Unboxing Galactica

Posted on April 2, 2008 by Granger Meador

Adama on the Galactica BridgeI am pumped because Battlestar Galactica finally returns to television this Friday! Fans have been waiting for more than an entire year for new episodes, thanks to the SciFi channel’s dubious programming choices. So I am more than ready to start the first half of the show’s final season.

But those of you who have been keeping up with my posts may recall that I no longer have cable television. Since Galactica doesn’t air on any of the over-the-air broadcast channels, how will I manage to pick it up?

Normally I would buy the series episodes through my Apple TV. But NBC and Apple had a falling out and NBC pulled all of its shows, including its SciFi channel frontrunner, from Apple’s iTunes. Thankfully, however, they made the final season available through Amazon’s Unbox service. So I’ve subscribed to the fourth season at $1.89 per episode.

Battlestar Galactica via Amazon’s Video on Demand

Since I have a Tivo HD DVR registered with the service, the episodes should be automagically downloaded to my Tivo once they become available, and I won’t have to try and download them to a computer and then convert them for display on my living room television. I haven’t used Unbox much, so I’ll let you know how it goes. It certainly should be better than my other option of recording it off the school’s cable line onto a crummy VHS tape. Let’s face it, 250 lines of resolution is NOT acceptable anymore. And I won’t be tempted to illegally download the episodes from a torrent site, since I’d much prefer to play by the rules and hope that some of the money supports additional quality television.

Posted in HDTV, technology | 1 Comment

A World Without Tears

Posted on March 29, 2008 by Granger Meador

A World Without Tears by Lucinda Williams

Preview/Buy MP3 at Amazon

If we lived in a world without tears
how would bruises find
the face to lie upon?
How would scars find skin
to etch themselves into?
How would broken find the bone?

If we lived in a world without tears
how would heartbeats know
when to stop?
How would blood know
which body to pull us out of?
How would bullets find the guns?

If we lived in a world without tears
how would misery know
which back door to walk through?
How would trouble know
which mind to live inside of?
How would sorrow find a home?

Posted in music, video | Leave a comment

What the BLEEP!?

Posted on March 28, 2008 by Granger Meador

This clip is a fun illustration of the quantum weirdness of the double-slit experiment. Be warned, however! The movie this is from, Quantum Weirdness! What the BLEEP Do We Know!?, is a mélange of pseudoscience and quantum physics. This clip holds together pretty well until the end, when it starts to posit that a conscious observer alters reality.

The “observer” here need not be conscious – it is the act of measurement that collapses the wave function. The physics of measurement, of actually determining which slit the electron went through, causes quantum decoherence in which the vastly entangled quantum system assumes a given state. When you don’t have the “observer” present the quantum state remains entangled and superposition can occur and create an interference pattern.

And if all of that sounds like mumbo jumbo, well, what the BLEEP do we know?

What the Bleep Do We Know!? at Amazon

Posted in physics, video | 1 Comment

Mascot Tree

Posted on March 27, 2008 by Granger Meador

The College High Class of 1957 came up with an interesting project: carving the stump of the old elm tree north of the BHS Science Wing into the school’s former and current mascots. They paid to have Clayton Coss sculpt one portion into a Wildcat and BHS alums paid to have the rest formed into a Bruin.

Bill Miller, the BHS Safety Guy, used one of the campus security cameras to compile a time-lapse video of the sculpting process, which I then edited for time, color, and contrast and I threw in a soundtrack. He and I collaborated previously on a similar project when they demolished the old BHS skybridge.

You can read more about the tree at the BHS website.

Posted in random, video | Leave a comment

On the Hunt for a Fast Browser

Posted on March 20, 2008 by Granger Meador

SafariSafari is fast…really fast. Recently I downloaded Apple’s Safari web browser for my Windows XP machine, and I’m surprised at how much I like it. Knowing that it would lack all of the nifty add-ons that I use with Firefox, I didn’t expect to like Safari. But its speed in loading and displaying web pages is quite impressive. The other striking thing about Safari is its font-smoothing technology, but I have mixed feelings about that.

Safari has the same tabbed browsing features as the latest Firefox and Internet Explorer releases and so far I haven’t noticed any problematic page displays. I do miss some of the Firefox add-ons, most notably thus far how AdBlock Plus can wipe out ads on web pages, how Googlepedia shows a related Wikipedia entry display on a Google search, and how Foxmarks keeps my bookmarks synchronized on multiple machines.

What I certainly don’t miss is Firefox’s glacial startup (worsened by the plethora of add-ons I’ve thrown in) and its more plodding display of various web pages. And don’t get me started on the hideous menu and toolbar system in Internet Explorer 7!

I’ll make good use of Safari on my laptop, since its slow hard disk and aging microprocessor will likely make the snappy Safari experience quite alluring. But those Firefox add-ons will likely keep drawing me back. I look forward to the release of Firefox 3, but I have a feeling Safari will retain the speed crown.

CNET has a good comparison of Safari and Firefox in the Windoze environment.

Posted in technology | Leave a comment