head, describing it to the machine, and watching as that idea becomes a photo-realistic image. I've been raytracing for over a decade, and I still find that thrilling.
I suggest you drop by a bookstore and look the book over before dismissing it. I've been designing and coding sites since '96, and this book is by far the best overall reference to browser-based web technologies I've found. Here at the office, we call it "the Bible." As a side note, for people asking what good DHTML is, the ability to format a complex page without a bazillion nesting table tags seems like an excellent place to start. From a maintenance standpoint, give me well-crafted DHTML over HTML any day.
I stumbled accross this book on Project Gutenberg: Heroes of the Telegraph by John Munro. It's a fascinating account of the various inventions that led up to the telegraph. Oddly enough, the book was written when the telephone and phonograph were pretty new, so the author's speculations as to the future of these devices is interesting.
Well, I'm not sure, but from what you're describing it sounds like they just flipped back and forth between stereo pairs rapidly. You can see this effect if you take a standard stereo pair and make a looping animated GIF out of it. I've put up an example I made out of an old stereograph slide here. By the way, you can get synthetic stereo from any two successive frames of video or film as long as the object being viewed is either slowly rotating, or the camera itself is dollying sideways (NOT panning).
In the late '70s I was assistant manager at the Tiffany Theatre on Sunset Strip, and we showed "Dial M for Murder" with the original two-projector setup for 3D, which hadn't been done since the 1950s and to my knowledge hasn't been done in a regular theater since.
Most Polaroid system 3D movies use a single film with both images in each frame, either one on top of the other or side by side. These images are distorted in order to squeeze them both onto one frame of film. The images are projected through a beam splitter and then sent through an anamorphic lens to get the correct aspect ratio and remove distortion. When viewed through the Polaroid glasses, which are dark like sunglasses, these films tend to appear very dim because the amount of light reaching each eye is less than half of the light from a normally-projected film. There is also a great loss of image detail because each frame is only one-half the size of a normal film frame, and sent through extra optics to boot. Coupled with the fact that theatres tend to project movies much dimmer than they should in a misguided attempt to stretch bulb life, modern 3D projection is pretty damned unsatisfactory.
The two-projector system, which is the way these movies were intended to be viewed, is frankly a bitch to set up, but wow, what a difference. There are two different prints of the film, one for each eye, and each shot from that eye's viewpoint. The films must be threaded into the two projectors, making sure that they both start on exactly the same frame. (This little requirement is the reason for all the "3D causes eyestrain and headaches" bad press 3D got in the 'fifties, by the way. Untrained and/or uncaring projectionists could ruin a 3D movie.) In order to ensure that the projectors remain in sync with each other, a steel rod actually connected the takeup reels with each other across the projection booth. Since each image receives the entire illumination from the projector lamp, after putting on the glasses the 3D film looks just as bright as any other film. There is no loss of image quality because each image is a full frame.
We also showed a 3D Hong-Kong martial-arts period piece called "Dynasty."
On a side note, the article linked to claims that the Soviets never had an operational glasses-less projection system. This is incorrect. A friend of mine saw a 3D movie without glasses in a theater in Moscow in the mid-eighties. It was a lenticular screen, and the theater itself was much narrower than usual to ensure the correct viewing angle.
Now, don't get me started on how morons in suits have ruined every attempt to do 3D on television.
Your ignorance of recent American history is astonishing. Ask the victims of COINTELPRO whether they had anything to hide or not. What are you going to do if what you've done wrong is merely disagree with the government's abridgement of your civil rights as guaranteed under the Constitution? It's happened before, right here in the US of A. Did you know the Bush administration is floating the idea of an internal spy agency? Read your history, people. We are in bad trouble.
Go with the POV-Ray raytracer and do what I do -- TYPE your graphics. I swear, you young punks today don't know what 3D graphics are... mutter, grumble...
Besides, it's free.
I've got news for you: this was done in Uvalde, Texas in the early sixties. I know this because I saw it myself. The sterilized flies were dropped from aircraft in cardboard boxes that broke open upon impact. I remember the boxes were printed with big red bullseyes on them, presumably so the ranchers who found this trash littering their land would use them for target practice instead of complaining. Come to think of it, I remember playing with those boxes... They also used to drive a truck around the neighborhood spraying big clouds of DDT. Fun, huh?
Remember when computers were all about expanding what's possible instead of restricting it? I'm getting goddamn sick and tired of beneficial technology being held hostage by a bunch of greedy assholes.
Merely using search engine data to generate the base map wouldn't be effective, since that would only map what people are looking for, not what's out there. Probably the best way would be to use one of the universal catalog systems already in existence (Library of Congress, for example) and create sets of specialized thesaurii. Place these in a 3D coordinate system and then use word-frequency counts on internet documents to match them to subject areas.
With data from search engines, searches can be placed the same way, mapping them to every specialized thesaurus they fit. Clusters of hits in a sparsely-populated area would then indicate possible unsuccessful searches.
After USA cancelled the show, it was picked up by SciFi Channel, where it turned into instant crap. They kept the premise, but got rid of the psychotic humor that was the main appeal. (In one episode from the first season they blew up Emmanuel Lewis, and in another a character seduces a woman on an airborne passenger jet, assisted by a spotlit disco ball which mysteriously appears.)
G vs E vanished after a few sorry months on SciFi. The USA season was brilliant, and if you can find it anywhere do yourself a favor and watch it. But the SciFi episodes are just sad.
After the credits, our heroes investigate the crime scene, during which a character will utter a line setting up the dramatic conclusion. This bit of dialogue will be heavily stressed so that later you will remember it and say "how ironic."
Then comes the establishment of the subplot, usually featuring the Ex-Stripper Who's Trying To Put Her Past Behind Her or the Young Man From The Streets Who Pulled Himself Up By His Bootstraps But Made Mistakes Along The Way.
After that, Grissom explains a forensic technique that's been in common use since 1947 to his fellow investigators. In elaborate detail. A piece of equipment that they've all been using daily since they were hired will also be explained, sometimes with helpful graphics. Everyone but Grissom will express dumbfounded amazement at the Miracles Of Modern Science. At lunch, a ham sandwich is explained.
The action will be punctuated with visualizations of theories of the crime. We know they are visualizations because of the overexposed high-contrast film, jumpy editing and echo-chamber sound track.
Finally, after some breathtaking leaps of logic, the crime will be solved. The subplot will then be wrapped up, and the final shot will be of Grissom pensively considering the Toll This Work Takes On Them All. Once, he did this from a moving roller coaster.
This show is the funniest thing on TV since the first season of G vs E.