Skip to main content

When Will We Ever Use This?

My sister's boyfriend showed me a nifty chart which presents the size of by distance from a television before your eyes begin to notice the difference of 1080p resolution. Just out of curiosity, we measured the length of my living room and looked at the chart to see how large of a television I would need. The distance between my couch and television is a bit shy of 20ft... off the chart!

The chart goes up to 130 inches, or approximately 11 feet. But an 11 ft diagonal measurement doesn't really mean anything to me other than "big ass TV"*, so I decided to dig out my high school math skills to help me put it into perspective. Assuming a standard 16:9 wide screen display and some liberal number rounding:

math

I would need a television that's almost 6 ft tall, and 10 ft wide if I wanted to see Jay Leno's crow's-feet in high definition!

I only have 8 ft ceilings so that gives 2 ft of clearance above it, and the room is 16 ft wide so I'd have 3 ft of clearance on each side (just 6 inches wider than the width of my door casings). That's not a "big ass TV"... that's my wall!

I realized two things after running the numbers: First, that was a great real-life example to answer the question "when will we ever use this stuff?" we were all asking our teachers when we were learning algebra. Secondly, I wonder how many people are wasting money on all the latest and greatest video technology. I'm glad I don't own a Blu-ray player, or I'd now be scratching my head wondering "when will I ever use this stuff?"

* For my friends in metric countries, that's "big arse television"

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Writing a Minimal PSR-0 Autoloader

An excellent overview of autoloading in PHP and the PSR-0 standard was written by Hari K T over at PHPMaster.com , and it's definitely worth the read. But maybe you don't like some of the bloated, heavier autoloader offerings provided by various PHP frameworks, or maybe you just like to roll your own solutions. Is it possible to roll your own minimal loader and still be compliant? First, let's look at what PSR-0 mandates, taken directly from the standards document on GitHub : A fully-qualified namespace and class must have the following structure \<Vendor Name>\(<Namespace>\)*<Class Name> Each namespace must have a top-level namespace ("Vendor Name"). Each namespace can have as many sub-namespaces as it wishes. Each namespace separator is converted to a DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR when loading from the file system. Each "_" character in the CLASS NAME is converted to a DIRECTORY_SEPARATOR . The "_" character has no special ...
6 comments
Read more

Composing Music with PHP

I’m not an expert on probability theory, artificial intelligence, and machine learning. And even my Music 201 class from years ago has been long forgotten. But if you’ll indulge me for the next 10 minutes, I think you’ll find that even just a little knowledge can yield impressive results if creatively woven together. I’d like to share with you how to teach PHP to compose music. Here’s an example: You’re looking at a melody generated by PHP. It’s not the most memorable, but it’s not unpleasant either. And surprisingly, the code to generate such sequences is rather brief. So what’s going on? The script calculates a probability map of melodic intervals and applies a Markov process to generate a new sequence. In friendlier terms, musical data is analyzed by a script to learn which intervals make up pleasing melodies. It then creates a new composition by selecting pitches based on the possibilities it’s observed. . Standing on Shoulders Composition doesn’t happen in a vacuum. Bach wa...
7 comments
Read more

Learning Prolog

I'm not quite sure exactly I was searching for, but somehow I serendipitously stumbled upon the site learnprolognow.org a few months ago. It's the home for an introductory Prolog programming course. Logic programming offers an interesting way to think about your problems; I've been doing so much procedural and object-oriented programming in the past decade that it really took effort to think at a higher level! I found the most interesting features to be definite clause grammars (DCG), and unification. Difference lists are very powerful and Prolog's DCG syntax makes it easy to work with them. Specifying a grammar such as: s(s(NP,VP)) --> np(NP,X,Y,subject), vp(VP,X,Y). np(np(DET,NBAR,PP),X,Y,_) --> det(DET,X), nbar(NBAR,X,Y), pp(PP). np(np(DET,NBAR),X,Y,_) --> det(DET,X), nbar(NBAR,X,Y). np(np(PRO),X,Y,Z) --> pro(PRO,X,Y,Z). vp(vp(V),X,Y) --> v(V,X,Y). vp(vp(V,NP),X,Y) --> v(V,X,Y), np(NP,_,_,object). nbar(nbar(JP),X,3) --> jp(JP,X). pp(pp(PREP,N...
22 comments
Read more