Category: Thoughts

Trying to recall TV from my childhood

I’m trying really hard to recall fragments of TV shows I watched when I was a child.

In particular right now, a show that I think routinely involved time-travel. I think it was British though I may be wrong. Had a time machine with a sort of transporter pad and a robot head face thing to one side. Looked like this I think:

And I think the time-travelling kids had some sort of return-buttons on their belt-buckles?

(EDIT: Might have been located in a medieval tower, which is where the machine sent them back to? Think it was destroyed at some point. Recall it laying all smashed up like the tower had collapsed on it.)

Pretty sure this was well before The Girl From Tomorrow. Possibly Pink Windmill/Puddle Lane era? (that’d be 1984-1988) That’d be the same period at that schools educational drama about the ghost of a knight that lived in a tower, right?

It might have been the same show that had a bus that turned into an airship? I remember one with a propeller at the back, lots of bicycle parts used.

Same era as a film I used to re-rent at the video rental place up the road (along with the Claymation Adventures of Mark Twain) that had a flying tandem bicycle in it with flapping wings (It wasn’t in black and white, but was very grey, so pretty sure it was filmed in 70s/early-80s England that one).

 

Another one, another Australian import I think, had something to do with a psychedelic clock in a shopping centre and some small glass balls that were missing from it.

Police uniform thoughts

I haven’t been too keen on police uniforms in the UK for some time. With all the changes in equipment over the years, particularly with the addition of the stab-vests/webbing that everything hangs from, it’s made it look rather ad-hoc as well as making it a lot heavier for the officers. And while there’s a definite cost involved, at some point there’s got to be a review to redress this and boil down all the add-ons into singular combined pieces of equipment, lest the domestic police officer end up hauling backpacks of gear around like Marines on a march.

Last night something specific crystallised about it though, and that’s the high-visibility jackets and patches that are now part of the selection.

I don’t know about you, but I associate high-visibility jackets with emergencies; officers or paramedics dragging wounded people to safety, running into burning buildings, floods, disasters, high-peril, high-drama events.

And I think for that reason it’s made me more wary of police patrols. I know it may sound silly, but by donning those same jackets it’s taken an approachable, respectable entity that’s supposed to be a part of a community and turned them into walking ominous suggestions that we’re in an emergency whenever they’re around.

The jackets make me think of disasters rather than safety. And I suspect if you stop to think about it, others would agree.

I doubt anything will be done about it though. To incorporate things like stab-vests, utility-belts, visibility aids and communications into would take time and effort to test, refine and deploy. I’m sure there are more than a few maker/hacker/artistic types like myself who’d leap at the chance to add some oil to smooth the grinding gears of society like this, but frankly even if we came up with a magical ideal new kit layup it would never see use as there are vested interests in legacy supply-chains. What an independent agent or company could make in-house for a tiny budget, a supplier will charge hundreds of times more for (as well as angling to further lock you in to them in future (EG; proprietary communications systems, maintenance contracts, promise of discounts)).

That said though, assuming you already had designs, getting equipment manufactured on a bespoke basis (sending the design out for manufacture by a generic 3rd party) would come in a LOT cheaper. The only issues that might remain are again how much sway those existing supply chains can pressure the decision-makers on choosing it or similarly influence those that decide whether equipment meets specification (as has happened before, altering spec so only one pre-selected choice is possible).

OpenCV in citizen media 3D compositing?

Last week someone put an interesting item onto Hack-A-Day; someone who’d built their own “CT Scanner”. And functionally it is. It takes x-ray images from all angles around an object, which they then scan into a computer and let it turn the platen images into a 3D model. I believe the latter was done using OpenCV scripts.

The recent and ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests in New York City have generated a large amount of citizen-media footage (albeit released without sound in many cases, to avoid breaking outdated wiretapping laws).

If key events observed from different positions could be found to align the timelines of footage, it seems plausible that the same scripts used in the CT scanner could be used to assemble a crude animated 3D model of the events as they unfold.

For purposes of evidence gathering and contextualisation of the news stories, it seems this could be a very useful tool, rendering isolated and often repeated footage into singular but multifaceted logs of events from every recorded angle.

I doubt it would be of high quality, due to all the variables and low-quality of the footage used, but it could perhaps knit together the results with the events that preceded them, and at least help in giving a more rounded view of events.

9/11/2011

I remember something from “Tales of the Afternow”. A quote about the millennium; “People thought the world would end then.. and the world did end, just nobody noticed”.

More than a few people have said they can’t believe the 9/11 attacks happened a decade ago; that they feel like they happened just a short time ago.
For something to be relegated to our past, we have to be able to forget it, to let other memories over-write, add or subtract from them. We overcome through distraction, of letting life go on and not dwelling. But in this last ten years I doubt there’s been a single day when the attacks haven’t been exposed to us in the media in some form. The events have been kept fresh for the world for 3562 days, fresh in our minds, never allowed to be relegated to memory. It’s always just happened yesterday.

The world ended on 9/11/2001, because time stopped.

As a small aside, the day of the 7/7 bombings in London my sister got a call from an acquaintance of hers in Scotland telling her he couldn’t believe it. Not because of what had happened, but because it was all a conspiracy, it was all being faked just to scare “us” (him).

Distance is a powerful aid to delusion. Just because you can’t comprehend a thing, doesn’t mean it’s a lie.

Corporate conspiracy theory

With the 10yr anniversary of the 9/11 attacks coming up, my mind turns to the various conspiracy theories of the world. Many of them these days revolve around large business interests, and their apparent involvement in world disasters due to their ability to profit from them.

The majority of the people in the world, work for someone. That is, there are far more employees than there are employers. I’m not sure it would be possible for that to be the reverse. I’m going to go out on a fairly sturdy-feeling limb and say there are less people in the world with first-hand experience of running a business than there are who don’t. Further it seems those who don’t contain a large proportion of people that feel business leaders got to that position purely on an ability to “be evil”. Or that is to say, bend the rules, ignore human rights or what-have-you. Basically do whatever it takes to get to the top.

Very few people have first-hand knowledge of actually running a business. I am far from a good businessman, and I acknowledge this. But a large portion of business is essentially gambling. You gamble your money to get in stock in the hope it will sell and you’ll make back more than you paid so you can pay yourself, your staff, and afford to either have some fall-back savings in future or gamble/invest even larger amounts for bigger returns in future.
If you buy in lots of food and it goes off before you can sell it, you’ve made a loss. A business owner would have to pay to have the remains properly disposed of. A “good” business owner might sell that food to a pig-farm, or find some other way to recoup some of the losses or even make a smaller profit off the larger failure. Selling unsellable electronic goods for scrap metal as another more common example.

Of course, doing this may not be legal. I’m pretty sure pigs have to be fed on approved feeds these days. But again there’s a gamble there.
The larger the business, the less likely it is a single person could be charged as the blame could be spread across many people. So the risk of recouping the loss is weighed against the likely fines or penalties that might be received. I doubt it would be hard to find examples where even if caught the business could still turn a profit from the situation after fines. Think of it like a strategy game; sacrifice a few units but still come out ahead.

The biggest businesses are essentially the ones that have proven themselves most capable of exploiting changing situations (at least previously). The level of situational exploitation they’re capable of is hard to conceive of for the majority of people. And I feel it’s because of that that most corporate conspiracy theories exist; people being unable to imagine how a business could exploit Situation-X as it happens or after the fact, so they must have been planning it to happen like that all along.

That said though, these common business practices would make it very difficult to separate any ACTUAL conspiracy from them.