Tag Archives: TV

Adam Curtis: All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace

I realize that I am desperately late to this particular party. Everyone has probably already watched the documentary, read the inevitable backlash, and digested the response to the backlash. Nevertheless, here are my notes on the first episode.

Part 1: Love and Power

Barbara Branden’s comments about Ayn Rand being disappointed by the reception of “Atlas Shrugged” are hilarious, yet sad. She reports that Rand was desperately upset when the people in her inner circle who had how much they liked the book, failed to stand up and say what genius it was when it was being excoriated in the press. Well, Ayn, of course they didn’t. They were behaving in their own selfish rational self-interest, exactly the way you yourself had told them they should. That should have been a learning experience for you right there, but somehow it wasn’t, and you ended up alone in a crummy apartment living off Social Security.

I remember when Alan Greenspan buckled under and took back his prediction that the economy was “irrationally exuberant”. I thought at the time that it was patently obvious that there were a lot of incredibly overvalued companies, and that we were likely in a bubble of speculation on Internet stocks. For one project I worked on, Enron was one of the bidders. I did some reading, concluded that they were dodgy, and said so. They were rejected. A few months later, their whole business imploded. Their glossy brochures had been really impressive though.

The idea of treating marriage and relationships rationally, or as business arrangements, is a very bizarre American one. There are lots of articles on the net which put the view across. “What can the corporate world teach us about personal relationships?” — I sincerely hope that the answer is “nothing”, but I’ve read of couples who schedule weekly meetings with each other to deliver “status updates”. There have even been Powerpoint proposals. The latest person to end up miserable because of treating marriage as a business? Kim Kardashian, allegedly.

The whole issue around commodifying our thoughts for exploitation by others is one of the reasons why I post anything of length on a site that I own, rather than letting Facebook or Google own them. Of course, Google Plus and Facebook are good ways to get an audience—but you don’t want to let them own you.

One of the sad facts about the New Economy idea of unregulated markets and computer networks leading to stability, is that I think any decent mathematician or computer scientist would have told you that it was almost certainly not going to work. Unregulated systems with feedback often have chaotic behavior, and the more complicated the system, the more likely it is to be chaotic. Even trivial systems of a few equations with feedback can result in chaotic complexity—that’s what makes fractals so interesting. Unfortunately a lot of people in Internet businesses and banks in the 90s either didn’t have the mathematical background to know about chaotic systems, or didn’t want to believe that they were building them. I remember reading articles about the issue at the time, but nobody really took it seriously. There is at least now some discussion of issues like the effect of trading speed on market stability, even as the financial services companies continue to reduce already small latencies to allow for even faster trading cycles.

Around Austin, Greenspan and the Federal Reserve are widely seen as villains. It’s pretty common to see “End The Fed” on bumper stickers and T-shirts. Unfortunately, a lot of the criticism comes from Ron Paul followers, and Paul is one of those people who still believes that unregulated market systems will be naturally stable. The fact that history seems to show the opposite, he and his followers dismiss, arguing that there was still some government regulation somewhere, and if only we had absolutely no regulation anywhere, then it would all work just fine. That is, the cure that killed the economy didn’t work because we didn’t try it hard enough.

It has been obvious to many people for years that China has been systematically buying control of the USA. As I would tell people during the boom, when they got angry for action against China over human rights abuse: China could shut down the US economy overnight any time they liked. They wouldn’t need bombs to do so, they would just shut down a few factories or ban exports. The USA wouldn’t be able to restart manufacturing, and its economy would collapse. There are a few companies that understand this; mostly foreign ones, like Toyota. They keep manufacturing plants across the globe, hedging their bets.

Finally: It’s pretty ballsy of Curtis to effectively make the case that Al Qaeda were right to bomb the WTC. Fortunately for him, I think he stated it subtly enough that the people who might otherwise have lynched him, failed to notice the point being made.

The 70s again, through the lens of TV theme tunes

I’ve recently become somewhat fascinated by a number of 1970s TV themes. They’re not theme tunes of shows I ever watched, and not themes I remember. Rather, they’re tunes which have something odd or off-putting about them.

First up: The theme from LWT’s “Weekend World”. The YouTube clip is an 80s recording, but the same music was used in the 70s too; Wikipedia tells me it’s “Nantucket Sleighride” by Mountain, and that in the 80s the show used a cover version. It’s driving prog rock, slightly sinister, just like an out-of-control winter sleigh ride in Nantucket might sound. The weirdness here is that the show was sleepy Sunday afternoon political discussion. How did that music ever get chosen for it?

Next: Granada TV’s “World In Action”. A politically-focused documentary show. Again, the best YouTube recording is from the 80s, but the same music was used in the 70s as well. For best effect, imagine the music over the 70s titles. Creepy, depressing, a soundtrack for a country falling apart. Used to scare the hell out of me as a child.

The story behind how this music came to be used seems somewhat bizarre. It was improvised by Texan folk rock musician Shawn Phillips and another session musician, Mick Weaver. Producer Jonathan P Weston then edited the TV theme out of the jam session, and allegedly put his name as sole composer and performer because Phillips and Weaver weren’t members of the UK musicians’ union at the time. Apparently Weston then collected 30 years of royalty checks, and Phillips and Weaver didn’t see any of the money. Ironic, given the kinds of corruption the TV show used to investigate. And now I discover Shawn Phillips lives a few miles from me, here in Austin.

Finally: A John Barry composition, The Theme to “The Persuaders”. Again, to me this seems like a seriously creepy and sinister piece of music. It’s completely out of keeping with the TV show, too–to get a feeling for how inappropriate the mood match was, check a random clip from the series. The show was a lightweight action-adventure romp, with Roger Moore giving the kind of jokey tongue-in-cheek performance he later gave to the role of James Bond. They’d end on a laugh, and then suddenly the creepy music would play.

They don’t make TV show theme tunes like these any more.

Sony BRAVIA problems with PAL playback

A couple of nights ago, I noticed my TV/DVD combination was acting up. PAL DVDs would play with a horrible irregular juddering motion. I checked broadcast TV and the PS3, and they were both fine; I checked the DVI/HDMI cable, that was fine also. I started to suspect the DVD player.

Friday, I bought a new DVD player. $44 at Fry’s Electronics. It had the same problem. Further investigation and experimentation eventually revealed that the issue was a setting on the TV.

The short summary: If you have an NTSC Sony BRAVIA TV but have no analog video sources, find the CineMotion setting in the TV setup, and make sure it is turned off, not set to auto or on. Even if you have some analog video sources, you should turn CineMotion off if you don’t use analog sources to watch movies. You don’t need it, you don’t want it, all it can ever do is mess up your signal. The long explanation follows…

Conventionally, movies are shot on film at 24 frames per second. When they are transferred to US NTSC video via a Telecine machine, the 24 frames per second must be converted to 29.97 frames per second, or 59.94 fields per second–which I’ll call 60 fields per second for the purposes of this brief discussion.

The process used is called 3:2 pulldown, because the first frame of film used to end up turning into 3 fields of video; the second frame of film ended up as 2 fields of video; the next was 3 fields again; and so on, alternating. Nowadays, frame buffers allow the 2 and 3 field allocation to be varied, so you tend to get 2:3:3:2, which results in fewer video frames whose contents are taken from two different film frames. But all pulldown options share the same fundamental defect, which is that the frames of the movie are no longer all of the same duration. This tends to make tracking shots and motion look somewhat odd.

Modern digital HDTVs don’t need pulldown. The HDTV standard, ATSC, mandates that TVs support 24 frames per second–and also 23.976 fps, which is the speed 24fps movies used to be slowed to before performing 3:2 pulldown, so as to end up with 59.94 fields per second. So an HDTV can display a 24fps movie at 24fps. If it’s a 120Hz set, it can even display movies with no split frames at all, as 24 goes evenly into 120.

Sony BRAVIA HDTVs therefore have a feature called CineMotion buried away in the setup menus. This detects incoming 3:2 pulldown video, and dynamically works out the pulldown pattern, reverses the pulldown and recombines the fields into 23.976 frames per second, buffers them, and then shows the result at exactly 23.976fps. Your movie motion looks smoother and more natural as a result.

My DVD player only pumps out a progressive signal (480p or 720p) via HDMI, so the TV never needs to do reverse pulldown. If the DVD is a movie, the MPEG-2 video file is 24fps, and the DVD player turns that into 24fps digital stream to the TV. So I have no use for this advanced CineMotion feature. It’s only applicable to analog interlaced video sources, and the only analog video source I have is the Wii–and that’s 480p via component cable and never shows 24fps movies, so it doesn’t need processing either.

Somehow, CineMotion got turned on in the setup menu–either as a default, or maybe I was playing with settings and turned it on without realizing what it was. And sadly, there’s a bug in Sony’s TV firmware: it doesn’t seem to check whether the source is interlaced before applying CineMotion post-processing. Instead, it just checks the frame rate of the decoded frames to decide whether to buffer them.

PAL video is 50 fields per second, or 25 frames per second. This seems to be close enough to 24 frames per second that it triggers the CineMotion buffering. The TV tries to take the incoming 25fps video, and show it at 23.976fps. This results in disaster; every now and again, the TV realizes it has fallen too far behind the incoming data stream, and drops an entire frame to catch up.

So that is why my UK DVDs were looking like crap. I turned the CineMotion feature off, and now everything looks good again.

So I have a second DVD player which is, strictly speaking, unnecessary. However, there’s an upside. My original player was state of the art 4 years ago, but technology has marched on. The new $44 DVD player upscales to full 1080p, the native resolution of the TV. This seems to give a better picture than upscaling to 720p and then having the TV upscale again. The fancy noise reduction and motion smoothing of the old DVD player are also unnecessary, as the new TV has even better implementations. As a final benefit, the new player has true HDMI out rather than DVI, meaning I get audio and video through the same cable, with no need to adjust timing between the two. I also notice that the new player is very light and runs cool, whereas the old one had a lot of circuitry packed in and would get hot. So, I’m keeping the new DVD player and retiring the old one.

Ah, technology, where the state of the art from 4 years ago is today’s doorstop.

Oh, and if you want a region-free DVD player, pick up a Coby DVD288 at Fry’s.

Things I’ve learned from TV: Bringing death home

I get annoyed by people who say “Oh, I never watch TV”. Sure, 90% of TV is crap; Sturgeon’s Law applies. Similarly, 90% of books are crap, but you wouldn’t hear the same people saying “Oh, I never read books”.

TV can be educational. It can even be educational and entertaining at the same time. You just need to be careful what you watch. Tonight I watched a couple of episodes of Penn and Teller’s show “Bullshit!”

I learned that until around the early part of the 20th Century, houses had a parlor. When someone died, the family would lay them out in the parlor, which was the room used for serious events. The family would clean and dress the body. Everyone would view the body in the home, satisfy themselves that the person was really dead, and do any grieving they needed to do. The body would then be taken to the burial plot, and simply buried.

Then around 1910, marketers decided that the parlor was old fashioned–and more importantly, that it was inappropriate for families to perform funerals themselves. The parlor was rebranded with a new name, designed to make it utterly clear that it was an inappropriate place for the deceased: “living room”. For your funeral services, you were to go to a “funeral parlor” and have things done by professionals. The old family heirlooms that reminded you of the past were cleared away, and new modern furniture replaced them.

The “funeral parlors” soon began inventing new services. Embalming, fancy caskets, and so on. It turns out that the funeral industry is sleazier than user car sales. My favorite bit of info from the TV show concerns rubber seals around the lids of coffins. Apparently these are often pushed as an expensive upgrade to protect the body from moisture. Unfortunately, the bacteria in the body chow down after death, producing gases. The rubber sealed coffin ends up like a pressure cooker, the body decomposes more quickly because of the heat and pressure, and eventually when the coffin loses structural integrity the liquified body tissues get pumped out through the cracks by the gas pressure.

Cremation isn’t much better. Prices vary by factors of ten, because the person doing the shopping isn’t in the mood to price compare. While you can get a $60 cardboard box, chances are they’ll try to upsell you to a $1400 wood coffin with extra fluffy pillows. (No, really.) Also, cremation’s not great for the environment, as it releases mercury from the fillings in people’s teeth.

There are alternatives, and home funerals are starting to come back into fashion. In Texas, you don’t have to embalm the body with toxic solvents; you don’t need a mortician’s license to transport the body; you don’t need a traditional fancy casket. If you want to dig a hole in the back yard, put your loved one’s body in, and plant a tree, as far as I can tell that’s legal as long as you own the land. (Disclaimer: I am not a lawyer and haven’t researched thoroughly, so check the facts before proceeding.)

Sure, Penn and Teller are abrasive, and sometimes miss the point. However, their show on the death industry ended on a great human note. They put it this way:

It may be hard to admit, but the dead are dead. Nothing you can do will please them. Ashes don’t know if they’re in a marble urn or an old Starbucks cup. The time to treat people right is when they’re alive. A ham sandwich, a soda and a joke now mean more to your loved ones than a $10,000 coffin after they’re dead. Which brings to mind one more thing: If you’re still lucky enough to be able to do it, call your mother. Yeah, right now. You don’t know anyone in the credits and they’ll be pretty much the same next week, so call your mom. Now.

(She’s on vacation in France, or I’d have talked to her already today.)

More thoughts on AppleTV

I’ve worked out how to take a typical AVI file download (generic MPEG-4 with MP3 audio, such as XviD) and convert it to something the Apple TV should be able to play without re-encoding all the video.

There’s also the elgato turbo.264, which approximately quadruples the speed of encoding video for AppleTV.

I tried re-encoding a good quality downloaded show that’s unavailable in the USA, using the QuickTime AppleTV preset. The result was indistinguishable from the original. So I’m really seriously considering AppleTV now.

So, how does AppleTV stack up as a way of replacing cable or satellite?

Mythbusters: $50 (30 episodes)
South Park: $24 (14 episodes)
Aqua Teen Hunger Force: $20 (13 episodes)
Venture Brothers: $20 (13 episodes)
Reno 911: $21 (14 episodes)
The Soup: $6 (per 8 episodes)

If we imagine Dr Who and Torchwood were also available at similar prices, that’d be about a year’s TV for maybe $200, or about 4 months of cable or satellite bills.

This ignores the option of watching shows by renting the DVDs from Netflix. Do that, and it’s an even more cost-effective option.

I’d be inclined to spend some of the freed-up money on “This American Life”, Penn & Teller’s “Bullshit”, and other shows that I currently don’t get to see.

Hot Air

As expected, MacWorld was a big disappointment. The MacBook Air was supposed to be the big “wow” item, but it’s more of a big “meh”. Apple clearly set out to make something comparable to the VAIOs Sony has been selling for years–which is a great idea, as I love small laptops, but in the quest to be thinner than anyone else they introduced a few too many design compromises.No optical drive built in is no big deal; I go weeks between using my Mac’s optical drive. More of a problem is the lack of any Firewire capability, the inability to upgrade the RAM, and the fact that there’s no ethernet unless you carry around a USB ethernet adaptor. And of course, that adaptor will use your only USB port, so better carry a hub too. And cables for your hub.

[Update: It's also no smaller than the regular MacBook; just thinner. So it's not an ultraportable, and no easier to carry around.]

Now, if they had done something like Fujitsu’s P1620 and made it possible to flip the keyboard under and use the device as a tablet, that would have rocked. But as it is, it’s just another laptop, albeit a very thin one; and it’s not really suitable as a primary machine.

So what’s the target market for the MacBook Air? People who want a status symbol, or people who travel an awful lot and need the absolute lightest Mac possible. They also need to be people who can afford a second Mac as a main machine, or people with very light needs. So I really can’t see the Air selling in great quantities. If I were choosing a Mac laptop today, I wouldn’t get one, even if price wasn’t a concern.

I was more interested in what they’re doing with AppleTV. I’ve been thinking for a while that dealing with scratched and scuffed Netflix DVDs is a pain, and I’d rather just rent movies via the Internet. AppleTV is going to offer this as an option. Add in the ability to buy TV shows a la carte, and it’s starting to look pretty tempting.

Of course, there are a couple of problems. The first is that a lot of content isn’t in MPEG-4 format. The iPod would never have been a success if it hadn’t been able to play MP3s and had only worked with MPEG-4 audio; and similarly, if Apple wants the AppleTV to be a success, they need to make it able to play more formats than just MPEG-4.

The second problem is selection. Right now, the movie and TV selection via iTunes doesn’t even come close to Netflix. But give it another year or two, and I think the cable TV and satellite companies are going to be in big trouble.

The economics are simple. I watch 2-3 hours of TV a week, on half a dozen channels. To get those channels, however, I have to buy a bundle of over a hundred channels that I literally never watch. I could buy the shows via iTunes instead, cancel the DirecTV subscription, and save $30 a month. But not this year, not until all the shows I want are available…

The big question will be whether the new AppleTV software can be easily hacked to enable installation of other codecs and playback of non-MPEG-4 content. If so, I may get one. If not, I’ll wait until the content is all available in MPEG-4–which may be a long wait.

Reality TV: when will it end?

Fox TV described There’s Something About Miriam as “6 eligible men, 1 beautiful model named Miriam, and an enormous secret reveal you never saw coming!”

Well, actually the reveal is pretty obvious from the web site. It’s your basic reality TV dating show, where a bunch of loser guys compete for the attention of a woman–but this time, the object of their affections is, unknown to them, a pre-op male-to-female transsexual.

The show was made in 2003 and shown in the UK in 2004. It’s currently finishing up its US run on the Fox Reality Channel; the final 2 episodes are next weekend. Because of the delay before the show aired here, the offscreen drama has already played out.

As you might have guessed, the male contestants were not very happy about the show, and felt they had been ridiculed. They launched a lawsuit claiming everything from defamation, thru psychological damage, all the way up to “conspiracy to commit sexual assault”. (Don’t flatter yourselves, boys.) Eventually the production company behind the show settled out of court.

Another “lie to the contestants” TV show soon followed. Space Cadets sent a group of ordinary mouth-breathing reality TV show contestants on a 5 day mission in earth orbit. That’s what they were told, anyway; in reality they were stuck in a fake spacecraft built on a disused military base in Suffolk. Apparently they didn’t catch on, and a cash payout at the end prevented legal unpleasantness. Viewing figures were disappointing, though, with many people refusing to believe that anyone could be stupid enough to fall for the hoax, and concluding that the whole thing was in fact a fake reality show made using actors.

The scenario reminds me of an SF short story, 50s I think, about a group of astronauts who are similarly sent on a faked mission–but who go insane after the accidentally get to see the far side of the moon, which is just a painted wooden mockup. (Perhaps someone remembers the author and title? I’m thinking Heinlein.)  Of course, in this case the astronauts were selected because they were borderline insane to start with.

TV as lie is hardly new. The bigger mystery for me is the content of some of the reality TV shows that are totally honest with the participants. Like A Shot At Love With Tila Tequila, aka some slutty bisexual woman with a MySpace page. The shock revelation in this case is delivered right at the start: there are contestants of both genders competing to win the chance to take home a Playboy model to meet mom and have her lap dance for grandmother. (No, really.)
Tila is cute, but she’s not that great of a catch. There are any number of good looking Asian women who are a lot less trashy, and won’t ask you to eat raw bulls’ testicles and crawl through mud for the chance to date them. So basically, the whole dating aspect is a farce, and it’s a show where people compete to over-act hysterically and perform degrading stunts in order to appear on TV.

(And in case you’re wondering, no, I don’t sit and watch any of this crap. I just watch the highlights (or lowlights) that are mocked on The Soup.)

It makes me wonder: in another few decades, will people look back on reality TV shows the way we now look back at 1970s variety shows, Vaudeville, and circus freaks? Will people wonder why they were so popular? Or will reality TV continue indefinitely, like game shows, albeit becoming less popular with time?

I’d like to think that eventually, the mystique of TV will disappear, as anyone can put their own video on the Internet for the world to see. You don’t need to eat eyeballs on camera in order to appear on screen. I suspect that what will actually happen is that reality TV will evolve to attract only the most desperate attention whores as participants. But in that case, will anyone else want to watch?

Wii otter be skeptical

With the latest South Park being a time-travel story about Nintendo Wii, atheism, and sea otters, I must admit I did momentarily consider the possibility that either Trey Parker or Matt Stone had been reading my web site.

However, it’s quite common that people think that TV episodes contain coded messages specifically for them, and 99.9% of the time it just means they stopped taking their medications. So unless there’s an upcoming episode with a squirrel named Frida, I’m going to assume it’s a coincidence.

But that Allied Atheist Alliance logo with the otter head was pretty cool…

Lost interest

When I read about Lost, it sounded like exactly the kind of show I’d love. I didn’t watch it. To understand why, we need to look at The X Files.

At some point during the first few seasons of X Files, the writers decided that it would be good for the show if there was an overall story arc involving the alleged extraterrestrial invaders. Initially, they were right. However, shortly after the movie a problem became apparent: the network was never going to allow them to solve the mystery.

Things quickly became ridiculous. The need to keep adding new bits of plot twist to an already confused backstory quickly turned the UFO thread into an unintelligible mess of black liquid, killer agents, swarms of bees, body implants, and superintelligent children.

Then in a three-part episode, in what was originally intended to be the final season (Season 7), Mulder and Scully located wreckage of an alien spaceship, washed ashore on a beach in West Africa. You might have thought that they’d take photographs, get teams of scientists in, and get some answers; but the network’s desire for a neverending plot meant that the following week everything went back to normal—or rather, to a guy with a mysterious hunger for human brains—and the proof of alien existence was casually left on the beach.

At that point, I knew the shark was most definitely jumped. I watched for a while longer, but when Season 8 ended with Scully having her child, that was enough closure for me, and with a sense of relief I stopped watching.

Something very similar happened with Earth: Final Conflict. Season 3 had a multi-part story that turned out to have absolutely zero to do with the ongoing plot; when they followed that with a clip show, I realized the series was being shamelessly padded out to fill time, and I stopped watching.

So when I read the scenario for Lost, I immediately suspected that it would go the same way—that it would start promisingly, but that the network’s demands for a show that never ends would quickly mean that the writers would be forced to jerk the audience around. I figured if I turned out to be wrong, and there was a satisfactory resolution after 2 or 3 seasons, I’d hear about it and could rent the DVDs.

An added disincentive to watching Lost was that it was on one of the major networks. That meant if it was any good, it would almost certainly be killed part-way through a season. It amazes me that ABC, CBS, NBC and FOX will kill a show that doesn’t get mass-market audiences, even if there are complete, paid-for episodes sitting on the shelf. After seeing it happen to Stressed Eric and The New Fantasy Island (much underrated), I had vowed never to watch anything on a major network until it had made it to the end of season 1. If they didn’t kill it, then I’d watch the reruns.

So I’m not surprised to read that Lost is now hemorrhaging viewers as the writers overload it with red herrings. If you’re addicted to the show then I feel sorry for you, because I doubt you’ll ever get a satisfactory ending. Probably once the audience figures drop below a certain level, ABC will kill it mid-season; but in the mean time, they won’t allow any key questions to be answered, because they want to keep their options open. End result: lousy stories.

It’s clearly not impossible to have a series with a long story arc on US television. Babylon 5 managed it (though not without problems), and Star Trek: Deep Space 9 did too. But Lost is more typical: shows either die before everything (or anything) can be resolved satisfactorily (Firefly, Harsh Realm, American Gothic), or they are padded out with endless sub-plots that go nowhere until everyone turns off in disgust (X-Files).

So, is there a way to save future TV mysteries? Yes, but it might hurt: It’s vitally important that you all stop watching Lost, right now. Show ‘em they can’t just jerk you around endlessly.