The Arduino Solution to Selectively Mute Over-Exposed Celebrities
blog.makezine.com
blog.makezine.com
I find it's more effective simply to not watch TV. Ditch your cable, stop imbibing mind poison, and torrent/purchase/stream specific, worthwhile content according to your ethical predispositions. Our population grows ever dumber, ever more apathetic. Mainstream content is optimized around this. Better to opt out of most of it.
That said: boy, nothing beats Arduino for rekindling my boyhood sense of magic and imagination. Well, perhaps with the exception of seeing the world through the eyes of David Attenborough.
Also: although I've seen posters of Bieber, I've never heard him sing.
See how nice life can be without TV?
Now, if only Adblock Freedom were real: http://chromeadblock.com/freedom/
Likewise, I accidentally flipped to a channel with Spanish Flamenco dancing on a public channel, which was so far outside of my normal routine and culturally enriching that I couldn't help but watch.
Where people get in trouble is when they use TV as a crutch to live life vicariously instead of using it to enrich their view of the world (or universe).
Eleanor Roosevelt once said "Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and simple minds discuss people." It's amazing how much more you can get out of television (or life) when you categorize a show into one of those three boxes and select the first one.
If all of TV's content were on something like Youtube, I might watch. "Whatever I want, whenever I want" should be the default mode of entertainment in the internet age.
I didn't grow up around much money. We weren't poor, because my mom worked her ass off. But most people around me were.
They reproduce endlessly, these poor, because poverty, religion and ignorance of birth control are all best friends. Each successive generation ends up just a little more screwed than the last, as pregnancies roll into the mid-teen years, and generations start stacking. Women in their 30's, grandmothers. Financial literacy isn't taught in schools – schools, which, thanks to all this reproduction, are packed to the gills with students who don't focus all that well because they have miserable home lives. They don't learn how to learn.
They grow up, work way more jobs than any human being should have to bear at once, entirely robbed of the time needed to broaden their mind and their skills. And this is if they're lucky, and didn't get sucked into gang violence or drug abuse.
In aggregate? The population gets dumber because what other outcome can there be from this reality? This is nothing to do with being on a high horse. This is observing that most TV is shit because so much of the population that exists to consume it hasn't had the opportunities to desire anything better.
It's all terribly Malthusian, I know – I look forward to a Dwarf Wheat-esque event that's beyond our ability to see right now.
Then you got carried away with your rhetoric earlier:
>Each successive generation ends up just a little more screwed than the last, as pregnancies roll into the mid-teen years, and generations start stacking. Women in their 30's, grandmothers.
OTOH there's a lot of tv that is great, and I say that as someone who cancelled his cable almost 2 years ago. Some of this is available in other formats. "Saving" people $50 a month telling them to cancel cable tv and torrent everything they want isn't going to save the underclass.
Yes get off the high horse.
Even "bad" storytelling can require historical context or reasonable attention span to consume.
On the other hand, celebrity reporting and the rise of reality TV require absolutely no mental commitment or understanding of anything outside of what is immediately presented. I assert that, as the number of people whose economic circumstances prevent any sort of useful education grows, demand for empty content grows accordingly. There just won't be enough people with enough mental furniture to make use of anything more sophisticated.
Who are we to say that people who want to watch Celebrity Apprentice or some celebrity reporting are watching the wrong type of programming and you are watching the right type of programming? Or even saying that no programming at all is what we should strive for?
This indeed is a "high horse" attitude. I guarantee you that whatever you do in your leisure time I can find fault with also. Of course, you won't agree with my opinions at all, but it still doesn't take away from my point. Which is that it's easy to point the finger and say someone is wrong for doing something. And make not mistake, you are saying that people that watch "empty" television are wrong.
And in the long run, what does it matter? We'll all on a path to oblivion anyway. If everyone stopped doing what they're doing at the very second and followed your way of thinking, it still won't stave off the inevitable. Time will devour us all, so it really doesn't matter if someone wishes to watch Jersey Shore instead of...well...instead of whatever it is you do personally.
"They reproduce endlessly, these poor, because poverty, religion and ignorance of birth control are all best friends. Each successive generation ends up just a little more screwed than the last, as pregnancies roll into the mid-teen years, and generations start stacking. Women in their 30's, grandmothers."
No I don't see the same trends you do. The birth rate in African Americans has dropped to near replacement levels over the last 15 years. Teen pregnancy rates have falled over the last 15 years. Entropy is not the correct word to describe this and tv has nothing to do with it.
...k? I'm making the case for vapid content on television being symptomatic of declining intelligence/skills. It's not causal.
As to African Americans, well, okay. But my experience surrounds Latinos. In Latino culture, we've got Catholicism encouraging as much reproduction as possible while declaring contraception sinful. There's also a lot of cultural misogyny, which entitles men to take what they want, while robbing women of the agency necessary to assert their own needs. (I was spared all of this because my mom is gay. Who knows how many siblings I'd have otherwise)
I don't really see a way out of that for several more generations at least. And I'm not terribly surprised you don't see those trends – statistically, if you're on Hacker News, you're very unlikely to have had an upbringing where you got to see any of this firsthand. And that's the point.
Best part--haven't seen a commercial or heard anything about B. Spears in YEARS. The garbage and corporate agenda eventually clears from the mind.
In the way back times, at a place called Sun Labs, there was a very bright engineer whose name escapes me (he lurks here so perhaps he will fess up) who built a system which would record the full CNN feed and then 'decorate' that feed with the text from the closed caption decoder.
He would store both the text and the SMPTE time codes for the video into a simple round robin database (RRD).
You could then sit down and say "What news stories mentioned X over the last 24 hrs?" and it could cue up video snippets around the places where the CC data had that key word in it. As a bonus (because back then a big disk was 500MB) if the closed captioning was identical it could 'de-dupe' the video (basically it wouldn't store story repeats. I thought it was quite clever at the time. I'm surprised its not part of the DirecTV product or TiVO today.
On a related note, this engineer discovered that generally advertisements were not closed captioned, so he could have the mute follow the close captioning stream and the commercials would automatically be muted. Nice eh? Actually one could probably do that with the Arduino hack too...
You'd probably need to do some tuning of the number of keywords it sees before going to mute -- it'd be a tradeoff between false alarms and having to listen to more of the commercials.
I wonder if it would effectively work.
It morphed into google video (i.e. users upload stuff), but it started as searchable TV.
Here is the press release from 2005: http://www.google.com/intl/en/press/pressrel/video.html
- Eleanor Roosevelt
IIRC, close captioning isn't transmitted in this manner with systems other than NTSC (PAL -> Teletext?).
If you want a simpler solution, a better way to detect commercials than trying to analyze CC info, I think, would be to check the average loudness. See this article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17229281/ns/business-consumer_ne..., basically what it says is that commercials seem louder but are actually not (because they are not allowed to). The peak level is the same as normal programs but the average audio level is way higher. This should be easy top detect.
The UK Advertising Standards Authority recently took action saying they had proven that TV ads were being amplified above general volume levels - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1251583/ITV-fin... (not the best source but good enough here).
US Congress voted in the CALM Act, http://usgovinfo.about.com/b/2010/12/20/obama-signs-tv-comme... to curb excessively loud TV ads.