“Now that DVDs have become fully accepted by the masses, and even progressive-scan players can be found for under $70, what’s a videophile got to do to stay ahead of the pack? Or perhaps the better question is: Now that DVDs are almost 7 years old, which is an eternity in the consumer electronics world, what comes next?” The answer seems to be better DVDs, which would have enough storage space to take full advantage of the high quality and multiple features available to owners of high-definition TVs. But with the biggest DVD manufacturers squabbling over the format standard, it may be a while before the next generation of DVDs gets off the ground.
Blog
Schools Putting The Kibosh On File-Swapping
College students may be the largest single demographic of concern in the recording industry’s fight to stem the tide of illegal file-swapping of copyrighted music and movies. But “the University of Florida has developed a tool to help extricate the school from the morass of peer-to-peer file trading, and early results show that it’s succeeding.” Still, there are concerns that Icarus, the program that stifles the swapping, is restricting student use of other, more legitimate internet functions.
Domingo Falls Ill During Performance
“Tenor Plácido Domingo left the stage of the Vienna State Opera this evening after apparently falling ill during the second act of Giordano’s Fedora, but later returned to finish his performance.”
Texas Mayor Backs Off Slashing Public Art Program
Last week, Fort Worth’s mayor Mike Moncrief suggested axing his city’s public art program. But in the face of opposition from his city council, he’s backed off the idea. “This was an appropriate discussion to have. But we need to move forward and close the debate on public art funding.”
A New Engaging History Of Art
Noted historian Paul Johnson undertakes a history of art. “The book is really an extended and engaging work of art criticism rather than a strict history, with many fresh points of view and many eccentric ones. In places, it is deeply flawed. But it always has the virtue of a strong and opinionated intelligence guiding its arguments and prose.”
Fuzzy Thinking (No, Really, It’s Good)
“Traditionally, logicians have made a stark distinction between truthhood and falsity. A statement was considered to be either true (given a truth value of one) or false (a value of zero). In the 1960s, Lotfi Zadeh of the University of California at Berkeley came up with the catchy innovation of ‘fuzzy logic’. In this system, things could be sort-of true, or only partially false. A ‘truth value’ of 0.5 meant that a statement was half-true, and so forth.
Seeing Beneath The Surface
“Knowing what lies beneath the surface before the trowel hits the soil has long been the dream of many an archaeologist. As well as saving time in determining where to dig, it would enable archaeologists to answer questions with a minimum of destruction—and potentially none at all. This dream is slowly becoming a reality, as a result of improvements in non-destructive surveying techniques. Archaeology has never been a wealthy discipline, but by borrowing tools developed for more well-endowed professions, archaeologists are developing X-ray vision—or, to be precise, infra-red, microwave and magnetic vision, which are even better. Such tools enable archaeologists to identify and target small areas of interest, and to move away from the complete excavation of sites towards a more selective approach.”
The Portable Musician
“Working on the go has become standard operating procedure in the music industry. Times have changed: Twenty years ago, a studio was the only place where professional recordings could be made; even five years ago, desktop computers were just starting to get enough horsepower to make great records. Today, a laptop offers plenty of power to make a great-sounding track – and that portability is changing the way music is made.”
Movie Westerns – R.I.P.?
The movie western is 100 years old. But it’s not in good shape. “There hasn’t been a mainstream Western in eight years and no successful Western since Clint Eastwood’s revisionist epic Unforgiven appeared in 1992. For anyone who as a child was enthralled by Gary Cooper in High Noon or John Wayne in one of a dozen great movies (Red River, She Wore A Yellow Ribbon, The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, The Searchers) this has been a sad, even mournful, state of affairs.”
Celebrity Trumps Politics
Arnold Schwarzenegger has brought the big Hollywood machine approach to dealing with the media to politics. Not that the movies and politics haven’t been keeping time together for some time. But this is a whole new level. “If Schwarzenegger wins, he will have done so by studiously and stealthily avoiding the traditional news media, supplanting newspaper interviews with softball entertainment TV appearances along the way.”