Here’s a lovely clock created by G. Wade Johnson, which should appeal to any electronics geeks out there.
(I’ve put a copy here for posterity.)
Category Archives: General
The best medicine, canned
If you go back and watch (or listen to) comedies from an earlier age, one thing that often stands out is the volume of the audience laughter track. The fashion for including laughter, whether from a live audience or from a canned track, has changed over time, but has generally declined in recent years and, to modern ears, too much laughter can make the show sound fake, or at least dated.
I’ve sometimes thought this would be a good use for multi-channel sound: if there were a separate laugh track, you could include it or not, or turn it up or down, according to your own taste, when watching those old Blackadder or Seinfeld episodes.
Who knows, fashions may change in future and go the other way, and then we’ll want to turn it up again.
But it turns out that the history of laugh tracks is quite interesting. People do laugh more when they aren’t laughing ‘alone’, so including laughter in comedies was seen as beneficial from the start. But because early studios usually had limited numbers of cameras, and recordings involved multiple takes of the action from different angles, you couldn’t rely on an audience to laugh consistently, or indeed at all, after they’d seen the same gag several times. So appropriate laughter had to be added back in to the final product anyway, and after a while the idea caught on of using recorded laughter without actually needing an audience there at all.
The Wikipedia page on the topic is surprisingly long and interesting. Here’s an extract:
From the late 1950s to the early 1970s, Charley Douglass had a monopoly on the expensive and painstaking laugh business. By 1960, nearly every prime time show in the U.S. was sweetened by Douglass. When it came time to “lay in the laughs”, the producer would direct Douglass where and when to insert the type of laugh requested. Inevitably, arguments arose between Douglass and the producer, but in the end, the producer generally won. After taking his directive, Douglass would then go to work at creating the audience, out of sight from the producer or anyone else present at the studio.
Critic Dick Hobson commented in a July 1966 TV Guide article that the Douglass family were “the only laugh game in town.” Very few in the industry ever witnessed Douglass using his invention, as he was notoriously secretive about his work, and was one of the most talked-about men in the television industry.
Douglass formed Northridge Electronics in August 1960, named after the Los Angeles suburb in the San Fernando Valley where the Douglass family resided and operated their business in a padlocked garage. When their services were needed, they would wheel the device into the editing room, plug it in, and go to work. Production studios became accustomed to seeing Douglass shuttling from studio to studio to mix in his manufactured laughs during post-production.
The sophisticated one-of-a-kind device — affectionately known in the industry as the “laff box” — was tightly secured with padlocks, stood more than two feet tall, and operated like an organ. Only immediate members of the family knew what the inside actually looked like (at one time, the “laff box” was called “the most sought after but well-concealed box in the world”). Since more than one member of the Douglass family was involved in the editing process, it was natural for one member to react to a joke differently from another. Charley himself was the most conservative of all, so producers would put in bids for son Bob, who was more liberal in his choice of laughter.
Douglass used a keyboard to select the style, gender and age of the laugh as well as a foot pedal to time the length of the reaction. Inside the machine was a wide array of recorded chuckles, yocks and belly laughs; exactly 320 laughs on 32 tape loops, 10 to a loop. Each loop contained 10 individual audience laughs spliced end-to-end, whirling around simultaneously waiting to be cued up. Since the tapes were looped, laughs were played in the same order repeatedly. Sound engineers would watch sitcoms and knew exactly which recurrent guffaws were next, even if they were viewing an episode for the first time. Frequently, Douglass would combine different laughs, either long or short in length. Attentive viewers could spot when he decided to mix chuckles together to give the effect of a more diverse audience. Rather than being simple recordings of a laughing audience, Douglass’s laughs were carefully generated and mixed, giving some laughs detailed identities such as “the guy who gets the joke early” and “housewife giggles” and “the one who didn’t get the joke but is laughing anyway” all perfectly blended and layered to create the illusion of a real audience responding to the show in question.
Happy Indivisible Year
2017 is a prime number.
Just thought you’d like to know.
The world’s biggest reality-distortion field
Everywhere, I see people complaining about what a terrible year 2016 has been. Actually, now I think about it, that’s not really true. On Facebook, I see people complaining about what a terrible year 2016 has been. Yes, it’s certainly had its downsides: the Brexit vote was a disappointment and may prove rather inconvenient if it ever actually happens, and the Trump election makes you realise that there’s no need for Spitting Image any more, because it just couldn’t live up to reality. But, in real life, these things don’t absorb much time when chatting to friends in the pub, or to customers in the meeting room, or to fellow dog-walkers in the wood, or to neighbours in the street.
Now, I’ve often joked that the word ‘fury’, at least outside the realms of Greek mythology, is only found in the headlines of the tabloid press and local newspapers. You know the kind of thing: “FURY AT COUNCIL GRASS-CUTTING SCAM!” This artificial heightening of emotions, or the publicising of one or two unbalanced individuals’ feelings as if they were a general reaction of the populace at large, is one of the oldest sales tricks in the book.
But Facebook, it sometimes seems to me, encourages this tendency from all of us: it’s a place for users to vent their opinions — I’m not immune — and the more extreme expressions tend to get extra attention from others and so be rewarded by the FB algorithms, with the result that on some days I go to the site and it feels as if I’m walking along in the middle of a protest march.
Protest marches are all very well in their way, because they allow those with strong feelings on a particular topic, or insufficient faith in democracy, to let off steam from time to time and feel they’ve accomplished something, without inconveniencing others too much. But these outbursts are clearly segregated from the rest of life, which is important if a civilised society is to continue. Someone who brought their protests or their political campaigning into the workplace would be a bore, and rightly ostracised. But Facebook is a broadcasting medium to which people turn when they get upset about anything, without having to wait for someone to organise a protest, and before even knowing that they have a sympathetic ear. There’s no easy way to tell it, for example, “I like Fred – he’s a witty and intelligent guy – but I don’t want to go on any of his protest marches.” If the line between outbursts and normal conversation is not clearly defined, you can get a rather distorted view of somebody, and of how much you might have in common with them. And the problem with Facebook, unlike, say, Twitter or an RSS reader, is that even if I subscribe to Fred’s feed, I may only see a subset of the things he writes. Facebook decides what appears in my stream, not Fred. So how accurately can I even judge my friends’ opinions? Facebook may well decide that it’s not in your best interest to see this post either, now I think about it.
Facebook can be a place for useful discussion, but the general newsfeed may not inspire very balanced or considered debate. It’s worth remembering, for example, that whichever way you may have voted on Brexit, or in the presidential elections, almost exactly half of the populace voted the opposite way to you. Is that balance accurately reflected in your Facebook feed? Did you really get a fair chance even to consider the other point of view? Jenna Wortham’s article is a nice discussion of this:
I’ve spent nearly 10 years coaching Facebook — and Instagram and Twitter — on what kinds of news and photos I don’t want to see, and they all behaved accordingly. Each time I liked an article, or clicked on a link, or hid another, the algorithms that curate my streams took notice and showed me only what they thought I wanted to see. That meant I didn’t realize that most of my family members, who live in rural Virginia, were voicing their support for Trump online, and I didn’t see any of the pro-Trump memes that were in heavy circulation before the election. I never saw a Trump hat or a sign or a shirt in my feeds, and the only Election Day selfies I saw were of people declaring their support for Hillary Clinton.
If you believe that half the population are just idiots, and only the smart people are your friends, then you’ve already fallen into this trap.
We’ve always had biased news sources, of course — pick your favourite newspaper — but in the past you were at least subconsciously aware that you had chosen your bias, and since the editor’s ideas didn’t correspond quite precisely to yours, you would see dissenting opinions from time to time. But Facebook is everybody’s tabloid. It tells you what you want to hear, and me what I want to hear, and we reward it by clicking little buttons when it does so. It, in turn, rewards us, like pigeons in a laboratory experiment, by giving us more of that kind of food when we tap the button. Dopamine is a powerful drug, and Facebook is a highly-tuned delivery mechanism for it. I’ve started to realise that I’m spending too much time absorbed by it, and have rather too Pavlovian a reaction to its notification bells.
Now, let me be clear that Facebook has lots of good stuff on it as well – I have been much more active on it this year then in the past, largely because of two special-interest groups of which I’m a member. It is a very good discussion forum for those kind of things if they’re well-curated (something that the general newsfeed isn’t). I have also had some of my opinions challenged in a useful way, when I’ve gone out of my way to engage with those who thought differently, and I hope that some others have too. I’ve discovered good stuff, funny stuff, educational stuff.
But in general, have the gains outweighed the negativity? I think not. I could have read the good stuff in other forums without so much of my reading being accompanied by complaints about Jeremy Corbyn, Theresa May, Boris Johnson, or whichever politician, corporation, or policy is the bête noir du jour, and without the margins being full of “X did Y and you’ll never believe what happened next!”, “The most amazing video you’ll see all year!”, and “10 things you really can’t live without!”. It’s like walking through a circus or amusement arcade while people tell you what a terrible time you’re having! Remember, good news doesn’t sell papers, and it doesn’t in general sell web advertisements either.
True, 2016 hasn’t been the greatest year on record, but, unless you live in Aleppo, it certainly hasn’t been the worst. For the rest of us, let’s keep things in proportion, shall we? Yes, I liked Alan Rickman and Leonard Cohen, too, but lots of good people died in 2014 and 2015 as well, and no doubt we’ll lose a few in 2017. Their work lives on. Don’t like the way some vote went this year? Don’t worry, governments and politicians come and go, international treaties change and adapt, and remember that every election result in the past that you did like made lots of other people grumble.
On balance, I was lucky enough to have had a rather pleasant, interesting and productive 2016, and I expect that many of my Facebook friends did so too, if they were to look back and count their blessings in an objective way. And I can’t help feeling that it might have been even more so if I hadn’t had a Facebook account.
So 2017 is going to be Facebook-free. That’s my New Year’s resolution. I won’t actually delete my account, but I’ll change the password to something I don’t know, delete all the apps, disable all notifications and bin all incoming emails. I can’t actually deactivate it completely for a year without too many other adverse consequences if I decide I want to return in the future — see how deep the rabbit hole goes? — but I’m going to get as close as I can. In the interest of fairness, I won’t post anything on Facebook either: if you’d like to keep track of what I’m doing, subscribe to my RSS feed, follow me on Twitter or on LinkedIn, subscribe to my videos on YouTube, check out my website or get emails when I post on my blog.
When I was an undergraduate, I decided to be a teetotaller every other term. I believed that if I ever found that process too difficult, it was an indication that I had a problem, and it was in my own interests to get an early warning! This is probably a good discipline for any product on which one might become dependent. So here’s my recommendation for the New Year: ask yourself how easily you could give up Facebook, or any other addiction of your choice. If the answer is “not easily”, then it’s probably a good idea to consider doing so!
Wishing you all a great 2017, wherever you get your dopamine from!
The Millennial Question
I assure you, this is well-worth 15 minutes of your time. Simon Sinek talking on Inside Quest about what makes the ‘Millennials’ tick and why, and the challenges they can face as they enter the workplace.
There are a few over-generalisations here, but in general it’s good stuff, intelligently and amusingly presented, and most of it certainly doesn’t only apply to those in their twenties!
The Power of Competition
Rather sad to discover that walking to my local Post Office to send a parcel costs me three times as much as having a courier pick it up from my door!
Lesson of the day
It’s a bad idea to get super glue on your fingers, I discover, even if you don’t get stuck to anything. It messes up your fingerprints and you can’t log in to your phone any more!
If, on the other hand, you’re planning to commit a crime, it’s probably quite a good idea…
For love of a Rose
Today, as it happens, is our silver wedding anniversary.
It doesn’t feel much like one, because Rose is currently in the suburbs of Detroit helping to look after her parents, and will be getting on an economy transatlantic flight tonight, and I’m about to rent a van and shift some furniture around the M25! The traditional celebrations, you see.
We had a nice trip to Venice for our 20th anniversary, though, and so I told her we’d adopt a more decimal approach and do something nice for the 30th!
Rose probably won’t see this, since she reads neither my blog, nor Twitter, nor Facebook, but I think she knows I’m rather fond of her anyway! If the next quarter-century is as good as the last one, I’ll be a very lucky chap.
Ghosts of Boxing Days past
Christmas is a good time for looking back… Blog archives can help you do that…
- Ten years ago – threw out my floppy disks
- Six years ago – composed a carol
- Four years ago – invented a new word
- Three years ago – watched myself on TV
🙂
Your electronic driving licence
I should read Terence Eden’s blog more regularly. There’s some good stuff on there.
What would you do if you turned up at a car hire company and realised you’d forgotten your UK driving licence, for example? He found a solution.
Is a picture worth 140 characters?
I sent an emoji today. Not quite my first, because various systems have been converting my colon-dash-parentheses into smiley or sad faces for some time, but I think it was the first time I’ve deliberately sent one knowing the recipient would see it as a picture.
In this case, it was a ‘thumbs up’, which I sent to John Naughton in reply to an incoming query, because I had my hands rather full at the time, and I could at least do that with a couple of taps on my watch. I guess they’re useful for that level of communication when you don’t have access to, say, a keyboard.
In general, though, I’m rather confused by this apparent belief that a return to hieroglyphics is a good idea, and that people are willing to send messages expressing emotions when they often have little idea of what the receiving party will actually see – this may be rather different from what you thought you sent. At least we didn’t have that problem with the clip-art of the 90s… and it still went out of fashion.
This is the way our communication technologies progress: first, we neglect spelling and grammar. Then punctuation goes by the board. Now we can abandon words altogether, and start using other people’s primitive pictures. Soon, I imagine, the internet will give us a way to say “Ug” while hitting each other with jawbones.
Still, for better or worse, Apple and others feel the need to issue complete operating system updates where new and improved emoji are the main feature. Did you know, for example, there is now an official unicode character for a man-with-slightly-dark-skin-getting-a-face-massage? It’s hard, looking back, to conceive that Proust, Hemingway and Dickens were all able to communicate so effectively when their character set didn’t include any face-massage symbols at all!
Still, if you want to know everything there is to know about the wonders of this new alphabet, then Emojipedia is a good place to start. And because they are actually official unicode characters, you can even use them in, say, URLs. This is completely valid, though your browser might not yet think so.
http://emojipedia.org/emoji/💆/
Try giving that address to somebody over the phone! Ah, but I guess the youth of today are unlikely to do that, because using a phone would also involve using words…
Altruistic Autonomous Vehicles
One of my shortest recent posts generated quite a lot of discussion, both here and on Facebook. I wrote:
When we have proper and affordable self-driving vehicles, will that be the end of the railways?
Clearly there are some things that railways will do better for the foreseeable future, like long-range high-speed links, or carrying heavy freight. And don’t get me wrong: I like train journeys. But it seemed to me that the key reasons people currently take trains for normal day-to-day journeys — wanting to read en route, a lack of parking at their destination, avoiding congestion — could very soon be overcome when, for example, your car can go and valet-park itself after dropping you off at the office.
And the disadvantages of train travel: the fact that instead of going from point A to point B, you have to go at least from point A to point B to point C to point D, possibly waiting on a cold platform at point B for an indeterminate period, and not being sure whether you’ll get a seat from point C to B on the return journey. Will it be worth the hassle?
One of my assumptions is that traffic congestion will become less of an issue when cars are smarter, of course, which may not be a valid one, especially if lots of train travellers take to their cars instead.
There’s an interesting question as to whether lots of small independent agents trying to meet their own goals are going to result in an optimal solution for road congestion as a whole. We may start off with vehicles that are pretty autonomous initially, but become less so in due course, as the road infrastructure starts to adapt to them. Network packets on the internet know their destination, but it’s the routers (the junctions) that tell them which exit from the roundabout to take.
Will the Department of Transport manage overall use of the network better than each individual car? Well, that depends on who has the better computer scientists, of course! But it also depends on the amount of knowledge each vehicle can get about the overall road network, and, of course, on how selfish your car is: will it decide that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one (or the few)?
Perhaps we need Altruistic Autonomous Vehicles? (You heard it here first!) There could be financial incentives to encourage this. You get lower road tax if your car agrees to obey centrally-prescribed rules at times of high congestion. Perhaps you get to use the high-speed autonomous-only lanes if you’re willing to hand over to the cloud-based algorithms. Of course, this could open up all sorts of wonderful opportunities for hackers, too. Remember the movie?
Anyway, perhaps congestion will be less of an issue, but for a completely different reason. If you can be having a coffee, working on your laptop and taking Skype calls while you slip quietly along in your electric car, you may be more productive than if you’d got to the office on time.
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