Electrons

Tonight, Aunt Mae called and asked why she was seeing two of everything. After my initial panic of some potentially serious health condition passed, we determined that she had somehow accidentally activated the Picture In Picture feature of her television.

I asked her to try finding the “PIP” button on her remote, but she couldn’t find it. So, I asked her to try turning off the TV and then turning it back on to see if the PIP would just “go away”. In my fairly-electronics-aware geek brain, the TV might revert to PIP-off on reboot.

“Oh honey, I tried that, but I’m still seeing two of Hillary,” she said. I chuckled, and sympathized.

“Maybe I didn’t leave it off long enough.”

That’s when I was reminded that her understanding of the universe is vastly different from mine. In her mind, the length of time that the TV was off could somehow cause a different outcome when she turned it back on.

It’s not that the electrons might disperse a few microns more, and thus never re-collect to activate the PIP function. In Aunt Mae’s universe, there are no electrons.

To finish the story, it turned out that a few minutes after we hung up, we simultaneously realized that, like most households, Aunt Mae has thirty-some remotes. The phone rang as I was starting to dial her number. We found the PIP button on the correct remote, and she was back to one Hillary. Whew.

Subtitles

I know the morning news anchors and crew work as hard as anyone else, but even so, they have become a source of humorous morning entertainment for Lor and me.

In the morning today, they ran a short bit on Tiger Woods and his wife having had a baby less than 24 hours after the end of the U.S. Open. During the bit they showed a clip from an interview with him from just after the Open. At the bottom of the screen, they put a typical caption of his name, “Tiger Woods”, and a subtitle, “PGA Golfer”.

While sufficiently accurate, I would think that being the most dominant and recognizable golfer of one’s generation would earn a slightly more distinguished subtitle, or maybe even obviate the need for a subtitle at all.

Maybe soon they’ll have pieces on “George W. Bush”, “Politician”, or “Steve Jobs”, “Guy in black turtleneck”.

Planet Earth again

Did you watch it last night? It was amazing once again. IMHO, it’s the most beautiful and informative show on TV right now. If you didn’t catch it, here’s what you missed:

1. Birds catching fish 130 feet underwater.
2. A sparring match between a penguin and a seal.
3. Incredible time-lapse footage of starfish. They move so slowly that this would have been impossible (and ridiculous) to show, but in time-lapse it was quite nifty.
4. Probably the most amazing super slo-mo footage ever captured of a great white shark leaping several feet out of the water to catch a seal (it’s about 1:20 into the clip, and shown again from a different angle at 2:09).

If you did watch, and you have HD, please invite me over so I can watch it in HD next week! I'll bring chips and salsa.

Planet Earth

If you’ve watched the Discovery Channel or any of its affiliates at all during the past few months, you’ve probably seen the hype for their “planet earth” miniseries. We watched the first episode last night, and I have to say that it was pretty incredible.

Many of the things they showed had never been filmed before, like a mother and baby giant panda in their den in the wild, and a snow leopard chasing down prey. I won’t give away any more about the content, because I’m sure they’ll repeat the whole series, and the Science Channel is rerunning the latest episode on the following Monday night.

Besides the excellent content and narration, I thought the cinematography was impressive. The quality of the film alone seemed to be well above your normal documentary—bright, crisp colors, and incredible definition. We don’t even have HD, and I was amazed.

Some of the shots left me wondering how in the heck they got them, like perfectly steady shots of a huge flock of cranes flying up near the peak of Everest. There was another of a grizzly scavenging for food on a rocky hillside. The shot started with the bear taking up nearly all of the screen, and zoomed waaayyyy back until the bear was smaller than the pixels on my TV, and the mountain was framed in the screen. I thought lens technology like that was limited to spy satellites and space telescopes.

They showed a lot of time lapse scenes of landscapes, clouds, starry skies, etc., but there was one that seemed just darn near impossible. It was a time-lapse-and-pan that showed a landscape through all four seasons. The camera panned across as the time-lapse whizzed the seasons by. I was blown away by how smooth it all was. That had to be a seriously slow and smooth rotational motor … and how the heck did they keep that camera in place and so steady for 12 months???

I definitely recommend getting your Battlestar Galactica fix some other way next Sunday, and tuning in to planet earth.