This post is based on a tweet. Perhaps this’ll happen more often. I find something pithy to mention and then I’ll expand upon it in a blog post.
My wife was changing the TV volume the other day and making sure she could see the number it was set on (the amp is perpendicular to where we sit, so quite hard to read). I asked whether she was being fussy about what volume the amp was on. No, was the reply, you are the fussy one.
This is correct as I would prefer the TV volume (actually the amp volume) on either a multiple of 2 or 5. Given that for normal TV viewing the ideal volume is somewhere between 20 and 30 this gives plenty of choice: 22,24,25,26,28. The other volume settings are incorrect to use and even if they create the best listening conditions I would find it hard to settle on one of those.
I do not consider this to be weird behaviour, I consider it to be remarkably sensible although I would probably end up with many logical fallacies should I attempt to explain how this obsessiveness can be justified.
A friend will only get out of bed if, when he looks at the alarm clock, it is a multiple of 5 minutes. If not he will stay in bed until the next multiple. Now that’s weird!
Material World 23/06/11
Quentin Cooper discussed health reporting in UK newspapers with Dr William Lee, King’s College London and Roger Highfield, Editor of New Scientist. Material World.
Roger Highfield made the argument that newspapers are for entertainment and that the fact that around 70% of the claims made in their health articles were not backed up with evidence was justifiable. His reasoning was that journalists often have short deadlines and that the readership was able to tell the difference between what was true and what was not. He is quite wrong.
Newspapers are expected to tell the truth and to have evidence to back up what they report. The fact that people fail to trust newspaper science reporting is mostly due to newspapers reporting either poor research or researching poorly. The general public have lost faith in the trust of reporters to report what they know.
If the tabloids are generally read by the not so educated then those newspapers have a lot of responsibility for their readers’ health. People aren’t clever enough to judge the science and evidence for claims made in papers. Half of the population has below average intelligence and probably doesn’t understand the sceptical process of critical thinking about scientific claims. I await the time that a tabloid is sued for causing the death of someone who took their broccoli health plan seriously. The readers of the Daily Mail deserve whatever they get given the excrement they read.
The responsibility for the understanding of health articles relies with those writing the articles, not those who read them.
How to eat an apple
Apart from using a knife (or not) and cutting up an apple I can think of predominantly two ways of eating an apple. This does matter because one way is correct and the other is not so correct.
Circumferential or the Segment method?
A circumferential eater will take a bite, rotate the sphere using the core as the axis and take another bite. This will result in a curve of apple exposed around the great circle of the apple. Then another line of bite is taken from each end (assuming that the eater has a big enough mouth to bite to the core)
A segmental eater takes bites out of the apple from stalk to opposite pole. This results in a segment being eaten and then the apple being rotated to start the process again.
The problem is exposure of the flesh of the apple to the air to turn brown and this needs to be minimised. In the segment method the area exposed for significant time is constant. For the circumferential method the area exposed increases with time.
Which leads to:
The analysis shows that if your bite radius is greater than 0.140 of the radius of the apple then you should eat in segments. Apart from small mammals the bite radius is going to be more than 14% of the apple radius, unless there is a huge apple variety waiting to be discovered.
This post was necessary because every time I eat an apple my wife tells me I am eating it the wrong way.
Sky+HD sound
You would think it’s simple.
Sky box has HDMI output. My amplifier has HDMI in with full HD sound and 7.1 decoding. So why does Sky box only output stereo sound through the HDMI cable? I have optical cable connected which does work fine ( DD 5.1 only). The installation tech told me the HDMI does do 5.1, he was wrong although it’s hard to find a definitive answer.
After about an hour of googling I finally found what I hope is the correct answer.
http://helpforum.sky.com/t5/Sky-HD-Picture-Sound/Sky-HD-5-1-via-HDMI/m-p/2183#M300
Why make a piece of kit that doesn’t do what it can? Is it that you can’t send HD sound over satellite signal? Perhaps they only have space for compressed Dolby digital rather than the more pure 48khz CD or better standard.
Sky need a tech page for people who know their stuff to help make decent equipment decisions.
Oh well.