tollie.org/blog thoughts and reflections of Tollie Williams

I lose: HD ain’t for me.

Well, it's time to get back to blogging. As is often the case for many bloggers, I worry that if I don't develop the habit of pressing the Publish button, months will go by before ideas get shared. And idea sharing is really what this is about, isn't it? I'm not a "true" scientist, but I believe I do think scientifically. My friends will tell you that I admire the intelligent sharing of thoughts, the diversity of opinions, the back and forth dialog to arrive at at some final result or conclusion. Ok, maybe they won't tell you that. They might tell you that I'm a thought tyrant, certain of my correctness and persistently pressing my point. And while that's true, I'm really not, and I do in fact enjoy intelligent dialogue - both watching and participating.

For instance, the past few days have had really reminded me of the value of TV. Off at school, I rarely watch much more than Heroes and news; however, at home I have the time to watch Discovery, History, TLC, National Geographic, and occasionally Discovery Times. Tonight I've seen The Universe: The Big Bang, Minutes to Meltdown: a documentary of the Three Mile Island near-disaster, and Seconds to Disaster: Chernobyl. I'm pretty sure I've seen all of them before, but I did something unusual this time: I paid attention. The Big Bang was good enough that I recorded parts of it - then went to download a torrent of the show to keep instead of VHS tapes (fair use!!). Alas, my DVR is still dead; one of those Christmas projects I haven't gotten done yet.

About the DVR - it's a pretty crappy Pioneer 531H (caveat emptor) that never would stop downloading its programming guide, so unavoidably, it would lose power during hard drive writes, and one day I noticed that one of the programs I was wanting to burn to DVD wouldn't play all the way through. How I wish I had kept current my DVD backup of the DVR's hard drive. There's a lot of good science content stranded there, that I don't want to touch until I've had a chance to look at the DVR's drive through the eyes of a computer (SpinRite perhaps?) and I simply haven't done that yet. This reminds me: I need to get a copy of SpinRite. Sadly, that's one of those tools I need to have in my arsenal that I've never even used, let alone bought.

The other two shows, Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were particularly elucidating as well (find that used in a sentence in an online dictionary, I dare yo), but they didn't receive the record button. A few things I jotted down that I want to remember from these programs:

* Jimmy Carter (who served on a nuclear sub) visited 3MI as a public relations stunt to calm down the highly panicked, angry, and confused locals. (The companies responsible were arrogant with their press briefings and had lost all trust - even the Governor had no real idea about wether or not to evacuate.) On his way there, President Carter was being begged not to go and to tell the people to evacuate immediately by the "it's gonna blow" camp, while the other camp was less certain of inevitability. The PR stunt worked. I wonder if a president would do that today?

* At Chernobyl, the night crew operators not only survived but they were exonerated, while their off-duty bosses were thrown into jail for 10 years. I think that's odd, but I can't fully understand the pressure they were under to carry out the test that night, given the Soviet approach. Speaking of the communist USSR, Russia covered up the accident as long as possible. If it hadn't been for a Swedish nuclear plant detecting the radiation on its incoming workers, they probably wouldn't have said anything. (The US had spy satellite photos minutes after the explosion, however.)

* Despite the Soviet cover up, they did successfully and quickly evacuate 50,000 people over the course of a few hours, less than 24 hours after the explosion. I couldn't help but think of Katrina and New Orleans when I heard this. Our government failed at so many levels. If news crews could find a land route to the super dome the next day (or was it two?), why did it take weeks to - wait, they were Chinooked out. Because, it took the Army coming in to get people out of there. So, credit to the communists for being able to order people out of their homes. By the way- they'd never return. The city is still too radioactive to visit for more than an hour or two.

* Finally, the horror of post-contamination cleanup is unbelievable. Of the 100 or so fire-fighters called up (not knowing it was radioactive) to put out the 1am fire (it took 3 hours to put out), about half died from radiation poisoning. Then there was the matter of inspecting the reactor, and so nuclear experts were called in to go inspect the scene. They certainly weren't asked "would you be willing?" - they would be forced, despite knowing better than anyone the lethal risk. And then, finally, they used 1000s of their soldiers working to clear the debris by hand (shovels, etc) and throw it into the reactor, so that it could be isolated. The soldiers worked for only 3 minutes, but received a lifetime, and for hundreds - lethal - doses of radiation. And amazingly, the Russian government kept the power plant operational until 2000! (Somehow, I missed this fact.) People commuted in, through the 20 miles of ghost-town restricted areas, and ran the place. Now, the US and others are chipping in on building a new dome to cover the existing structure, as the first was hastily built and no one has much confidence in it.

Shifting away from TV-learning for a moment, over the break I also caught up on some of Stanford's podcasts that I had saved since before it was rolled into iTunes U. One in particular, The Cholesterol Myth with Robert Simony (I'd provide the link, but it's no where to be found now.) was enlightening. I didn't realize the body had such a homeostatic regulation on cholesterol. It made me feel less like I'm going to die at 30 from feeding off fast food for the past 3 years. For those curious, basically the body produces its own cholesterol for its own purposes, but its production rate is inversely proportional to the amount of cholesterol made available from your diet. ie. Diet probably has less of an affect on cholesterol than popular attention leads you to believe.

And another podcast that I listened to (this one I can find, and can link to, but it requires iTunes) was "Getting Ahead in School: How We Are Creating a Generation of Stressed-Out, Materialistic, and Miseducated Students" by Denise Clark Pope, and oh how I agree with it absolutely. Its digest would be this: learning extends beyond what is being tested on pencil and paper, and we need to refocus our vision of "academic excellence" likewise. It's a must listen to for educators, or those who are fond of genuine learning.

The state of schools, NCLB, and even at the college level - this inability to properly reward genuine academia, while meanwhile robbing students of free time to learn on their own by the use of ineffective and inefficient methods of teaching - it all burns me deep inside.

And finally, back to TV, speaking of being burned, I'm also tired of the consumers losing out in this HD-DVD war. I digress: I'm a Harry Potter fan, and I've already ranted on this blog about HP5 DVD, yet I failed to mention this other point of contention: the utter lack of commentary on any of the HP DVDs. Why? To make money for Warner Brothers of course. In an attempt to force consumers to shift to high definition, WB has apparently agreed to only release their commentary on the HD-DVD and Blu-ray versions, which are now in stores. No technical reasons why the commentary can't easily fit on the DVD; it's purely a calculated market move in attempt to force consumers to migrate to the latest and greatest.

Now, what makes this different from the VHS to DVD transition that we went through 10 years ago? Namely one thing: format wars. Because the two formats are incompatible, and because absolutely no compromise or solution is in sight (Sony in particular, known for their proprietary formats, seems to insist on no dual players) there's very little technical reason to make the upgrade now. If you upgrade now, each format's players cost $300+, there's no guarantee your format won't die and be left with only a handful of titles. To make matters worse, most titles are only released for one of the two formats, so you have to factor in which titles you want and which format you expect future titles will come out in. All of this has lead to lack of interest by the consumer, which means a lack of incentive for the market to produce more HD devices, which means a lack of competition for the existing ones (name more than 3 HD-DVD or Blu-ray players, I challenge you. I'll help you with one... the Play Station 3 plays Blu-ray, since 80% of PS3 owners didn't know), which means prices are still high and not coming down any time soon. And if it wasn't for general confusion and misreporting on the FCCs push to digital-only OTA broadcasts, then HD-TVs would probably be just as stalled, although they're finally becoming reasonably priced (for small LCD screens). In case you didn't know, the 2008 digital thing a) has nothing at all to do with HD and b) has no effect on cable or satellite - only if you're using the good ol' rabbit ears will you be affected.

Arg. Sorry, but as much as I want to hear the commentary, there's no way I'm going to spend $300 on a player and another $300 on a TV just to buy into one of the two formats, when all rational thinking says "wait until the format wars are over and prices come down." I wonder how many people were in the same boat, but decided to make the costly upgrade? As consumers, we lose.