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Last Friday evening Aussie blogger based in London Michael Jennings gave a talk at my place, on the subject of digital TV. What is it? Where’s it at? Where’s it going? That kind of thing. He combined knowing a lot about his subject with not talking at too great length to a degree that doesn’t always happen at these things, and I think all those present found it most informative and interesting. I certainly did.
For the benefit of those as ignorant of this subject as I was at 8pm on Friday evening, I summarise as best I can something of what I learned during the next hour and a half.
Around 1980, or so, governments around the world began switching to digital TV. They did this for a variety of reasons, but to a degree rare in such circumstances they all arrived at very similar technological destinations, which resulted in a new global system that involved only trivial incompatibilities. US TV corporations wanted an excuse to cling to their existing wavelengths. The British government was looking to economise on the use of existing bandwidths so that it could auction the vacated electronic real estate. In Japan they wanted to dominate the next generation of TV manufacturing. And so on. In practice it all meant the same thing. Digital TV. Which is where we now are. I now have a little box above my TV which cost £100, which has transformed a TV which emitted five channels in rather poor quality to a TV that emits something more like a dozen channels in better quality, including 24 hour news services from the BBC, from ITV and from Sky, just in time for the war.
How come digital TV means more channels? Compression. Digital data can be compressed. How does that work? Well, instead of transmitting thousands of very big numbers each referring to each bit of the picture being described, you can instead emit a string of numbers many of which take the form of things like “the same as the bit next to it” or “one more than the bit next to it” and this occupies much less space. The more computing power you apply to such processes, the more you can compress, and computing power, as we all know, is leaping ahead year by year. Once all the information arrives in our TV sets we can apply steadily increasing computing power to its storage and viewing and manipulation. TV has now become something that you need to upgrade, because it is going to get better year by year, and keep on getting better.
Threading its way in among this story is the related story of the rise of the DVD, to the point where it is about to dethrone the VHS tape as the standard for hiring movies from the Shop Around the Corner or buying them to have in your home. Apparently DVDs will in due couse jump to being an order of magnitude better, and I’m going to wish I’d not bought so many DVDs in their present primitive state. Oh goodie.
So, an informative evening, and no doubt I’ve missed out lots. As to what all this will mean for our culture, I’ll try to have a go at that in a later posting. Or maybe postings, because it is a complicated story.
UPDATE:
Email from Jennings:
“Around 1980, or so, governments around the world began switching to digital TV.”
Thanks for the nice comments. However, “1990” is more accurate. I suppose you could say that some of the HDTV efforts that ultimately led to digital TV started in 1980, but digital was not technically possible until a decade later and in 1980 nobody had any idea that “digital” is where we would end up. The first application that could be described as “digital TV” in any form is the Video CD, for which the technical standard was released in 1987. The first broadcast digital TV system of any form was the American DirecTV satellite system, which commenced broadcasts in 1993.
Yeah, 1990. I meant 1990.
Nice article in Wired on how playing video games is helping youngsters to think better, therby overcoming the obstacles put in their way by our dumbed-down education system. Hmm. Food for thought. Any, this screed by James Paul Gee perhaps suggests that homeschooling parents should ensure their children play certain types of game as a key element of the learning process. I must say I never thought that Doom or Grand Theft Auto as agents of learning, but the world is a strange place.
I liked this paragraph:
We don’t often think about videogames as relevant to education reform, but maybe we should. Game designers don’t often think of themselves as learning theorists. Maybe they should. Kids often say it doesn’t feel like learning when they’re gaming – they’re much too focused on playing. If kids were to say that about a science lesson, our country’s education problems would be solved.
In other words, all those kids out playing computer games are no cause for concern. They are our next Edisons, Feynmans and Bill Gateses.
The folk at the U.S. techie magazine Wired have been celebrating 10 years of existence. On the whole I have enjoyed reading that publication, notwithstanding its occasional teenage-like cockiness, obsession with fashion and suchlike. On the whole I regard their particular northern Californian brand of breezy optimism to be a tonic compared to a lot of doom and gloom stuff that comes our way. They are also consistent defenders of privacy and exude a pretty strong libertarian cultural vibe, though many of their authors could not be classed as out and out libertarians.
In the April edition, Wired got two authors, Peter Schwartz and Doug Randall to write about the need for the U.S. government to launch a $100 billion venture on getting the country linked up to hydrogen power in order to wean Americans off their addiction to oil. A lot of reasons are given, many of them pretty obvious, such as reducing reliance on oil from the instable Middle East and reducing carbon dioxide emissions because of the so-called Greenhouse effect.
Their article contains a lot of impressive facts and figures as well as calls to embark on a hydrogen project with the same fervour that JFK asked Americans to put a man on the Moon. But that is my problem with this article, as it applies just as much to Britain as it does to the U.S.A. Surely, do we really want vast amounts of taxpayers’ money spent encouraging big energy firms to move into this technology, when that is bound to provide endless opportunities for pork-barrel politics, and the like? And while it was a magnificent achievement, putting men on the Moon came at a vast cost and the bloated bureacracy of NASA is surely a warning of what can happen with such projects, as Rand Simberg has pointed out many times before.
Ultimately, if the price of oil rises to a level which means sharp entrepreneurs think hydrogen-powered energy solutions make sense, it will happen. After all, the oil industry got started in the late 19th century without a vast government-led project. The best thing governments can do in this area is like pretty much everywhere else – GET OUT OF THE GODDAM WAY!
I’ve had half an eye on British TV all evening, and you might be quite surprised how gung-ho it has rather suddenly become. Finally, we are getting all the stuff about what a total bastard Saddam Hussain is, from fearsome looking guys with towels on their heads. On Newsnight they’re now discussing the nuances of the fighting that might happen, with an elderly military guy who sounds confident and expert and who I’ve never seen before. Funny how war seems to cause all manner of total strangers suddenly to pop up in TV studios.
All this makes me remember that there is just one more guess about this “war” that I want now to get on the samizdata record before events overtake me and leave me having to say: “I said that! Didn’t I say that?!” So now let me say it.
There’s been a lot of grumbling in the blogosphere, and from the likes of Mark Steyn and many others, about how absurdly delayed this “war” has been, and what a “rush to war” there hasn’t been.
The dominant explanation of this now is that Dumbo the Elephant alias George W. Bush has been standing like a greyhound in the slips (Henry V – please pardon the mixing of the animal metaphors) and that Tranzi Tony Blair has been restraining Dumbo with a lot of flummery about the UN, World Opinion, and other such foolishnesses not held in very high regard in our corner of the blogosphere.
But what if the reason the “war” has been so delayed is that it has taken a long time to get it ready? If I understand the Americans correctly they’ve been planning this war since 9/12. And one of the things they have been most concerned to achieve is low casualties, on both sides. And one of the most important ways they’ve been setting about how to get that result is by throwing technology at the problem. → Continue reading: What if the wait turns out to be worth it?
War looms but life goes on. I’ve been reading Steven Pinker’s The Blank Slate: The Modern Denial of Human Nature. Quite a few surprises already. I didn’t realise quite how vicious and unscrupulous the hostility towards sociobiology has been. But some of the book has been tough going, and in the toilet this morning I dipped into the later stuff I haven’t yet got to officially. I found myself in what I later identified to be Chapter 20, entitled “The Arts”, and in it I came across this (on page 416 of my 2002 BCA paperback edition):
As for sneering at the bourgeoisie, it is a sophomoric grab at status with no claim to moral or political virtue. The fact is that the values of the middle class – personal responsibility, devotion to family and neighborhood, avoidance of macho violence, respect for liberal democracy – are good things, not bad things. Most of the world wants to join the bourgeoisie, and most artists are members in good standing who adopted a few bohemian affectations. Given the history of the twentieth century, the reluctance of the bourgeoisie to join mass utopian uprisings can hardly be held against them.
What is startling is not the sentiments themselves. They are all pretty obvious stuff, certainly to me. What is pleasing is who is saying them, and in what context.
Pinker is a respected scientist and scholar, and a fearless and extremely capable defender of his scientific speciality – and scientific decency in general – against the attacks on it, both from the left (who accuse him and his ilk of being “genetic determinists”) and the religious right (who accuse him and his ilk of reducing the soul to a mere bodily function). The Blank Slate is only one of several very good books that Pinker has written. He’s relatively young, a personable and winning TV presence, and a terrific scientific synthesiser and populariser. To encounter notions that you usually expect to find only in the windy and ignorant writings of people who have swallowed the entire right-wing package and nothing else, and are booming forth with it in something like The Daily Mail or The Sun, is most pleasing. → Continue reading: Steven Pinker on modern art
I’ve know for some time that there was a modernised movie version of Hamlet out there, starring Ethan Hawke. Yesterday, for just £9.99 I finally got my hands on a DVD copy of it, and although I haven’t yet had time to watch all of it, I have watched the first few scenes of it. So far, I’m impressed.
For starters, I wasn’t sure if they’d even kept the original Shakespeare text. There’s nothing wrong with keeping the plot but updating the script of a Shakespeare play. It happens all the time. But I wanted it to be the original script by Shakespeare, and it is.
The trouble with ‘authentic’ productions, which make it very clear that the original Hamlet lived in earlier times than ours is that although you can revive the old language and the old costumes, you can’t revive the old audience. And that means that actually even the language and the costumes have to change. The more linguistically impenetrable lines get cut, and the costumes aren’t so much genuinely ancient as ancient-looking-to-us.
I once saw a production of Hamlet in which they all wore genuine Elizabethan sticking-out trousers. It looked utterly ridiculous. Shakespeare done in merely antique looking (but in fact totally anachronistic) tight-fitting modern leather trousers can look splendid, however daft it would have looked to an Elizabethan audience.
But there is a deeper problem than mere costumes. In order to understand all the private griefs and calculations of characters in a play like Hamlet, you have to take their public power struggles seriously and to have an instinctive sense of how important and overbearing these struggles can be and how brutally they can intrude into the would-be ‘private’ lives of the characters. → Continue reading: A Hamlet for our time
I like this posting by Michael Jennings, about portable phone etiquette.
This piece (via slashdot) on how social customs in Japan (particularly amongst young people) are evolving due to near ubiquitous mobile phone use is quite interesting. Amongst the customs discussed is the fact that members of social groups of younger people are contacting one another constantly throughout the day to keep in touch with what their friends are thinking and doing. For doing this, text messaging is a much more important medium than voice. This is interesting, and is an application that the designers of cellphone networks did not anticipate. At all. The same thing has happened in Europe. (The greatest social sin that can be made is now to forget to bring your cellphone, or to allow its battery to run out).
Two other things are mentioned that I have also noticed. Firstly, people no longer have to arrange times and places to meet one another, but plans can be fluid and decisions are gradual rather than at once. Being late is no longer a cardinal sin, as long as you keep people informed about where you are and when you will (or will not) arrive. (I have certainly noticed this. It is probably the number one reason I have a mobile phone). Secondly, people are sending text messages before making a voice call, to check that it is a good time for a conversation. The telephone is a relatively intrusive technology, interrupting you from what you are doing and demanding attention. Sending a text message is much less intrusive, and doing this first is much more polite. (I do this myself, although typically only at times when I think there is a strong chance a voice call will be inconvenient, such as late at night or around meal times. At other times, I will just make the call). Here though is a situation where mobile phones are adding subtlety to etiquette rather than taking it away. Lots of people consider the mobile phone to be a technology that has increased crassness. This does not have to be so, and here is an example.
→ Continue reading: On portable phones and their various uses and impacts
Hurrah for remainder shops. A week or two ago I found a copy of Tom Wolfe’s little book of essays entitled Hooking Up, after the first essay in it (which I thought was the least good one), for £2.99. It is crammed with interesting and very readable stuff, including a wonderful piece called “My Three Stooges”, in which the Wolfe man rips the pants (first in the American sense and then in the British) off three critically acclaimed but not much read (compared to him) novelist rivals of his (John Updike, Norman Mailer, John Irving). I do love a good literary row. Lots of hits below the belt. Lots of quasi-military calculation, on both sides. These Stooges, by the time Wolfe has finished devouring them, come across, to switch metaphors, as giant structures that occupy the spaces that ought to be occupied by real writers of real substance, but with nothing inside them, like that design to replace the Twin Towers with giant empty children’s climbing frames. By going for Wolfe in a gang the stooges hoped that they’d flatten him. By counter-attacking against all of them instead of just picking on one and ignoring the others, Wolfe comes over as Errol Flynn, as the outnumbered hero, rather than just as a rougher and tougher bully.
The piece I’ve just finished reading is the one called “Sorry, but Your Soul Just Died”, which is about the collapse and replacement of Freudianism and Marxism by “Neuroscience”, as Wolfe terms it. Neuroscience is the catch-all name he gives to the fact that Neuroscience (minus inverted commas) is, he says, the new hot scientific frontier, together with the claim that it and other closely related theories (such as Evolutionary Biology) explain everything that people think and do. → Continue reading: Tom Wolfe on Nature, Nurture, Individual Responsibility and How to Write Novels
NASA has set up this FTP site here for the public to use to upload photos, videos and documentary commentary of found debris. It may be the first use of the Net to assist in disaster evidence collection on such a massive scale.
REMEMBER not to touch anything. And FORGET about trying to profit from this tragedy.
The BBC on-line has an interesting article called never ending computer games about using vastly improved Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) to avoid linear pre-scripted games. Of course this is vastly harder to actually pull off than some people seem to think and in some ways a degree of control over events is essential to maintain an interesting and coherent story line.
Nevertheless, any giants leaps in A.I. has to be welcome as it may well lead to entirely new ways of ‘writing’ fiction, relying less on a movie-like approach of pre-scripted actions, but instead driving a story with a series of looser ‘objectives’ which can be solved in many ways, some of which might not have even occurred to the games writer, which is both a potential joy and a source of potential problems… imagine a Lord of The Rings Game:
- Gandalf lures the Nazgûl back to Hobbitton on a wild goose chase with a false reported sighting of Frodo having gone back there after his visit to Rivendell
- Gandalf summons his giant eagle ally (the one who he escaped from Isengard on the back of)
- With the Nazgûl safely out of Mordor airspace, Gandalf and Frodo fly over Mount Doom on their giant eagle friend, drop The Ring of Power into the volcano safely from 5000 feet up, Sauron goes ‘poooofff’!
- Frodo and Gandalf are back in Hobbitton in time for tea and biscuits the next day… done and dusted but rather an anti-climax!
The games designer had better be on the look-out for possible ‘elegant story killer’ endings!
A.I. characters would be ‘accented’, given objectives of their own and then populated around the game in certain contexts, at which point if the A.I. is good enough, the discreet A.I. ‘players’ will take act and react dynamically to event driven ‘reality’ so well that games would be vastly less predictable. It would however require a very different set of ‘rules’ compared to all forms of current fiction, making games more like a high tech form of ‘Dungeons & Dragons’, which is to say an interactive and much looser sort of fiction. Unlike D&D however, the games designer has to balance the game ahead of time rather than on-the-fly. This means good games design will be at a huge premium given that powerful new A.I. technologies will give us whole new ways to make totally crap games as well as transcendently good ones.
Forty-two US Nobel Prize winners have signed a declaration denouncing any unilateral, pre-emptive strike by the US against Iraq:
“The undersigned oppose a preventive war against Iraq without broad international support. Military operations against Iraq may indeed lead to a relatively swift victory in the short term. But war is characterized by surprise, human loss, and unintended consequences. Even with a victory, we believe that the medical, economic, environmental, moral, spiritual, political, and legal consequences of an American preventive attack on Iraq would undermine, not protect, U.S. security and standing in the world”.
The Nobel laureate who wrote and circulated the declaration is chemist Walter Kohn of the University of California at Santa Barbara, a former adviser to the US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency. Other signatories include physicists behind the nuclear research that ended the Second World War. Hans Bethe was an atom bomb designer and Norman Ramsey was part of the Manhattan project to build an atom bomb.
“We are a group of bright people who have had very relevant experiences. We hope to contribute to the sharpness of the discussion.”
Yeah, right, we wish. However, all is not lost. Apparently, six Nobel laureates refused to sign the declaration. According to Kohn their reasons were a lack of faith in the UN, a desire to avoid mixing science with politics and a fear of appeasing Iraq. Seems like a sound bunch of scientists to me (I am, of course, only assuming that they are scientists). Unfortunately, I could not find their names anywhere as the only source of the report seems to be New Scientist. If anyone knows who they are and what they said, I would be interested to read their comments in full.
In any case, it looks like the well-meaning Nobel-prize-winning professors have struck a bonanza in signatures. Last time I looked their support form had about 1360 signed and counting in just a couple of days! Well done. Only, it seems that most of the ‘signatories’ appear to be Raelians adding their own garbled and emotionally incontinent messages…
They are all stark raving mad. Bloody marvellous!
This story is already a little old but I thought I’d give my two pennies’ worth on the situation facing Danish statistics teacher Bjorn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, which was published over a year ago.
In a nutshell, Lomborg uses the evidence on which Greens rely to point out that by many yardsticks, life on planet Earth is getting better. As one can imagine, this has sent large parts of the Green movement and the anti-globalistas into a collective funk…
“You mean the world is getting greener, healthier and wealthier? But that’s just terrible! Heretic! Heretic!”
The response from many quarters has been nothing less than childish. A self-selected and rather Orwellian group calling itself The Danish Committee for Scientific Dishonesty has denounced Lomborg root and branch for the temerity of writing such a book and has sought to smear him and his academic credentials. So it is good to see the man himiself fight back. Check out the article by Lomborg in the online pages of the Wall Street Journal for his rebuttal of many of their claims.
Of course by writing in the WSJ, Lomborg has proved he is a mere lackey of the global free market capitalist conspiracy, so no doubt the doomongers will not pay a shred of attention. It might influence saner counsels, though.
And in the meantime, take a look at www.lomborg.com for an ongoing discussion of his book and associated issues.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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