Monthly Archives: February 2004

Fix those unsightly blemishes

Avert Your Eyes! – High-definition porn has arrived. That’s bad news for HDTV. By Brendan I. Koerner
About 6 years ago or so, when it was clear that HDTV would finally make it to the US, I started considering the implications of the technology.

One thing that occured to me was that the standards for TV stagecraft were going to change. Those crummy sets weren’t going to cut it at 1080i.

Another was that TV stations were going to need new graphics packages to run during station promos and around newscasts.

Then I started to pity some of the talent. I’d recently seen a couple of our TV anchors around town, it it was suprising just how deeply lined their faces were. I figured that HDTV was going to shorten a lot of people’s TV careers.

However, I have to wonder if technology is to the point that we could actually have “digital makeup” applied in realtime to their faces, and anything else they were showing.

So, I’m posting this link to an article in slate in order to make an excuse for regurgitating some of my old ideas in a favorable light. I hope you’ve enjoyed it.

Hegemon

If American foreign and military policy is organized primarily around providing the country with a steady supply of cheap oil (an idea I am not necessarily endorsing, though it often seems true), then what happens if:

  1. it fails to continue to deliver on that goal
  2. other countries find alternative approaches to solving the same basic problem (a steady supply of enery for transportation) in a manner that is cheaper and/or lower risk