Downton Abbey At the beginning

I missed the early episodes on cable, but trusty Netflix just delivered a DVD with the first two episodes.  I watched one last night.  Pretty good.  Great sets, costumes, scenery.  Mediocre sound recording.  Dialog from a number of characters was unintelligible to me, due to mumbling mixed with strong Brit accents.  Makes the story hard to follow when you can't follow the dialog.   Some plot points totally obscure.  The Grantham's, or perhaps the Abbey, are burdened with "entaille"  some kind of medieval legal deal that causes unhappiness, gets talked about a lot, but I have no idea what it actually means.  Mary Grantham has an unsuccessful date with a young Duke of somewhere-or-other.  Lots of footage of the couple tiptoeing around the third floor servant's quarters in the Abbey, for reasons unkown, unless the Duke is looking for a spare room to have sex in.  Which seems out of character for 1912 upper crust Brits.  The romance doesn't work out, the Duke leaves early, to the annoyance of Earl Grantham, but the reasons for the breakup remain obscure to this Yankee viewer.  Doesn't seem to bother Mary too much. 

Hobbit Movie to play at 48 frames/sec

Way back when, say Thomas Edison's time, movies were taken at quite low frame rates, as low as 12 frames/sec.  That's what made the real oldies move funny.  You must have seen Charlie Chaplin walking funny.  The movie film back then was slow, insensitive to light, and needed a 1/12 second exposure time to get a good image.  By the late 1920's Kodak had improved the film, and the movie makers had improved the lighting and frame rate standardized at 24 frame/sec for theater grade movies.  You need standardization because the same movie is played at thousands of different theaters, each with its own movie projector.  All those projectors need to run at the same speed unless you want the movie to run too fast or too slow as it moves from place to place.  
   The eye is a biochemical device, and by electronic standards, it is slow.  It takes many milliseconds for an image to fade away.  If a fresh image is flipped up on the screen before the old image fades from view the eye sees it as a continuous image.  It was found by experimentation, that if the movies ran at 48 frames/sec  a smooth flicker free movie resulted.  Then some genius experimenter discovered that the projector did not have to advance the film at 48 frames/sec.  He set the projector to advance the film (change the projected image) at half the rate the shutter ran.  Test audiences loved it, and it saved a lot of expensive film.  Speaking as one who has enjoyed thousands of theater movies over the years, I can say the motion illusion from 48 frame/sec flicker and 24 frame/sec film advance rate is very good, realistic, and enjoyable.
   In the constant search for a new gimmick to draw bigger movie audiences,  Peter Jackson is going to try filming at 48 frames/sec for the new Hobbit movie coming out next year.  Stand by for a lot of advertising hype about how much better it will look on screen due to revolutionary technical advances.  But I ain't gonna believe that hype.  I'll go see the flick, 'cause I am a Tolkien movie fan, not 'cause of running more frames per second.
 

Underwear Bombers

Lots of talk about the latest underwear bomb (no bomber, just the jockey shorts).  Looking at it on TV, I don't believe that little amount of explosive could bring down an airliner.  Not enough bang.   It would do grievous harm to the bomber's reproductive organs,  making it impossible to enjoy the legendary 72 virgins in Paradise, but it ain't enough to bring down a Boeing.
   TSA will doubtless use it as an excuse to feel up more passengers.   If you have time to spare, go by air...

Roger Clemens

Why is Roger Clemens  back in court?  Far as I know he is accused of using drugs to improve his baseball playing.  I don't approve, but why is this a matter for the courts?  We have a commissioner of baseball, who can  enforce major league baseball's rules against "performance enhancing drugs".  
  Let baseball enforce it's rules against drugs, by itself.

Raptors Rapping, F22 Hypoxia mystery

For mysterious reasons, pilots of the new F22 Raptor are suffering from hypoxia in flight.  Hypoxia severe enough to have caused one fatal crash already.   Since then the Air Force reports 11 more events, not quite as severe, but way out of line. Investigations of cabin air supply have not detected any toxins.  Now they are looking at ill fitting survival suits that might be cutting off circulation.   No solid cause, let alone a fix, has been found to date. 
   I never heard about anything like this ever happening on any other aircraft.

AdvertisementFail

So I'm looking thru a slick paper blow-in for Nikon camera's which fell out of yesterday's Wall St. Journal.  I like cameras, and would love to upgrade my worn plastic point-n-shoot to a big black Nikon with a lens the size of a manhole cover.  So I open the flyer and we have a Nikon point-n-shoot in five designer colors, with color coordinated carry cases.  Instead of a good zoom lens, which covers all bases, this little fellow has interchangeable lens, which is pretty fancy for a point-n-shoot.  The lenses are even color coordinated.  Pretty fancy price too, $700 for the camera.   There are just a few simple things the ad doesn't tell you about.  Such as batteries, cost of, type, recharger, battery life.  I'm guessing the viewfinder is electronic, but they don't say.   Nor do they give the number of pixels.  Does this baby have that really convenient automatic lens cap so you can jam the thing into a pocket without worrying about scratches and dirt on the lens?  My cheapy Kodak can do that, what about this really pricey Nikon?
  Next page they have some  $100 point-n-shoot's, fixed lens, 16 Megapixel.  And a total of eight different models, at various prices, but far as I can see, roughly the same performance on each model, despite a three to one range in prices. 
  Last page we get into the big iron, black, leatherette covered, professional grade camera's with thru the lens viewfinders.  These guys start at $549 and work up to $3000.  Wow, I could get into these babies for less that the color coordinated lady's model point-n-shoot.   They have a selection of mean looking lenses.  But the catalog doesn't say which lens fits which camera's, nor does it say the lenses have a universal mount that fits all camera's.  No word about batteries.  Nothing about the size and weight of these babies.  It's probably sizable but it would be nice to know how sizable.   No word about speed.  Digital camera's need a bit of time to digest each shot before they can take the next shot.  Would be nice to know just how much time is involved.  These boys can all double as video camera's, high definition video no less.   The flyer neglects to say if they do sound as well as video, and how the video comes out, VGA? HDMI?  USB?  some new interface that my computer lacks?
   In short, this flyer raises as many questions as it answers. It would be nice if there were some ad guys who knew something about cameras.

Read the charges aloud

The Guantanamo defendants were not co-operating at their arraignment.  One tactic was to demand that the charges against them be read aloud in court.  Not unreasonable really.  That took two and a half hours.  Wow.
Apparently the lawyers thought they were being paid by the word.  The charge sheet was 87 pages long. The ten Commandments themselves can be typed on a single A sized piece of paper.  Who needs 87 pages to say "this no good nick planned 9-11"?   Frankly having to sit around for another two and a half hours serves all the lawyers, and the judge, right.
  The reason to try KSM and his buddies, is to convince the rest of the world that they are guilty and they deserve every bit of what we are going to give them.  87 pages of  legal malarkey won't convince anyone, not even a bunch of Army officers serving as jury, let  alone the Arab street.  It only takes a few words to spell out why we want to execute these scumbags, and the arraignment is the place to say those few words.
  I'd say the prosecutors need to find some real lawyers, and the judge oughta be replaced on account of terminal stupidity.