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Commercials are Dumb, or How TV Should Work

Oct 232009

I despise commercials. On TV, the radio, or some other format, I resent their existence. Some of them are amusing the first time you see them, but they quickly become overplayed and obnoxious. More than just the individual commercial, I especially despise commercial breaks, when we’re subjected to five, six, or more of these tedious ads in rapid succession. I mute the TV, leave the room to get a drink, or do some other activity to avoid watching them. In other words, their objective—selling me something—is not being achieved.

TV shows live and die by their ratings, compiled by Nielsen Media Research (“the Nielsens”). These numbers boil down to a certain number of viewers for a given show, and also what percentage of all viewers in that time slot were watching that particular show. For networks (and shows), higher Nielsens are good, because it means more people are watching the advertisements, more advertisers will have their products seen, and thus will continue financially supporting the show.

This, to me, has always been a stupid business model. It places shows at the mercy of advertiser’s whims. Technically speaking, cable TV is completely unregulated. They can show whatever they want: horrid vivisection, full-on nudity, copious vulgar language. But they don’t. Why? ’cause they don’t want to turn away advertisers reluctant to support a show containing those elements.

So, in short, we have an entertainment system funded and censored by people with no creative interest in the product, and who achieve their support by annoying viewers.

Does anyone else think this is ridiculous?

I think we should do show-based subscriptions. You only get the content you subscribe to, you only pay for that content, and there are no ads. The money goes directly to the “bank account” of that particular show to fund future endeavors. There are no “networks” in this world. There are no advertisers. There’s you, the cable company (which holds the repository of shows), and the creators. (Promotion of new shows would be a potential issue under this system; not a problem I’ve thought through.)

Let’s use the example of Firefly, the series beloved by many but ultimately canceled because the network (FOX) continually shuffled its timeslot, preempted it for baseball, ran the series out of order, and so forth. I can’t find a list of the ratings for each episode that aired, but I do know that the first episode had a 4.1/8 rating, meaning 4.1 million viewers watched it. Suppose the subscription cost for a show was $1.99 (the cost of a song on iTunes) per episode and further assume that the cable company gets the change portion. That’s $4.1 million in the bank for the show, or basically enough to pay for that one episode. (This is technically true, but not practically true. The pilot episode cost $10 million; the first aired episode, however, was not the pilot, and cost $3-$4 million.)

This is using dirt-simple, ultra-basic hypothetical numbers. I’m sure television accountants could cook up a better, more-sustainable number. Crank up the cost for shows with higher viewership, until they stop watching (American Idol, anyone?) and allow the actual viewership revenue to dictate how much money a show can spend.

The downside to losing both networks and ad revenue is that you need start-up capital from somewhere. I imagine this is where something like product-placement enters the picture. For shows where this is impractical, perhaps a small, static, and soundless ad in the bottom right of the screen every so often (much like networks now emblazon their logo on the screen at all times).

(This entire rant was prompted, rather paradoxically, by the news that Hulu is switching to subscriber-only model in 2010.)

Halloween Redux

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Oct 152009

I’m excited about Halloween.

Cody and I have decided to pair as Dr. Horrible (her) and Captain Hammer (me). They’re simple costumes, so they don’t really fulfill that deep-seated need to construct something epic. However, they’re fun costumes that we can achieve with the time we have. Most of the attendees at the party we’re attending should recognize the outfits, which is a bonus.

So, that’s good news.

From a more long-term point of view, I did some reading up and I severely underestimated the utility of papier-mâché. I’ve been imagining a future filled with hot ABS plastic and noxious fiberglass-resin fumes because those seemed the only ways to get good, smooth, solid costume pieces. I’ve always thought of papier-mâché as crude and flimsy. In the form I used, it was. But that’s because I was only exploring part of it. Check out this guy.

It makes a lot of sense, if one pauses to think about it. At its most basic, papier-mâché is the same thing as fiberglass: fibers suspended in a glue. Paper is a lot stronger than one might give it credit for, too. Sure, we can rip paper by pulling nearby sections in opposite directions, but have you ever tried to tug on it from two opposite ends? It’ll give, but not without effort and usually local to the area where you’re pulling, not in the middle where the highest stress is. Paper’s strong stuff. Add glue to the mix and you’ve got a decent material—if you execute it correctly.

What’s more, the “strip” form is only one of the two ways to use papier-mâché. The other, using pulped paper, ends up as a clay-like material that can be molded and shaped however you want. Way more versatile. Layer something up with several layers of strips, work in detail with the clay form, and then waterseal it with lacquer of some kind and you’ve got a pretty formidable piece of hardware that’ll stand up to a good amount of weathering.

Get some fine-grained sandpaper to smooth it down, and you might, might have something on par with ABS plastic or fiberglass—as far as costuming goes, anyway—and at a fraction of the cost and risk (glass fibers can do terrible things to your lungs; where’s the risk in water, paper, and flour?).

Suffice it to say I plan to test out this hypothesis at the earliest opportunity. If it works, hoo boy. I shall become a costume making machine.

Moonshot Insanity

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Oct 092009

I’m upset.

This happens when people exhibit kneejerk reactions without first trying to understand the details. In this case, I’m referring to LCROSS and the moon impactor study.

I value science and the pursuit of knowledge. As such, I’m going to make a point-by-point rebuttal of one of the more egregious reactionary articles I’ve read concerning this topic. That article may be found here*.

On Friday, NASA is planning to crash into the moon. I’m just wondering: who gave them permission to crash into the moon? Not once, but twice.

The USA is a democratic republic. The people elect representative officials to legislate, execute, and adjudicate. NASA, a government agency, owes its budget to the whims of congress (legislative) and answers to the president (executive). The people working at NASA do so because the representatives we’ve elected have chosen them as the best candidates for the job. This trickles down from the guy in charge to the lowest intern, with all the intermediary managers having delegate responsibility.

So, in short, we gave NASA permission to pursue scientific endeavors as they best see fit by electing our current representatives.

Further, the people at NASA are qualified. Very qualified. They know what they’re talking about and they’ve gone through a lot of schooling. I’m going to quote the excellent Atomic Rocket.

So you know, university Physics is essentially three years of this discussion among like-minded enthusiasts.

Done with supercomputers, access to the textbook collections of five continents and thirty languages.

On four hours sleep a night.

With no sex.

You’re not going to find the loophole these guys missed.

Continuing on with the absurdity…

The rocket and satellite will smash into the moon at 5600 mph (more than seven times the speed of sound). The size of the explosion will be equal to that of 1.5 tons of TNT and will release 772,000 pounds of lunar dirt into a 6.2 mile high spray of debris, NASA’S own version of shock and awe, in a purported experiment to see if any ice or water is released.

I’m just wondering, who signed the paper? Who did the risk assessment? I mean, what if something goes wrong?

Remember that first paragraph? These guys are experts. They did the risk assessment. Trust them; they don’t have their job “just because.” We often refer to less-than-complex matters by saying, “it’s not rocket science.” Well, guess what: this is rocket science, and these are rocket scientists.

It’s a big explosion. Suffice it to say that any amateur astronomer west of the Mississippi with a home telescope will be able to view it from their backyard.

I could say something scientifically lame and ask, “What if it gets thrown off its axis?” or something funny and suggest something (that I actually sort of believe), like, “What if it somehow throws off the astrology?” Or that we’re not risking — as we have the earth with continued experiments of this kind — sending the solar system out of balance.

This is a failure to understand scale.

The moon orbits the Earth once every 27.3 days at a distance of 384,399 km. This works out to an orbital velocity of about 3,700 km/hour. The moon has a mass of 73.5 billion billion metric tons. Thus, the moon has a total kinetic energy (relative to the Earth) of 7.76 x 10²⁸ Joules, or the equivalent of about 18,500 billion megatons of TNT.

And you’re worried about an impactor with 8.09 x 10^-18% (that’s 8.09 billion billion billionths of a percent!) the kinetic energy?

Why?

The moon is under constant meteor bombardment, as well. You need only look at its pockmarked surface for confirmation. A common 5-meter ferrous (i.e. iron) asteroid crashing into the moon at the same speed as the impactor is going to have 250 times the kinetic energy.

The irony is that one of the purposes of the experiment is to assess whether there is any water on the moon and is it worthwhile to send another manned mission to the moon. If we’d just send up two guys with a bucket and shovels, we wouldn’t have to bomb the moon at all.

The amount of money and planning that goes into every manned mission is enormous compared to unmanned missions. Getting people into space, along with all the required support equipment (atmosphere, water, food, etc.) is hard and requires a great deal of fuel. Keeping people alive in space is harder. Sending up unmanned probes is comparably easy.

I’m not a big fan of explosions, anyway. In Iraq or Afghanistan or the South Pole of the Moon. But who does have a territorial prerogative there?

The explosions in Iraq and Afghanistan are chemical explosions meant to kill people. The “explosion” on the moon is an impact-derived plume of dust meant to learn something and potentially help people. Big difference.

Who has jurisdiction?

By international decree, no one has jurisdiction over space territory. Yet, anyway.

Who has the right to say that it’s okay to blow up a crater on the moon? Or Jupiter? Or Saturn, for that matter?

See above about experts.

If we think there is water there, how do we know we’re not affecting some life form, as well?

Do you worry about wiping down your counter tops with a disinfecting wipe? You are, after all, deliberately killing off microbial lifeforms when you do so. Any form of life on the moon is going to be extremely simplistic and if it exists in one location, will likely exist in many.

It sort of reminds me of two kids in a backyard with a firecracker that they don’t really know how to set off.

This comparison implies that NASA scientists don’t know what they’re doing. Frankly, it’s just insulting.

It’s causing great excitement in the astronomy sector. NASA is running a live broadcast on its website (wonder if they’re selling ads). A NASA spokesman announced, “It’s going to be pretty cool.” The Fiske Planetarium in Boulder is serving free coffee and bagels. “People like explosions,” the Planetarium director is quoted as saying, “and this is going to excite them.”

There’s a good reason for this: it’s an interesting, visible experiment that may lead to revolutionary results.

Well, I for one, don’t like explosions. Call me a pacifist, call me cautious, call me an environmentalist, or call me something worse, I don’t really care.

This is a non-destructive explosion in the pursuit of better understanding of the world. Better understanding is at the heart of pacifism and environmentalism.

The only thing you can be called is reactionary and ignorant.

ADDENDUM: Here’s a YouTube clip showing the impact.

* This article may or may not be a humor post, but if it is, it accurately illustrates widespread sentiment I’ve seen expressed on numerous websites.

20 Food Rules to Live By

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Oct 092009

I originally caught this at Lifehacker, which posted from the NYT. I’ve paraphrased the list and condensed it, with explanations below.

Don’t eat egg salad from a vending machine.

Or eggs from a carton.

You can’t leave the table until you finish your fruit.
Meals prepared at home, served at the table, are more appreciated and more healthful than food eaten on the run.
Breakfast, you should eat alone. Lunch, you should share with a friend. Dinner, give to your enemy.

I don’t understand this rule.

Don’t eat anything that took more energy to ship than to grow.

The emphasis here is to buy local, organic foods rather than imported food. It’s usually fresher and has required less chemical processing.

Never eat something that is pretending to be something else.
Don’t yuck someone’s yum.
Make and take your own lunch to work.
If you are not hungry enough to eat an apple, then you are not hungry.
Eat until your are seven-tenths full and save the other three-tenths for hunger.

The point is to enjoy what you eat without eating too much.

Eat foods in inverse proportion to how much its lobby spends to push it.

Key example: corn byproducts (i.e. high-fructose corn syrup).

Go ho, go shiki, go mi (Japanese for five cooking methods, five colors, five flavors) for each meal.

Go ho: Five cooking methods (i.e. steaming, simmering, grilling, sautéing, raw)
Go shiki: Five colors
Go mi: five flavors (i.e. sweet, sour, salty, bitter, spicy)

Avoid snack foods with the “oh” sound in their names

Doritos, Fritos, Cheetos, Tostitos, Hostess Ho Hos

The law of diminishing marginal utility from economics: each additional bite is generally less satisfying than the previous bite

3 bites from 5 plates/dishes is more satisfying than 15 bites from 1 dish

Don’t eat anything you aren’t willing to kill yourself.

I suspect this is aimed at we carnivores from vegetarians.

No second helpings, no matter how scrumptious.
When drinking tea, just drink tea.

Tea is not a tea bag, water, milk, and sugar. Tea is a tea bag and water.

When eating, don’t talk about other past meals, whether better or worse.
Don’t create arbitrary rules for eating if their only purpose is to help you feel in control

If you have to choose between eating ice cream and spending all day obsessing about eating ice cream, eat the damn ice cream.

It’s better to pay the grocer than the doctor.

Emphasis added to the rules I consider most important.

Chirality

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Sep 252009

Chirality describes a state in which something cannot be superimposed on its mirror. It’s often used in chemistry, but the human hand is a good example as well. Chirality is the reason you have to use the same hand as the other person when shaking hands. The “opposite” hand cannot clasp.

This word popped into my head while in the shower this morning. I have no idea why, but there you are.

Unrelated, I started wondering last night if I should have been a doctor, and whether or not becoming one later in life would be remotely feasible. I suspect not. Alas. It’d be nice to help people and get paid for it.

Tonight, He Writes

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Sep 022009

I’ve been trying to write a short story every other night or so for the past few weeks, with moderate success. However, the urge to build something more concrete has crescendoed. Thus, tonight, I’m going to start writing my second novel.

The first novel, written last year for NaNoWriMo, is not something that I would ever dream of publishing in its current form. The story is far too linear, the protagonist too inconsistent, and the ultimate theme not something I’m happy with. I might revisit the premise at some point in the future. The objective of that novel was not getting published, anyway, but rather to prove to myself that I had it in me to write a novel. I did, so it achieved its purpose.

The novel I start tonight is the result of a story that has been percolating in my head for about 13 years, in various forms. It’s a sci-fi epic in the best tradition of sci-fi epics.

We’ll see where it takes me.

Writing and Ideas

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Sep 012009

It’s an old cliché that aspiring writers* will often ask established writers where their ideas come from. The equally cliché answer is that their ideas come from all over, which leaves the poor aspiring writer wondering why they are so defective, since they do not appear to have the same wealth of ideas from which to pick and choose. The truth is, they do. Everyone does. It’s a matter of recognizing it, tapping into it, and executing on that idea once you’ve identified it.

I’m being presumptuous here, not being an established writer myself. In the course of attempting to become one, however, I make habit of reading the personal writings of several authors (namely Gaiman, Scalzi, and Lisle) and have also read a number of books concerning the craft. The authors of these books always bring this particular question up, and always express how flabbergasted they are when they hear the question. The barrier between the two is that one party has a wealth of ideas, knows how to access those ideas, and has the skills to hammer the raw material into something that a publisher will buy, while the other doesn’t realize that their deep pool of imagination is right there, waiting to be used. If you’re capable of reading this blog entry, you have an imagination equal to the task of inspiring a work of fiction. “I don’t have any ideas,” is the mantra of those who don’t know how to recognize their ideas for what they are.

Any idle thought can turn into a story. Walking into work today, I saw a tall, thin post with a hole through the top emitting smoke. I can only assume that this post, with its hole, was meant for cigarette butts. But that image can be enough to inspire an idea. Perhaps it was the start of a fire that consumed the building. Perhaps there’s a story about a guy trapped in this fiery building. Maybe this pole is part of a laser security grid, and it just vaporized the last person to try and walk in. Maybe it’s one of several exhaust vents for a fire-breathing dragon that lives beneath the building. Any of these could become a story.

Ideas are everywhere. You just have to let yourself see them. The hard part isn’t coming up with an idea; it’s turning the idea into something other people will want to read. For that, you have to push beyond the paralysis associated with the desire for approval and just write. See where the idea takes you. If it starts off rocky, with turgid prose and flat characters, that’s okay. Keep going. Writing something is better than writing nothing at all.

* “Aspiring writer” is a bit of a misnomer. The second you put pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard), you are a writer. An aspiring writer implies someone who has yet to actually write anything. Aspiring published writer would be more a accurate phrase.

Further Tales of Vespacide, Part 1

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Aug 272009

Following my epic battle with the solitary invader, I returned home from work to my fiancee and her sister. We set about preparing dinner…when I noticed a yellow jacket. It had just come through a small hole in the upper corner where the exterior wall meets the ceiling. Another one of these things was in my home!

Of course, my initial reaction was the spheksophobic response. Watching it warily, I tried to keep it as distant as possible. It seemed to sense my loathing and terror, hovering ever-closer to me. Instinct took over and I crouched down into a tiny ball, whimpering. In the back of my mind, shame was washing through me for putting on such a ridiculous display. Little I could do about it; the phobia was in charge.

The wasp got within a foot of me before deciding I had been sufficiently terrorized. It then proceeded to fly around Cody’s sister’s legs for a bit, before returning ceiling-ward. We all lost sight of it. I looked about for it, frantic. The only thing worse than knowing a wasp is present is knowing that it’s present and not knowing where it is.

We finally spotted it. It had landed on the wall above the kitchen window, over the sink. Throwing caution to the wind, I yanked the Swiffer out of its usual corner, swung it around so that I could mash the flat pad against the wall, and slammed it down on top of my nemesis. A partial sense of relief flooded through me, but I wanted to be sure. I started dragging the pad along the wall and over the cabinets, bring it closer and closer to the trash can. When I finally removed it from the wall…the yellow jacket wasn’t there.

This worried me. While the ladies assured me that it had probably fallen on top of one of the cabinets, I wasn’t so sure. Wasps are tough bastards. As a preventative measure, though, I busted out the spackle and covered the two holes (there was a hole in the opposing corner too, though it was an interior wall). I had been planning to spackle anyway, so this just gave me an excuse.

Satisfied that there would be no additional invaders from these spots, I returned to my sandwich. In the back of my mind, I was still thinking about the lack of a corpse. That’s when Cody spotted it. It had fallen into the sink…and it was still very much alive.

Though it was not airborne, it was moving about uninjured in the basin of the sink. Its wings looked undamaged, suggesting that it could probably take flight at any moment. Reacting as fast as possible, we covered it with a small glass jar. It was contained and the immediate threat was neutralized.

That’s when the other half of my phobia kicked in. You see, when you have an irrational terror like this, your threat response is fear. Once it’s contained and you can do something about it, it’s rage. Nebulous fears (I also suffer from mild acrophobia — fear of heights) don’t have this, since there’s nothing to get angry at. In this case, there was.

After running water to ensuring that the yellow jacket’s wings had been soaked, I lifted the jar just enough to let the tail-end of the invader out and slammed it back down, bisecting the insect. Relieved of its primary weapon, I felt comfortable removing the jar.

It was still moving! Still crawling unimpeded, as though it hadn’t just lost half of its body! In the course of its bisection, it had also lost its wings, so it could no longer take flight, either. Nevertheless, the fear started to take control again. Before it could, I slammed a wadded paper towel down on the black-and-yellow demon. Picking up all of its pieces, I crushed the paper towel as hard as I could.

Still not convinced it was dead, I opened the paper towel a bit. It was still moving, but these were the nerve misfiring twitches of something dead.

Finally, some peace.

Spam: Defeated

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Aug 192009

I finally took the bull by the horns and did something about my excessive spam problem today.

I have a two-tiered spam filter. The first is server-level, with SpamAssassin. The second is client-level, with Thunderbird (formerly Evolution, which I ditched in favor of Thunderbird after many months — years? — of use for several reasons). One of the drawbacks to my server-level approach is that when SpamAssassin marks mail as spam, it gets shunted into a spam folder on the server, thus keeping it from flooding my inbox. This spam folder, left unchecked, grows and grows. Between my two mail accounts, mcc@ and mcc3d@, I had about 25,000 messages built up from June.

Enter cron and Python. As I’ve gotten more comfortable with Python, I’ve pushed it to do more and more, particularly at work. I used some of that knowledge to write a Python script that looks for any message in a spam folder older than 7 days and purge it. I’ve also written another script that goes through and flat-out deletes messages containing several key regex searches from the spam folder. With any luck, this should prevent my server-side mail folders from ballooning too much.

On the client side, I was pleased with Thunderbird’s ability to recognize spam, but I hadn’t learned enough about the specifics of the app to get it to do anything about that spam. I did some quick googling and got that correctly configured, so I think I’ll start seeing a marked improvement on that front.

EVE Musings

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Aug 072009

I mentioned a few posts back that I was trying to solve a complex integral for damage calculations in EVE Online. I was doing so in the interests of identifying the “best” overall ship for tackling PvE, specifically L4 agent missions. My current ship (a T2-fitted Apocalypse) does a fine job of it and I’ve never had to warp out of a mission when I didn’t do something stupid to aggro the whole pocket. However, if I can be using something better, I’d like to know it.

The problem with the approach I was using, as pointed out by Fraser, is that there are many, many additional factors beyond simple DPS. In particular, the targets themselves play a big role. Their size, velocity, angular velocity relative to your ship, and the size of your own weapons all play into the damage calculation (if you’re curious what the full formula is, check it out). The Raven, for example, is an incredibly common PvE battleship because of how cheap it is to purchase and fast it is to train for at a basic level. Its main weapons are cruise missiles, which are intended for large targets like battleships. Consequently, they do less damage against small, nimble targets that can out-run their explosions. As a result, Ravens often do well to fit target painters, which artificially inflate the apparent size of a ship. Raw DPS calculations won’t account for this.

I’m not really sure how to resolve it. I do think there’s an answer — and a generic one, at that — but I’m just not sure what it is.

Older Entries

Commercials are Dumb, or How TV Should Work

Halloween Redux

Moonshot Insanity

20 Food Rules to Live By

Chirality

Tonight, He Writes

Writing and Ideas

Further Tales of Vespacide, Part 1

Spam: Defeated

EVE Musings

What’s all this?

The Here and Now

Across the Sea of Time

Blogs

Local Sites

What’s all this?

The Here and Now

Across the Sea of Time

Commonalities

Blogs

Local Sites