Interesting Links for 23-06-2012

[andrewducker]

• A proposal to solve some of Greece's problems
  (tags: greece tax transparentsociety )
• Three more myths about the UK economy
  (tags: uk economics politics )
• Girlie scientist role models do more harm than good
  (tags: women science rolemodels psychology )
• How to Fix Movies that Are Really Quiet, then REALLY LOUD
  (tags: movies sound technology )
• Arbitrage and equilibrium in the Team Fortress 2 economy
  (tags: computer_games mathematics economics )

Comments

[thejeopardymaze]

Even if a young girl bought in to the girlie scientist thing she'll eventually learn a harsh lesson in matters of dress, academia, and employment. The people cooking up crap like Science It's A Girl Thing http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g032MPrSjFA have little or no understanding of the need for maintaining a strong sense of professionalism in these kinds of careers. I find their website to be as offensive as the advert for roughly the same reason, not to mention the problem of how condescending it is.

[andrewducker]

Absolutely. misrepresenting science sites nobody any good.

If this was any other profession...

[thejeopardymaze]

Or maybe not, I should look at how entrepreneurship and startups are marketed to girls as a possible future career option, see if they're making it pink like science and tech.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

Another way to fix the movie noise problem, is to go into the settings section of your television.

You generally have an option for nighttime viewing (I've only owned TVs in France for the past 12 years so have no idea what this is called on English language TVs. On the TV's here it's just called "soir") and that setting automatically boosts the dialogue while also moderating the sound of the action scenes - in fact the reason this setting exists is so that you don't freak out your neighbors.

The last two TVs I've had have also had a visual option for "jour" and "soir" which changes the brightness level for daytime viewing - where you have more light in your apartment and nighttime viewing when you don't.

Granted these settings aren't always easy to find but I haven't seen a TV in more than a decade that didn't have the options somewhere if you fiddle around with the menu - something I do anyway with a new TV because I tend to like to set the color palates, aspect ratios and other things to my own personal taste rather than the rather mediocre defaults the TVs come with, which seem to assume that everyone only cares about aspect ratios, brightness and color palates for sports (for which default settings seem to be excellent) and not for the type of movies/shows that I like.

[andrewducker]

I actually ended up borrowing a calibration Blu-Ray from a friend to get mine set up right. Because, yes, the basic settings are rubbish.

[bart-calendar.livejournal.com]

What I did when I set up my most recent TV was buy a Blu-Ray of Avatar and then downloaded a Blu-Ray of Avatar.

Then I started playing the downloaded version on my PC - where I have the colors perfect, and set my PC right next to the new TV and put the Avatar Blu-Ray in that and then adjusted the colors until they matched.

[andrewducker]

That's a good technique!

And (decent) monitors tend to fuck with the colours a lot less.

For me it was mostly about getting the brightness range right, so that black was actually black (and not muddy grey) and white was actually white (and not a bright grey).

When I got the Blu-Ray LOTR I put the DVD into my XBox and the Blu-Ray into the PS3 and then spent ten minutes comparing scenes :->

[apostle-of-eris.livejournal.com]

So they're bullshitting in Greece and a different "they" is bullshitting in England.
gee, what surprises!
Since questioning the perfection of the distribution of wealth and power doesn't get you tenure, can it be any different?