Oleg Zabluda's blog
Wednesday, March 14, 2012
 
I have a Sony 36" KV-36XBR400 Trinitron CRT TV.
I have a Sony 36" KV-36XBR400 Trinitron CRT TV. It's 12 years old, weights 240 lb, 36 inch diagonal, 4:3, the pinnacle of direct view CRT TVs. Sergey Zhupanov is making fun of it. But it's still unsurpassed in image quality by any of the current flat-panel TVs, be it plasma, rear-projection, LCD, OLED, what have you, no matter how much you pay. It is surpassed only by CRT front projection TVs. Its only problem is that, altough it does have full 1080 horizontal lines, it has only ~1600 vertical lines, instead of 1920. Fancy flat-panel TV's do surpass my TV in image size, but size doesn't matter, until I start going totally blind. For a while Pioneer Kuro Elite Plasma was developing with such a speed that it seemed that it would be equal to CRTs a couple of generations later, but then it died.

Now, Dolby Labs (from SF Bay Area) claim that they created "The first flat panel to surpass the CRT". I'll believe it when I see it. It is barely larger then mine (42"), costs US $55,000, and will become available at some undisclosed time in the future.

http://www.dolby.com/us/en/professional/hardware/video-monitors/prm-4200-professional-reference-monitor.html

CRT is the new vinyl.
https://picasaweb.google.com/lh/photo/4f4fPAQJxnd5td0FCxS2Jw

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- posted by Oleg Zabluda @ 7:04 PM | permalink | | | technorati | bloglines | feedster
 
Timekeeping on Mars.
Timekeeping on Mars.

The length of the average solar day on Mars is 24h 39m 35.244s. On Earth it's 24h 00m 00.002s. i.e. Mars day is 2.7% longer than Earth's. First problem is how to divide Mars days into Mars hours, Mars minutes and Mars seconds. Some people propose that Mars second is equal to Earth second and for Mars day to roll over at the 24h 39m 35s mark. That's just silly. Who cares about the stupid earthlings anyway. Clearly, the right thing to do is to have Mars second to be 1.0027 Earth seconds, and Mars day to be 24 Mars hours 00 Mars minutes 00 Mars seconds.

Then we come to the problem of splitting Mars year (which is equal to 668.6 Mars days) into Mars months (with usual leap years). Beyond the obvious decision to keep the Mars week equal to 7 Mars days, we are faced with either adding 10 more months (January, February, Bradbuary, ...) or making existing 12 months longer (6-10 weeks). This decision is arbitrary, and either way will do. Months can not be all the same length anyway, nor should they be, because Martian seasons (solstices and equinoxes) are very far from being of equal duration. If they fall onto the beginning of Mars months, it's a big bonus.

See examples of both proposals in the references below:

http://cmex.ihmc.us/data/MarsCalendar/index.html
http://planetary.org/explore/topics/mars/calendar.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timekeeping_on_Mars
http://planetary.org/explore/topics/mars/calendar.html

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- posted by Oleg Zabluda @ 3:03 PM | permalink | | | technorati | bloglines | feedster
 
A lot of time-travel stories involve you being your own grandfather [1].
A lot of time-travel stories involve you being your own grandfather [1]. I never encountered one where you are your own father. There is a good reason for that. If you are your own father, where did your Y-chromosome come from, huh? No such problem exist if you are your own grandfather. Then your Y-chromosome came from your other grandfather. If you are a boy, you can't be your own mother or grandmother. If you are a girl, you can't be your own mother, but can be your own grandmother, for the same reasons as above. Just imagine one of your Y-chromosomes marked with a small letter "Y".

[1] The most convoluted example I know, is in a science fiction short story by Robert A. Heinlein "—All You Zombies—" (1958). Michio Kaku in "Hyperspace" drew his/her timeline: http://books.google.com/books?id=_HBtAHuG6dwC&pg=PA241 He is his own father, mother, grandfather and grandmother.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E2%80%94All_You_Zombies%E2%80%94
http://books.google.com/books?id=_HBtAHuG6dwC&pg=PA241

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- posted by Oleg Zabluda @ 12:13 PM | permalink | | | technorati | bloglines | feedster
 
Typical stories go like this: somebody lived, lived then died.
Typical stories go like this: somebody lived, lived then died. Charlie Rose "Brain" series on PBS, funded by Jim Simons is different. Those stories always go like: somebody lived, lived, died, then autopsy showed xxx. Quite jarring after a while.

http://www.charlierose.com/view/collection/10702
http://www.charlierose.com/view/collection/10702

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- posted by Oleg Zabluda @ 10:18 AM | permalink | | | technorati | bloglines | feedster

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