I have bad taste in TV

I saw the above linked article regarding the cancellation of V, No Ordinary Family, and The Event, topped off with the fact that SGU was already cancelled with a very abrupt open-ended series finale.  All of those shows are set to automatically record on my DVR.  I think someone or something is telling me to not watch TV anymore or to develop new tastes.

Ok, not every show I watch is being cancelled.  House is still on.  Castle's still around.  A few more are still on hiatus. But I have a thing for (geek) genre shows and I always keep a set on there, even when they aren't really that good.  Actually I'm not surprised that the above shows were canned.  I don't consider myself a true fan of any of them.  Haven't seen a really good genre show that I really like since BSG ended, save for Dr. Who which I'm behind on.  It's just hard to do that stuff right I suppose.

Actually it's just as well all of these cancellations happened.  I've had to tone down my TV watching a lot and in truth most of those shows are stuff I leave on in the background while I work or do something else.  They don't require serious attention to get the gist of the story.  But thanks to the wonders of the interwebs it's also so much easier to test out or catch up on series that I missed or didn't know about.  So I'm not all concerned or up in arms as I was felt with, e.g. Firefly.  If I have a peeve, it's that the trend is to cancel genre shows first and foremost; I can think of other kinds that should be slated for demolition.  That an the fact I get this sense they don't provide enough warning for the show to really wrap up, to resolve their arcs, to at least bring the series to a proper resolution as genre shows now (thankfully) are more in need of.

In light of this not-so-new trend for genre to get axed by the execs, the people who make these shows REALLY need to take a cue from the Brits:  Make each season as if it were the only one ahead of time.  It's OK to leave a little something dangling or to leave people wanting more but definitely start with the end of the season in mind, make it complete on it's own, resolve the major purpose of the season, in other words know how to end it should the axe fall even if it means compressing things down to a few episodes like Caprica did.  Why? To get the story out, to aid in making the boxed set a complete thing fans would buy (I am much less interested in starting a series that just stops).  In fact, while you're at it, take another cue from the Brits (or even HBO/Showtime) and make the seasons tight and short.  13 to 15 episodes is a very good length. It prevents you from putting in too much boring filler that no-one's interested in or have nothing to do with the main arcs.  It's one of the things I adored about BSG season 1 over the others; it was tight and almost every episode related directly to the main plight of the series.

Addendum:
With my recent shortening of watched shows I've been watching more talk/late-night type shows.  The Daily Show is my main one but I'll catch the monologues of others (e.g. Conan, Late Show, etc).  I gotta say, I don't think much of Jimmy Fallon as talk show host, but he has the BEST band of them all.

Coin slots

While in Europe something I always noticed but never really gave much thought about was the fact that the equivalent of the dollar bill was always a coin in the foreign currency. Even $2 is a coin. It made one really have to pay attention to the coins unlike in the US where most people I know, self included, quite frequently empty our pockets of all coins into a tin or bowl or if small enough into the tip jar. We just don't like carrying coins. They weigh down our pocket or purse and fact of the matter is most wallets (at least male ones) don't even come with a coin pocket. In Europe, they are quite accustomed to it and all wallets not only accomodate the different paper-note sizes but most have a coin pocket too. How nice. I never got one, still may never for preference reasons.

I'd occasionally think, though, why is this the case? Paper bills are easier to deal with and carry and they make the strip club more entertaining. Isn't it much more expensive in materials and process to have a metallic coin than a paper note? Still, never gave it much thought. After discovering that there's a government group that's been proposing the same thing here I was compelled to understand why by way of reading the summary. In short, the crux of it is that coins are more durable and don't need to be replaced as often. This makes some sense actually figuring that the dollar bill is the most circulated bill and therefore the most worn out. These days it's practically treated as disposable isn't it? I had no idea that bills have a typical usable life-span that was so short (less than 2 years for old bills, 4 years for new ones).

I wouldn't really object to the notion of replacing these bills by coins. I'm sure the bulk of the US citizenry will be up in arms for the inconvenience or one reason or other and of course it will soon devolve into some evil conspiracy to make the US a socialist/communist nation and some other plot to embed microchips into the coins to keep tabs on you and yours by the New World Order. But as for me, I would only ask that if they do it they bring back that Silver Dollar, not these quarter-sized ones. There's something pleasing to me about a big coin, maybe that's why casino's still use them. I still have a couple saved from when I was a kid.

Doot. Lights are on.

Saw this article that I find to be a good idea... basically traffic lights that have a visible timer on so you know how long till the light turns green. The only concern that came to mind is that drivers will start gunning the gas right as the timer expires and they'll "charge" the green. This is bound to cause problems as there may still be people in the cross-traffic trying to race through before the red hits and often just running the red light. Unless they put a delay in, making both directions red simultaneously for a second or two to account for this, there's bound to be an accident.

In the US, the yellow signal light is used to warn that the red light is about to come on, but it is not used to warn when it is going to go back to green. I suspect they did this for the above reason, to introduce a reaction-time delay before getting moving. In Germany however, they use the yellow light to also warn when the light will turn green as well as red. A friend there said it allows the drivers to shift into gear and get ready to move. There are virtually no automatic transmission cars in Europe. I think fuel economy is the main reason.

I personally think a visible timer is a great idea. It would force some sense into some of those infuriationg lights on certain streets that we all know of that take an eternity to change. A visible timer would at least indicate that it's not broken.

This episode brought to you by the number 10

So... roughly speaking the Metric System is based on water, an inaccurate measurement of the Earth's size, and the fact that we have 10 fingers. It is a great system because it is logical, consistent, and convenient. Water is a convenient material to use since it's so abundant. The Earth's circumference is I think way too ambiguous to measure down to the fractions of a meter, but the meter has been recalibrated to something more precise using lasers or something. And all measures are related by powers of 10, which is very practical since our counting system is based on 10. Sadly, this whole 10 business may be the system's only possible shortcoming and I will explain presently. We like 10 because we're so used to it and we can count to 10 on our hands. And because of that we've become very happy to count things using 10's, like decades and such. But in most other scenarios, I think 10 is an inconvenient number dispite how pretty it looks. Try dividing a pizza into 10 nearly equal slices quickly and easily. We'd cut it in half, then each half into 5 which doesn't come naturally. Much easier to cut it into 2 then 4 then 8 equal pieces because we just keep cutting things in half. Powers of 2 are nice when portioning things.

So what if we were like cartoon characters and had 8 fingers like Mickey Mouse. Actually we do have 8 fingers (plus 2 thumbs) but that's arguable. Then we'd be counting in Octal instead of Decimal. We'd count 0 through 7, days would have 030 hours, we'd count special anniversaries in Octaves instead of Decades, and it would all seem very natural to us. In fact, I think we'd hardly ever even think of the number 10 (or 12/Octal). I think a lot of our convenient fascination with 10 is largely artificial; for everything we're used to counting in groups of ten we'd equally be comfortable counting in groups of eight without missing a beat. But the added advantage is that 8 is a power of 2 and I think that would simplify our natural interaction with numbers quite a bit. I think it's much more natural and common to think of, deal with, and portion things in terms of pairs (2) and halves (1/2) than any other numbers. An Octal counting system would handle that very elegantly.

Consider, instead of [32, 16, 8, 4, 2, 1, 0.5, 0.25, 0.125, 0.0625, 0.03125, ...] in decimal, we'd have [40, 20, 10, 4, 2, 1, 0.4, 0.2, 0.1, 0.04, 0.02, ...] in Octal and we'd have a nice easy pleasant-looking pattern of symbols with which to express doublings and halvings.

I was thinking about this a long time ago when looking at some stock exchange quotes which, then, counted things in half fractions, like 1/2, 1/16, 1/32, etc. and again looking at the sizes of nuts and bolts (in the US) that come in 1/4", 1/8", etc. These things get increasingly messy when trying to convert to decimal, especially the stock quotes because you have to round the cents to 100ths and tiny fractions of a cent get increasingly lost in the conversion. And in the modern age, it certainly would ease a bit the working with computer innards and code and whatnot since it operates in binary (we'd probably specify things in Octal instead of Hex though). The Metric System would be based on powers of 8 which would be just that much more applicable to things we do count and measure.

I don't wish we had 8 fingers like a cartoon character (that would make for less interesting piano music) but I do think we would have been a bit better off if people had chosen not to count the thumbs when developing our counting system.

Har!

The last time

Last useless musings about time...

Dispite the biblical explanation, I find 7 an odd number (bad pun intended) of days to have in a week. It's not connected to any astronomically observable period and it doesn't divide evenly into a year or month or lunar cycle or any cycle. Some older societies had differing numbers of days per week, and thanks to Wikepedia, I was surprised to learn that even modern ones proposed different week systems (though they still had 7 days). This paper says that there is some chronobiorhythmical basis for the original apparently arbitrary 7 day social convention. I thought it was interesting. I suspect, rather, that people determined that 8 was too many and 6 was too few. I'd settle for 8 if the extra day was attached to the weekend, as I think it should be. But with the periods of the earth and moon's rotation and revolution being not nicely divisible, I think there's no way around having some "week"ly or any time period that won't be assymetric in one way or another. I guess we'll forever be stuck with what amounts to feet and inches when it comes to times and dates.

Well, there is our notion of how we count time that is partly arbitrary. So I know where 60 seconds per minute, then 60 minutes per hour come from... But 24 hours in a day? I read somewhere that it's origins come from counting system used by the ancients where they would count using their finger joints, 12 per hand, not including the thumb. I find it mildly apocryphal but it's probably true. I'm sure the number 12 has something to do with it and it divides into 360 nicely. I wonder if anyone tried to push "metric" time; a system whereby you could add and subtract different times on different days trivially without having to constantly multiply by 24, 60, and 60 and then reversing the process and counting remainders to get the result. They'd have to redefine the metric second to be something longer than the current second but it wouldn't be that drastic. Dividing a day by 10 or 100 doesn't feel quite right to me though; I feel like I should be able to divide a day into 3 parts without a repeating decimal.

Monthly musing

More useless musing alert...

I'm not sure what to think of this whole month system. They each have different numbers of days, though necessarily so for cosmological reasons. But then there's this issue where February mysteriously gets short changed with respect to the rest... and not by just 1 day but 2 (or even 3). Creates an imbalance. 12 months is a bit unusual as well but it works out better than 10 I suppose, seeing as how 12 divides by 4 seasons whereas 10 does not. Now there was a time where there were 10 months in an ancestor to our western calendar system, hence the names for September through December (7 through 10). But when they added the 2 extra months couldn't they have had the decency to add them to the end AFTER December, so at least those month name prefixes would have made sense? Was that so much to ask?

I would just say abandon the whole month system and operate by weeks, or even days as Mulysa suggested... but I recognize at least some convenience for having months as a middle granularity. Still, they should re-divvy up the days and rename the months. On the other hand, perhaps we don't really need 12 months. I think that 4 months is sufficient, corresponding to the 4 seasons, and aligned so that they start on sensible days, like the summer and winter solstices and the spring and fall equinoxes... or something derived from them. Then each month gets 91 days except summer which arbitrarily gets 92 and winter gets a little boost on leap years. Of course some things like rent, loan payments, and paychecks should get moved to a weekly or some other sub-month schedule but that wouldn't be too different... e.g. have rent due on the first, thirty-first, and sixty-first of each month.

More on dates

I haven't been able to find an answer to this.

Why is January 1 on the day it is? Meaning, what makes it correspond to the Earth's location in solar orbit a week and a half after winter solstice? Why is that position significant? Who put it there and why? It seems completely arbitrary. It would make more sense for the start of the year to correspond to some astronomically significant, or at least observable, event. It should have been moved to winter solstice, or even better, to vernal equinox... which I think they do in Japan. Or if they want these dates to midpoint the seasons, then it should be closer to the date of the Chinese new year, midway between winter solstice and spring equinox.

Fixing day light savings

Day light savings... loose an hour for half a year. Some optimists say we gain an hour for half a year, but it doesn't feel like it. I can see some decent arguments for it. But I think there's a better solution: Split the difference. Adjust all the clocks by half an hour, and never ever have to set it forward or backward again. I mean, who cares if it's dark only half an hour earlier or later as opposed to a whole hour? At least then we won't have to deal with triffling annoyances like adjusting all of our clocks, forgetting which day the switch happens on, remembering that other countries don't switch on the same day, and some countries and even one or two US states don't even switch at all. Australia extended daylight savings a week to accomodate the possible confusion over some Commonwealth Games which only caused more confusion and prompted many to download patches for their computers to accomodate the change. Personally, it has mucked with my TV recording schedule, made me late for work, and meant that I have at least one or two time pieces (like my microwave oven or VCR) that give the wrong time for months. Ben Franklin didn't go far enough when he proposed the bloody thing. It seems to create more needless hassle.

Transformer overload

I'm not sure at the moment of what the solution is to the ever increasing entropy surrounding the growing presence of rats nests of cables, wires, and power cords, but one place I'd start is with the powerstrip plugs and transformers. Every little consumer device now seems to need to be plugged in. These things invariably run on DC and hence require a transformer. Transformers are usually not placed within the device itself. Instead it's a big, sometimes weighty, box you have to plug into the wall or powerstrip socket. When you have several of these things there's just no room to plug them all in. You have to get special spacious power strips that grant room for multiple transformers or perphaps even specialty items. In most cases you end up with a bulk of cords, plugs, and transformers clumped up on the floor or on the wall.

Well, there's a large class of devices out there that are typically small, require only 12 volts of DC or less, and don't need the amperage of a vacuum cleaner. Such devices typically come with their own power transformer with a little mini-jack looking plug that cleanly slides into the device. It is the little mini-jack that is of interest to me. Wouldn't it be nice if along with the ubiquitous 2-3 pronged wall socket, there were DC power strips of these little mini-jacks. No need for 5-10 big transformers elbowing each other for space, just a simple little box with an array of mini-jacks supplying modest transformed electricity to the devices via simple non-bulky cords.

Basically, leave the pronged wall sockets to the big hungry power consuming items like TVs, vacuums, kitchen appliances, and such; but make a second standard set of more numerous socket arrays for the smaller and power modest devices like cordless phones, ethernet routers, portable music players, mobile phones, low power vanity or ambiance lights, electric razors, etc. etc. etc. Of course they'd all need to standardize on the same mini-plug jack (never understood why there are so many pitches to these things, ever see those Radio Shack adaptors with the 20 differently sized tips?) and perhaps even the same output voltage. Heck if it were truly standard, only one type of power cord would be needed, they'd be available anywhere, and you may not even need more than a few.

I just imagine a only-very-slightly more convenient world where I do not need to carry around bulky transformers for all of my portable devices on trips or I didn't have to plug my phone in the far room with the free wall socket. Yes a ubiquitous standard would be nice. But as the oxymoronical saying goes "the good thing about standards is there are so many of them."