标签: television

My wife (Gina The Gorgeous) and I do not always agree when it comes to our television viewing pleasure.   For example, Gina is "glued to the set" when it comes to programs like Dance Moms and 19 Kids and Counting , which I regard as absolute dross. Contrawise, I can’t get enough of Doctor Who (although I'm still getting to know the new Doctor), while Gina... well, let's just say that she's not a huge fan.   On the bright side, we both love cooking programs like Chopped and Cutthroat Kitchen . In the case of Cutthroat Kitchen , which is hosted by Alton Brown, four chefs are challenged to cook gourmet dishes to be judged by a guest celebrity. The thing that makes this difficult is that Alton introduces "auctions" in which the chefs can purchase a variety of things to sabotage each other or to benefit themselves.   One such item in a recent replay was a set of prism glasses. The winner of this auction awarded them to one of his competitors, who had to complete the rest of the round wearing the little rascals.     I must admit that I was a tad intrigued. I started to wonder how the world would appear when viewed through these little scamps. I also wondered where on Earth Alton had found them, but it turns out they are readily available.   For example, when I bounced over to Amazon's website and searched for "Prism Glasses," I was immediately rewarded with these little beauties , which seem like a bargain at only Rs.481.82 ($7.95).   I am a weak man. I couldn’t resist. I immediately ordered a pair. When they arrived, I had a jolly interesting time walking around banging into things and tripping over the dogs and cats.   One of the things noted on the Amazon page was the fact that you could use these glasses to enjoy your favorite magazine, book, or television program while lying in bed. I must admit that I'd wondered why anyone (apart from me, of course) would purchase glasses like these. The bottom line is that, when we retired to bed that evening, I donned my prism glasses and reclined flat on my back to enjoy The Golden Girls .   To be honest, I'd sort of expected the prism glasses to offer a fairly pathetic television viewing experience, but -- much to my surprise -- they are actually rather good. Also, there's the added advantage that sporting these things does give one an air of... well, something or other. I'm reasonably confident that I'm the only person on our street who owns a pair of glasses like these. And, as I always say, you can’t put a price on style (LOL).

I am not inclined to dispatch the butler to fetch my angry trousers, but I do feel moved to say something. More and more these days, I am noticing people wishing their lives away and/or moaning about "how hard things are" (and not in a good way).   I know it's easy to dwell in the past ("We'll never see days like that again"). I also know it's easy to long for the future ("Just a few more days, and it will be the weekend.") The problem with both of these scenarios is that we end up missing out on the moment.   If all we do is long for days gone past or things to come, we neglect the good things going on all around us. When you come to think about it, for the vast majority of human existence on this planet, our species has lived in horrendous conditions and painfully eked out a pitiful existence. To this day, a tremendous number of people around the globe live in abject poverty, and many of them live in fear of their lives.   When my mother was a young girl, her family didn't have air conditioning, central heating, or hot running water. All they had was a single cold water supply to the tiny kitchen, along with an outside toilet at the far end of the yard. Any hot water was heated on the coal-fired stove in the kitchen. They took a bath only once a week. This involved bringing the tin bath up from the cellar and slowly filling it pan by pan with hot water. My mom's grandfather would have the first bath, followed by her mom and dad, followed by my mom and her sister and brother... all in the same water.   They lit the house using candles and gas lights. They didn't have electricity installed until 1941. I'm sure the delight of getting electricity was offset by the fact that my grandfather, who was in the Royal Navy, was busy being sunk on a series of ships (he was not considered a good luck charm), and bombs were falling whenever the Germans had a spare moment. As a major steel producer, our hometown of Sheffield was a prime target.   Today we have the most amazing medical facilities and capabilities. Our homes are heated and cooled. We have hot and cold running water, and we can take a shower or have a bath multiple times a day if we so desire. We have high-definition color televisions in almost every room of the house (living in the hope that one day there will be something worth watching), and we have access to cheap and plentiful food beyond the wildest dreams of our ancestors.   Once again, I know that an uncountable number of people still live in the direst of circumstances. When I paint my rosy picture, I'm talking about the people I know in America, Australia, Europe, and many other places around the world -- the sort of people who have access to the Internet and the time to read this blog.   Many of us are truly living in the golden age of humankind. The vast majority of our ancestors -- and the vast majority of people living in the world today -- would say we're enjoying the lives of emperors and empresses.   Life is very short. We diminish it by wishing our hours away and belittling our lot. We should all begin each and every day by reflecting on our blessings. I, for example, have my extraordinary good looks, incredible sense of fashion, extreme intelligence, and cutting wit, to name but a few. (You, for example, have my columns to enjoy.) After that, we should seize each moment and enjoy it to the fullest, remembering that these moments are finite in number, and that others are not as fortunate as we are.   Wake up and smell the bagels. {Pontification mode = OFF}      

There was once a radio comedy program called The Goon Show when I was a kid in England. It was originally broadcast by the BBC Home Service from 1951 to 1960, which means it actually finished when I was three years old, so they must have broadcast repeats after that because I remember listening to it with my dad. It's hard to describe the Goon Show – the script was incredibly zany, the humour was surreal, and the programs were jam-packed with bizarre sound effects – you had to be there. Prince Charles loved it, and it was cited as a major influence by folks as diverse as the Beatles and the members of Monty Python . The key members of the cast were Spike Milligan , Harry Secombe , Peter Sellers , and Michael Bentine . As an aside, Spike Milligan and Harry Secombe first met and became friends while serving in the Royal Artillery during World War II. Both must have been young men in their early 20s at the time. Milligan's artillery unit accidentally allowed a large howitzer to roll off a cliff. Secombe, who sitting in a small wireless truck at the bottom of the cliff, describes what happened as follows: "Suddenly there was a terrible noise as some monstrous object fell from the sky quite close to us. There was considerable confusion, and in the middle of it all the flap of the truck was pushed open and a young, helmeted idiot asked 'Anybody see a gun?' " The "idiot" asking the question was Spike Milligan. Secombe immediately responded "What colour was it?" (This must have been one of the greatest comebacks of all time – it makes me grin just thinking of the two of them meeting in this way.)   From left to right, Sellers, Milligan, and Secombe   Two of the characters in the Goon Show were called Bluebottle and Eccles . A snippet from one of the programs in which Eccles is trapped in a cellar (as I recall) sticks in my mind to this day. It went something like this: BLUEBOTTLE: Why don't you open the door? ECCLES: Okay, I'll open... how do you open a door? BLUEBOTTLE: You turn the knob on your side. ECCLES: I haven't got a knob on my side. BLUEBOTTLE: On the door you idiot! Well, it made me laugh... but that's not what I wanted to talk about... I was thinking of the way televisions were and how you had to twiddle and fiddle with their knobs to make them work... and it was this that caused the Goon Show to pop into my mind. These days we're used to seeing incredibly thin, flat television screens in the form of LCDs (Liquid Crystal Displays), plasma displays, OLED (Organic Light-Emitting Diode) displays, and so forth. Also, the electronics systems inside today's television sets are based on digital logic implemented using solid-state silicon chips. The end result is that modern televisions are extremely reliable, the full-screen picture appears almost instantly when you power-up the TV, and the picture remains rock-steady... ...things weren't always this way... When I was a young lad, the display portion of the television was a huge phosphor-lined, heavy-duty glass vacuum tube called a Cathode Ray Tube (CRT). Meanwhile, the electronics systems inside the set were based on vacuum tubes (called valves in England), which – if you took the back off the set and peered inside – sort of looked like dimly-glowing light bulbs. As a result, there were certain characteristic features associated with the early television sets that would be unacceptable to a modern viewing audience, but were simply regarded as a "fact of life" in the early days... When you first turned the set on, for example, the picture didn't immediately appear. Instead, a small version of the image appeared in the centre of the screen, and over the course of a few seconds it gradually grew to fill the screen. (In my "mind's eye" I'm visualizing a black-and-white television picture because that's what we had, but the same thing happened with colour sets). Similarly, when you turned the television off, the picture didn't simply disappear. Instead, it gradually shrank towards the centre of the screen, growing smaller and smaller until – eventuality – you were left with only a bright white spot in the middle of the screen (this dot subsequently faded away into oblivion). But wait, there's more, because things began to deteriorate over time. After a few years in operation, your television set was no longer as "robust" as once it was. For reasons too complicated to go into here, the vacuum-tube based electronic systems began to "drift" such that the image might not exactly "fit" the screen. Thus, on the back of the set (almost invariably to be found in the most inaccessible location) there would be a collection of knobs that allowed you to adjust the width and height of the picture. Also, there would be a knob to move the entire picture up/down and another to move it left-right. (Since folks at that time were generally unused to any form of electronics (outside of things like radio sets and record players), the vast majority of users regarded these controls as being the equivalent to the cockpit of a commercial airliner.) In some cases – possibly depending on surrounding temperature and humidity, or possibly depending on your television's sheer contrariness – the picture might start to rotate in a vertical direction. This would begin with the picture gradually moving up (or down) the screen such that the upper portion of the image disappeared off the top of the display and reappeared at the bottom. (Imagine watching an episode of I Love Lucie where the cast's legs are walking around the upper half of the screen while their heads, shoulders, and torsos appear on the bottom.) If left unattended, the image would start to rotate from top to bottom, or vice versa, which was a bit like watching one of the dial's on an old-fashioned slot machine just after you had pulled its handle. Thus, there was also a knob to control the "vertical hold" on the back of the television set. The sad thing is that once you started playing with these knobs, you knew in your heart-of-hearts that "the end was nigh" for your television. Tweaking one knob seemed to subtly affect the other settings. Thus, although things might appear to be "tickety-boo" by the end of your current session, the next time you turned the set on the picture could well be "all over the place", thereby requiring you to perform a new, more radical set of "tweaks". And remember that these controls were on the back of the set, which meant you had to drag the whole thing away from the wall and squeeze behind it to be able to access the small, ill-marked, hard-to-reach knobs. Now imagine the frustration of "tweaking furiously" to achieve the "perfect picture", returning the television to its usual location, sitting back down in your seat ... only to see the picture start to roll around again! Before long, you were spending more time adjusting the picture than you were actually watching the television programs. Ah... the good old days... (grin)  

It's a tradition among editors and writers (who are often so self-centric) to discuss their summer reading lists, so I figured I should do the same. (Note to those of you in the Southern Hemisphere: we are sensitive to your complementary seasonal situation, so either consider this as your reading list for some other season, or just put it aside for a few months.) My preferred non-professional reading includes a variety of topics and genres, but most of it focuses on the history of science and engineering. I especially like to read about "projects" rather than conventional, "linear" histories. But unlike many people, I also enjoy re-reading these books, and the ones that I enjoy the second and even third time around are ones that give me the most satisfaction. Here, in no special order, are a dozen books that I have read, re-read, and re-re-read, and from which I still get a lot of insight and enjoyment. Some are newer, some are older, but I am sure you can get any one of them via an online search, even if it is "out of print" (which is already becoming a quaint, archaic phrase): - Roving Mars: spirit, opportunity, and the exploration of the red planet , by Steven W. Squyres, the principal investigator on the Mars missions that landed the rovers Spirit and Opportunity in 2004; great insight into the technical challenges and constraints, and how they were overcome. - Voyager: seeking newer worlds in the third great age of discovery , by Stephen J. Pyne, a lengthy but fascinating look at the 30+ year dual missions (launched in 1977, and recently officially concluded) to the edge of our solar system, and beyond. - From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, by Sean Carroll , a Caltech theoretical physicist looks at the meaning of time, entropy, and much more. Doesn't talk or dumb down. Really made me stop and think. ?Einstein's Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics , by John Stachel, has English translations of the actual papers that radically changed physics, but also a lengthy introduction and explanation of each one which adds both technical and historical perspective. - Apollo: The Race to the Moon, by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox, is the best book about the Apollo program I have read; it combines big–picture perspective with details, and insights into the people, technology, and challenges. - Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight, by David A. Mindell, focuses on the computers and programming of the various Apollo computers; after you read this, you will never complain about insufficient memory, CPU speed, or tools. - Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance, by Donald Mackenzie, a well-written book which combines history, technology, personalities, and political context of the development of guidance, from earliest gyro systems to advanced missile units. Every other book I have read on guidance systems cites this one as a key reference. - Skunk Works: A Personal Recollection of My Years at Lockheed , by Ben R. Rich explains how clandestine super-aircraft (U-2, SR-71, as examples) were conceived and developed, and gave rise to a whole new way of developing major projects on the "sly." - Tube: A History of Television by David E. Fisher and Marshall Jon Fisher is a clear, readable history of this invention which changed our world in so many ways, the people who made it happen, the internal corporate and technical battles, and the challenges that had to be overcome in both prototype and mass production. - Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor , by Christophe Lecuyer and David C Brook; this book was a real treat and window into one of the companies and its brilliant, hard-working people that made semiconductors real and manufacturable in volume. Also has images (facsimiles) of meeting notes, and typed memos—some are quite riveting and prescient. - The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, by Clifford Stoll, is a first-person account of the lengthy, frustrating hunt for a computer hacker who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL). - The universe in a mirror: the saga of the Hubble Telescope and the visionaries who built it , by Robert Zimmerman, tells of the fifty-year struggle to build the first space telescope; how many of the telescope's advocates sacrificed careers and family to get it launched, and how hopes and reputations were shattered when its mirror was found to be flawed. That's it. . . and please, I welcome your own "favorites" in the Comments section.

Editors and writers (who are often so self-centric) usually discuss their summer reading lists, so I figured I should do the same. (Note to those of you in the Southern Hemisphere: we are sensitive to your complementary seasonal situation, so either consider this as your reading list for some other season, or just put it aside for a few months.) My preferred non-professional reading includes a variety of topics and genres, but most of it focuses on the history of science and engineering. I especially like to read about "projects" rather than conventional, "linear" histories. But unlike many people, I also enjoy re-reading these books, and the ones that I enjoy the second and even third time around are ones that give me the most satisfaction. Here, in no special order, are a dozen books that I have read, re-read, and re-re-read, and from which I still get a lot of insight and enjoyment. Some are newer, some are older, but I am sure you can get any one of them via an online search, even if it is "out of print" (which is already becoming a quaint, archaic phrase): - Roving Mars: spirit, opportunity, and the exploration of the red planet , by Steven W. Squyres, the principal investigator on the Mars missions that landed the rovers Spirit and Opportunity in 2004; great insight into the technical challenges and constraints, and how they were overcome. - Voyager: seeking newer worlds in the third great age of discovery , by Stephen J. Pyne, a lengthy but fascinating look at the 30+ year dual missions (launched in 1977, and recently officially concluded) to the edge of our solar system, and beyond. - From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time, by Sean Carroll , a Caltech theoretical physicist looks at the meaning of time, entropy, and much more. Doesn't talk or dumb down. Really made me stop and think. ?Einstein's Miraculous Year: Five Papers That Changed the Face of Physics , by John Stachel, has English translations of the actual papers that radically changed physics, but also a lengthy introduction and explanation of each one which adds both technical and historical perspective. - Apollo: The Race to the Moon, by Charles Murray and Catherine Bly Cox, is the best book about the Apollo program I have read; it combines big–picture perspective with details, and insights into the people, technology, and challenges. - Digital Apollo: Human and Machine in Spaceflight, by David A. Mindell, focuses on the computers and programming of the various Apollo computers; after you read this, you will never complain about insufficient memory, CPU speed, or tools. - Inventing Accuracy: A Historical Sociology of Nuclear Missile Guidance, by Donald Mackenzie, a well-written book which combines history, technology, personalities, and political context of the development of guidance, from earliest gyro systems to advanced missile units. Every other book I have read on guidance systems cites this one as a key reference. - Skunk Works: A Personal Recollection of My Years at Lockheed , by Ben R. Rich explains how clandestine super-aircraft (U-2, SR-71, as examples) were conceived and developed, and gave rise to a whole new way of developing major projects on the "sly." - Tube: A History of Television by David E. Fisher and Marshall Jon Fisher is a clear, readable history of this invention which changed our world in so many ways, the people who made it happen, the internal corporate and technical battles, and the challenges that had to be overcome in both prototype and mass production. - Makers of the Microchip: A Documentary History of Fairchild Semiconductor , by Christophe Lecuyer and David C Brook; this book was a real treat and window into one of the companies and its brilliant, hard-working people that made semiconductors real and manufacturable in volume. Also has images (facsimiles) of meeting notes, and typed memos—some are quite riveting and prescient. - The Cuckoo's Egg: Tracking a Spy Through the Maze of Computer Espionage, by Clifford Stoll, is a first-person account of the lengthy, frustrating hunt for a computer hacker who broke into a computer at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBL). - The universe in a mirror: the saga of the Hubble Telescope and the visionaries who built it , by Robert Zimmerman, tells of the fifty-year struggle to build the first space telescope; how many of the telescope's advocates sacrificed careers and family to get it launched, and how hopes and reputations were shattered when its mirror was found to be flawed. That's it. . . and please, I welcome your own "favorites" in the Comments section.