What’s that rhyme?

Now that I have the file-count limit sorted out on the audio system in my car, it’s much better at playing songs in random order. Now I’m hearing Yes, Linda Ronstadt, Steely Dan, Toni Price, and Jackson Browne, and not just artists in the alphabetic A’s and B’s.

Thus, the other day I heard a song from Los Lobos’ great album The Neighborhood. The song that came on was the one that opens the album, Down on the Riverbed, and it struck me, as it has before, that there’s a slight oddness to the rhyme in the chorus. It goes like this (emphases mine):

Down on the riverbed,
Down on the riverbed,
Down on the riverbed,
I asked my lover for her h...

...for her h...

You want it to be head, don’t you? I certainly do. They set you up with bed thrice, and what rhymes with bed? Well, head, most assuredly.

Of course, it’s hand; Down on the riverbed, I asked my lover for her hand.

Trips my brain up every time I hear that song.

Highway 61 revisited

As I sit here with a Cesária Évora CD on in the house, I have an update to the car AV system issue, wherein it couldn’t stop playing Bob Dylan. That is, I found out why it’s playing a disproportionate amount of Dylan.

I noticed, as it played more songs, that it was not just playing a lot of Bob Dylan and the Beatles, but that it wasn’t playing anything beyond C in the alphabet. I have the files on the microSD organized in folders (directories) based on the artists and albums, so at the root level there’s a Bob Dylan folder, and that has sub-folders called Blonde On Blonde, Blood On the Tracks, Desire, and so on. In those folders are the MP3 files for the songs. I used the touch-screen interface to look in the folder of the current song, then went up to the artist level, and then to the root. I scrolled the list of artists, which should have gone from 10,000 Maniacs to Youssou N’Dour. But the list stopped somewhere near the end of the Cs.

Ha! There appears to be a limit to the number of directories. And with only around 1000 songs active, instead of the 4000 on the chip, the chances of Dylan had been multiplied by 4 for each play. No wonder I was getting so much! OK, I can work around that limit.

I took the chip into the house, put it in my computer, and wrote a script to pull all the files out to the root level, so there are no directories/folders. /Bob Dylan/Desire/03 Mozambique.mp3 became /Bob Dylan-Desire-03 Mozambique.mp3, and now I have 3984 files in the root directory, and no folders. Pop the chip back into the car system, and try it out.

Great! There’s a D... now an L... a G. Much better!

But it didn’t take too long to notice that it never played anything beyond L. I went to the list and scrolled again (and was happy that one can scroll backward, and it wraps around).

This time, it was easy to tell exactly: the files in each directory are numbered sequentially by the system, and with everything in the root directory I could see what the actual limit is: 2500 files, exactly. That’s horrid!

2500 files might be a reasonable limit when microSD chips only went up to 2 GB. But that was a while ago, and it’s perfectly easy to have 8000 files or more now, and higher-capacity chips are coming out all the time. It’s absolutely ridiculous to build in limits like this, considering how the technology is moving forward. Any reasonable file system has tossed such limits away long ago.

I’m trying to delete 1500 files from the microSD card, but it’s tough: the music on my computer is already selected from my far more extensive CD collection, and represents my favourites. How do I pick 1500 favourites to eliminate? The first 500 went gradually, but it wasn’t too awful. The second 500 were a real challenge. I’m still working on the last 500, and it’s very tough!

I’ll be writing to Pioneer, to express my displeasure and to see if there’s anything that can be done. And I guess I’ll go back to streaming the music from my BlackBerry, which still has all the songs, and for which there’s no such limitation.

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Update, 4 p.m.: Pioneer's customer service gave me a prompt response, which confirms what I saw:

The maximum number of files on USB or SD that this unit will support is 2500. Currently there are no plans to change that specification. Your feedback is appreciated and will be passed along to product planning.

Patterns in randomness: the Bob Dylan edition

The human brain is very good — quite excellent, really — at finding patterns. We delight in puzzles that involve pattern recognition... consider word-search puzzles, the Where’s Waldo stuff, and the game Set. We’re also great at giving patterns amusing interpretations, as we do when we fancy that clouds look like ducks or castles — or when we claim to see images of Jesus in Irish hillsides, pieces of wood, paper towels, and store receipts. Remember the cheese sandwich with the Virgin Mary on it, which sold on eBay for $28,000 in 2004? Miraculous, indeed.

It’s with the knowledge that we find apparent patterns in randomness that I approach this puzzling aspect of the random play feature of my car stereo. I’ve stuck in a microSD card that has about 4000 songs on it. I’ve put it on random play. And it appears to be playing songs in random order.

But it sure seems to be playing a lot of Dylan.

Bob, not Thomas. I like Bob Dylan, of course; that’s why I have quite a bit of him on the microSD card. But, for instance, on one set of local errands, it played two Dylan songs, something else, another Dylan, two other songs, then another Dylan. Four out of seven? Seems a bit odd.

Now, I know that if you ask a typical person which sequence is more likely to come up in a lottery drawing, 1-2-3-4-5, or 57-12-31-46-9, he will say not only that the latter is more likely, but that if the former came up he’d be sure something was amiss. In fact, they’re equally likely, and are as likely as any other pre-determined five-number sequence, but the one that looks like a pattern is one we think can’t be random. Similarly, it’s certainly possible to randomly pick four Dylan songs out of seven — or even four in a row, for that matter. And if there’s a bug in the algorithm that the audio system uses, why would it opt for Dylan, and not, say, Eric Clapton or the Beatles, both of which I also have plenty of on the chip?

So I played around with some numbers. Let’s make some simplifying assumptions, just to test the general question. Assume I have 20 songs from each artist, and a total of 4000 songs (and, so, 200 artists). If I play seven songs, how likely is it that two will be by the same artist?

It’s easier to figure out how likely it is that there won’t be repetitions. The first song can be anything. The likelihood that the second will be of a different artist than the first is (4000-20)/3999, about 99.5%. The likelihood that the third will differ from both of those is (4000-40)/3998. Repeat that four more times and multiply the probabilities: there’s a 90.4% chance of seven different artists in seven songs... meaning that there’s about a 9.6% chance of at least one repetition. Probably more likely than we might think.

Let’s look at Dylan, specifically. I have about 120 of his songs on there (3% of the total; maybe I should delete some, but that’s a separate question). What are the chances of having no Dylan in seven songs? No Dylan for the first is 3880/4000, 97% (makes sense: 3% chance of Dylan in any one selection). Continuing, no Dylan, still, for the second is 3879/3999. Repeat five more times and multiply: 71.3% chance of no Dylan, so there’s a 28.7% chance of at least one Dylan song if we play seven.

What about the chances of at least two Bob Dylan songs... a repetition of Dylan? Well, we figured out no Dylan above. Let’s figure out exactly one, and then add them. For the first to be Dylan and none of the others, we have 120/4000 * 3880/3999 * 3879/3998 * 3878/3997 * 3877/3996 * 3876/3995 * 3875/3994. About 2.5%. It’s the same for one Dylan in any other position — the numerators and denominators can be mixed about. So the chances of exactly one Dylan song out of seven is 2.5 * 7, or 17.5%. Add that to the chances of zero, 71.3 + 17.5 = 88.8%, so there’s an 11.2% chance of at least two Dylan songs in a mix of seven songs.

In other words, it’s a better than one in four chance that I’ll hear at least one Bob Dylan song, and a better than one in ten chance that I’ll hear at least two of them every time I take a 20- or 30-minute ride. Thrown in some confirmation bias, where I forget about the trips that had Clapton and the Beatles and Billy Joel and Carole King, but no Dylan, and I guess the system is working the way it’s supposed to.

But, damn, it plays a lot of Bob Dylan!

Bird-Mountain

Daniel Grayling Fogelberg would have turned 60 today, had he not left us at the age of 56, taken by prostate cancer. His home town, Peoria, Illinois, dedicated a memorial garden to him in its Riverfront Park last year.

I first came across Dan Fogelberg’s music with his second album, Souvenirs, in 1974 — it’s playing on my stereo as I write this. His subsequent Captured Angels and Nether Lands stay together in my mind as my two favourites; I can’t choose between them. He’s probably best known, though, for songs from Phoenix and The Innocent Age.

This song, which he wrote for his father and recorded on The Innocent Age, seems appropriate to dedicate to Dan today:

I thank you for the music and your stories of the road.
I thank you for the freedom when it came my time to go.
I thank you for the kindness and the times when you got tough.
And, papa, I don’t think I said I love you near enough.

The leader of the band is tired and his eyes are growing old,
But his blood runs through my instrument and his song is in my soul.
My life has been a poor attempt to imitate the man.
I’m just a living legacy to the leader of the band.

— Dan Fogelberg, from Leader of the Band

Netflix abuses its customers

In December, I complained about Netflix streaming: not enough of what I want to watch is available for streaming. But some is, and getting one DVD at a time in addition to the streaming makes up for the lack, at least somewhat. In the end, then, we decided to keep the $10 Netflix subscription.

But Netflix has just announced that it’s increasing the cost of that plan by 60%. That’s a lot!

They’re actually doing it by separating the streaming and DVD plans, and charging $8 for each. Here’s what they say about it in their email message:

We are separating unlimited DVDs by mail and unlimited streaming into two separate plans to better reflect the costs of each. Now our members have a choice: a streaming only plan, a DVD only plan, or both.

Your current $9.99 a month membership for unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs will be split into 2 distinct plans:

Plan 1: Unlimited Streaming (no DVDs) for $7.99 a month

Plan 2: Unlimited DVDs, 1 out at-a-time (no streaming) for $7.99 a month

Your price for getting both of these plans will be $15.98 a month ($7.99 + $7.99). You don’t need to do anything to continue your memberships for both unlimited streaming and unlimited DVDs.

These prices will start for charges on or after September 1, 2011.

The good part, I suppose, is that people who do only want one of the services can save $2 a month (let’s skip the penny here or there). But the assholes nice people at Netflix are doing a massive 60% rate hike for those who want the same package they’ve been using.

And one thing that’s particularly irritating about this is that if Cablevision, Time Warner Cable, Comcast, or Verizon wanted a 60% rise in rates, they’d have to get permission for it from regulatory agencies, and they wouldn’t be allowed to dump it all on us at once. Netflix has no such restriction, and can do what it wants... it’s up to us to say No! by not buying their service.

And so I’m really undecided about what to do. On the one hand, I’ve gotten used to the streaming, despite its limitations, and it’s nice to have stuff available and to watch things on the laptop when I’m travelling (in the U.S.). It’s tempting to just drop the DVD service and continue with $8/month for the streaming.

On the other hand, I very much want to give Netflix a clear message that they can go fuck themselves, and hope they lose 80% of their customers and go out of business.

Clapton is God!

I’m at the IETF meeting in Prague this week, so there’s little blogging to be done. But I wanted to note that Eric Clapton turns 66 today, and to give you two of my favourites of his performances. Enjoy.

Happy Eltonmas

Today is Sir Elton John’s birthday; he’s 64. Here are two of my favourites of his songs. Enjoy the next eleven and a half minutes.

Watson’s third day

I hadn’t planned to make three posts, one per day, about Watson on Jeopardy!, but there ya go. The third day — the second game of the two-game tournament — was perhaps even more interesting than the first two.

Watson seemed to have a lot more trouble with the questions this time, sometimes making runs of correct answers, but at other times having confidence levels well below the buzz-in threshold. Also, at many of those times its first answer was not the correct one, and sometimes its second and even its third were not either. Some of the problems seemed to be in the categories, but some just seemed to deal with particular clues, regardless of category.

Watson also did not have domination of the buzzer this time, even when it had enough confidence to buzz in. I don’t know whether they changed anything — I suspect not, since they didn’t say so. It’s likely that Mr Jennings and Mr Rutter simply were more practiced at anticipating and timing their button-presses by then (remember that the three days’ worth of shows were all recorded at the same time, a month ago).

Those factors combined to make Watson not the run-away winner going into the Final Jeopardy! round that it was in the first game. In yesterday's final round (category: 19th-century novelists), all three contestants (and your reporter, at home) came up with the right answer, and Watson pulled far ahead with an aggressive bet that Mr Rutter didn’t have the funds to match. Mr Jennings, meanwhile, chose to be conservative: assuming he would lose to Watson (the first game’s results made that certain), he made his bet of only $1000 to ensure that he would come in second even if he got the answer wrong.

The result, then, was Watson winning the two-game match handily, and earning $1 million for two charities. Other charities will get half of Mr Jennings’s and Mr Rutter’s winnings (whether that’s before or after taxes, I don’t know; I also don’t know whether taxes will reduce Watson’s million-dollar contribution).

One other thing: in a New Scientist article yesterday, talking about the second day and the first Final Jeopardy! round, Jim Giles makes a sloppy mistake (but see update below):

Watson’s one notable error came right at the end, when it was asked to name the city that features two airports with names relating to World War II. Jennings and Rutter bet almost all their money on Chicago, which was the correct answer. Watson went for Toronto.

Even so, the error showed another side to Watson’s intelligence: knowing that it was unsure about the answer, the machine wagered less than $1000 on its answer.

Of course, Watson’s wager had nothing to do with how sure it was about the answer: it had to place the bet before the clue was revealed. Its wager had something to do with the category, but likely was far more heavily controlled by its analysis of the game position and winning strategy. In determining its bets, it runs through all the bets it and its opponents might make, and decides on a value that optimizes its own position. And its strategy in the second game was different from that in the first

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Update: The New Scientist article was updated shortly after it was published. It now says this:

Even so, the error did not hurt Watson too much. Knowing that it was far ahead of Jennings and Rutter, the machine wagered less than $1000 on its answer.

Watson’s second day

Commenting on yesterday’s entry, The Ridger notes this:

I find looking at the second-choice answers quite fascinating. "Porcupine" for what stiffens a hedgehog’s bristles, for instance. There is no way that would be a human’s second choice (after keratin). Watson is clearly getting to the answers by a different route than we do.

That’s one way to look at it, and clearly it’s true that Watson goes about determining answers very differently from the way humans do — Watson can’t reason, and it’s all about very sophisticated statistical associations.

Consider that both humans (in addition to this one, at home) got the Final Jeopardy question with no problem, in seconds... but Watson had no idea (and, unfortunately, we didn’t get to see the top-three analysis that we saw in the first two rounds). My guess is that the question (the answer) was worded in a manner that made it very difficult for the computer to pick out the important bits. It also didn’t understand the category, choosing Toronto in the category U.S. Cities, which I find odd (that doesn’t seem a hard category for Watson to suss).

But another way to look at it is that a human wouldn’t have any second choice for some of these questions, but Watson always does (as well as a third), by definition (well, or by programming). In the case of the hedgehog question that The Ridger mentions, keratin had 99% confidence, porcupine had 36%, and fur had 8%. To call fur a real third choice is kind of silly, as it was so distant that it only showed up because something had to be third.

But even the second choice was well below the buzz-in threshold. That it was as high as it was, at 36% confidence, does, indeed, show Watson’s different thought process — there’s a high correlation between hedgehog and porcupine, along with the other words in the clue. Nevertheless, Watson’s analysis correctly pushed that well down in the answer bin as it pulled out the correct answer at nearly 100% confidence.

In fact, I think most adult humans do run the word porcupine through their heads in the process of solving this one. It’s just that they rule it out so quickly that it doesn’t even register as a possibility. That sort of reasoning is beyond what Watson can do. In that sense it’s behaving like a child, who might just leave porcupine as a candidate answer, lacking the knowledge and experience to toss it.

No one will be mistaking a computer for a human any time soon, though Watson probably is the closest we’ve come to something that could pass the Turing test. However good it can do at Jeopardy! — and from the perspective of points, it’s doing fabulously (and note how skilled it was at pulling all three Daily Doubles) — it would quickly fall on its avatar-face if we actually tried to converse with it.

Watson’s first day

Interesting.

Watson did very well on its first day. In order to have time to explain things and introduce the concept of Watson, they set it up so that only two games are played over the three days. The first day was for the first round, and the second day (this evening) will have Double Jeopardy and Final Jeopardy.

It wasn’t surprising that there were a few glitches, where Watson didn’t fully get the question — for instance, answering leg, rather than missing a leg, in describing the anatomical oddity of an Olympic winner. And, as we knew might happen, Watson repeated an incorrect answer from Ken Jennings, because the computer has no way to know what the other contestants have said.

What I found interesting, though, is that Watson does have a very strong advantage with the buzzer. Despite the attempts to smooth that out by setting up a mechanical system whereby Watson sends a signal to cause a button to be physically pushed, and despite whatever the humans can do through anticipation, it’s clear that people just can’t match the computer’s reactions. Almost every time Watson was highly confident of its answer — a green bar (see below) — it won the buzz. Surely, on things like the names of people in Beatles songs, Mr Jennings and Mr Rutter were as confident of the answer as Watson was, and had the answers ready well before Alex finished reading. Yet Watson won the buzz on every one of those.

It was fun to have a little of Watson’s thought process shown: at the bottom of the screen, we saw Watson’s top three answer possibilities, along with its confidence for each, shown as a percentage bar that was coloured red, yellow, or green, depending upon the percentage. That was interesting whether or not Watson chose to buzz in. On a Harry Potter question for which the answer was the villain, Voldemort, Watson’s first answer was Harry Potter — it didn’t understand that the question was looking for the bad guy, even though the whole category related to bad guys. But its confidence in the answer was low (red, and well below the buzz threshold), it didn’t buzz in, and Mr Rutter gave the correct answer (which had been Watson’s second choice).

Of course, they didn’t use any audio or video clues, according to the agreement — Watson can neither hear nor see — but they didn’t seem to pull any punches on the categories or types of questions. It feels like a normal Jeopardy! game.

Oh, and by the way: the TiVo has it marked as copy-protected, so I can’t put it on a DVD. Damn. I don’t know whether regular Jeopardy! games are that way or not; I’ve never recorded one before.

Jeopardy! tomorrow

Monday through Wednesday are the days when the Jeopardy! games will air that pit IBM Research’s Watson computer against former champions Ken Jennings and Brad Rutter.

My TiVo is set to record them, and it’s also recorded last week’s NOVA program, Smartest Machine on Earth (which you can watch on the PBS site). I’m eager to see how the games, recorded last month, came out.

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Update, 15 Feb, answer to Nathaniel’s question in the comments: Ken Jennings says this, on his blog:

On Twitter, Watson (okay, his human handlers) have said that video will be posted on Watson’s website on Thursday, for those unable to watch one or more of the games live. You know: non-Americans, the gainfully employed, the Tivo-less, those with significant others expecting a romantic night out tonight instead of a quiz show, etc.

On streaming movies

A few months ago, I decided to try Netflix, after eschewing it for a long time. I never liked the idea that I have to pick one or two DVDs to have on hand, and that has to do for, say, a three-day weekend when it’s cold and blustery, and I feel like snuggling in and watching. What if the DVD I happen to have isn’t what I feel like watching right now? Maybe there had been a drama at the top of my queue when they sent it, but today I just want something light and comedic. Or maybe I did watch what I have, and there are still two days left with, now, nothing to watch because there’s no time to exchange a disc in the mail.

What won me over this time was the streaming. For the monthly fee, less than $10 per month, I get one DVD at a time by mail... but I can also stream anything, any time. I can watch on my computer, and I can also buy a device for my TV that will stream (in high definition, even) the movies there. That sounded great! The DVD is backup, for when something I want isn’t available for streaming, and most of the time it’ll be stream, stream, stream. I can even watch on my computer when I’m travelling! I bought a Roku box, and signed up.

The first thing I found, as I populated my queue, is that most of the things I want to watch are not available for streaming. They tell me, when I call customer support, that there are over 11,000 titles that can be streamed. And they’re right. If you want to watch the Law and Order TV series, or Barney the Dinosaur shows, you’re laughing. And, yes, there’s plenty of other stuff too. It’s just that almost everything I wanted to put on my queue is DVD only.

Now, of course, that speaks to my preferences, and one could say that it’s not Netflix’s fault. Only, I bought into the hype that the streaming would get me what I want, and, alas, to a large extent it doesn’t. I did find some foreign films that I’ve put on my streaming queue, and a few other things, as well. But for the most part, I’m left with one DVD at a time, and exactly the problem that I thought I’d have, which stopped me from signing up for Netflix before streaming.

And then someone suggested a BBC series called House of Cards (also series 2 and series 3), and I looked it up... it was streamable! Great; I added it to the queue and watched two episodes. When I went for the third, I found that it was no longer on my queue. Say what?

That was when I called customer support, and that was when they told me that they have over 11,000 titles for streaming. That was also when they told me that they negotiate streaming licenses with the content providers, and that the licenses for House of Cards and a few other things that had been on my queue had expired, and they were no longer available for streaming.

Netflix say that their goal is to get more and more available for streaming, but here’s the thing: it’s not up to them. They have to negotiate licensing contracts with the content providers — they can’t just buy the DVDs and make them available for streaming. And if the content providers are asking a lot of money for those licenses, Netflix can only afford to pay that for the titles that are sufficiently popular. If not enough people are streaming something, it doesn’t pay for Netflix to maintain a streaming license for it. So the whole system falls apart, and only the popular stuff (and the stuff the content owners are willing to let go cheap) is available. And that’s not what I was looking for.

Only, I’ve already paid for the Roku box. Does it make sense for me to kill my Netflix subscription now, and have an $80 device sitting there doing nothing? Is it worth the $10 a month to me, in order to get the streaming that I do have, along with the one DVD at a time?

Oh, and watching while I’m travelling? Yes, that works as long as I have an IP address in the United States. When I was in China, Netflix blocked the streaming, because the content licenses are only for use in the U.S.

Just be aware that as long as the content providers have a stranglehold on the system, nothing is as simple as it seems, and anything can change at any time.

Blogging songs?

On the radio program Soundcheck today, they had singer/songwriter Jonathan Mann as a guest. Mr Mann started writing a new song every day on the first of 2009, and he’s continued it since — he performs each song, and posts a video of it to YouTube. (His web site is here, and his song-a-day project is here.)

This reminds me of my blogging goal of writing a post in these pages every day. In a number of ways, it’s similar, though Mr Mann not only writes, but also performs and makes the video. He, too, watches the news of the day, and often takes his material from news items (he recently did one on flight attendant Steven Slater, as did I; his is not safe for work). I’d say he’s more entertaining than I am: you do not want to hear me sing.

I like his approach, and I’ll be interested to see how long he wants to keep up the one-a-day pace.

His song for yesterday, day 591, is about the Tea Party nuts. You should definitely go have a listen to that one. Here’s the chorus:

And the hate builds up
And Glenn Beck cries
Ann Coulter rants and raves
And O’Reilly screams

You ain’t never gonna reason with these folks
They think that Obama was born in Kenya
Ain’t never gonna reason with these folks
They think Sarah Palin would make a great president
Ain’t never gonna reason with ’em

We’re going to the zoo, zoo, zoo...

I paid a visit last weekend to the Bronx Zoo, my first in a number of years. I have very mixed feelings about zoos. On the one hand, many of them work for the animals, through their support of habitat-sustainability programs and efforts to protect endangered and threatened species. On the other, I question the ethics of capturing and imprisoning animals for our amusement. There have also been cases of multiple animal deaths in some zoos, calling their treatment of the animals into question.

I was surprised first by the cost of admission. I don’t remember what it cost the last time I was there, and perhaps I got spoiled by the free admission to the National Zoo in Washington, DC, but the sign over the ticket booth shocked me: $27 per adult for the Total Experience. Below that, it said that General Admission tickets are also available, and they turned out to be $15 each. We went for that.

Our first stop was the Zoo Center building, which includes a rhinoceros. And it kicked things off to a bad start: a solitary rhino lay supine on a concrete slab, while visitors snapped flash photos of its profile from a short distance away. The animal looked severely depressed, if I may anthropomorphize, and it was certainly a pitiable sight.

Let’s go see the butterflies! They won’t be crammed into a too-small, too-dark enclosure. They’ll be fluttering around, doing what butterflies do. Ah, here it is, the Butterfly Garden. What? Not included in the general admission, this is $3 extra per person.

Next stop, the gorillas. Ho!, but here, again: the Congo Gorilla Forest, home to gorillas, mandrills, and okapi, is another $3-per-person additional charge.

We began to think that the Bronx Zoo is now a pay-by-the-animal place. And we were unhappy.

Fortunately, it got better after that. It turned out that those first two places we went were the only extra-charge animal exhibits in the zoo, apart from the Children’s Zoo section. So we got all the bad-experience stuff hitting us at once. The giraffes, zebras, ibexes, nyalas, red pandas, birds, and lemurs, as well as the lions and tigers and bears, were all freely accessible, and the day wound up being pleasant after all.

I have to wonder, though, about the cost of a family visit. Remember that this is in the Bronx. There are affluent areas of the Bronx, but there are also many poor families there. Two adults bringing three kids for a Total Experience, plus parking, comes to $130... and that’s before the inevitable and overpriced sodas, hot dogs, ice cream, and whatnot. Wednesdays are pay-what-you-like days, but not everyone has the ability to go on Wednesday, and $150 or more for a day out with the kids is unaffordable for many Bronx residents.

Sucks and the City

Two years ago, I saw the (first) Sex and the City movie, and wrote in these pages about how I thought the men who dissed it on principle were being silly.

Today I saw the new movie, Sex and the City 2. In terms of being completely horrible, it’s everything the first movie wasn’t. Badly written, stupidly acted, and inanely costumed, even by SatC standards, it has nothing going for it. It’s just about the worst movie I’ve seen in a couple of years.

The dialogue is stilted and dumb, and the writers took every opportunity to stick in every tired one-liner joke they could dig up. As Miranda is about to be driven off for a day of shopping in Abu Dhabi, she shouts out the car window, “Abu Dhabi doo!”

Oy.

I’m saying this as a fan of the TV series, and as someone who enjoyed the first movie: if you haven’t already seen the new one, give it a miss. If you absolutely must see it, at least wait until you can rent it and watch it at home. It’s cheaper that way, and gives you the option of turning it off when you’ve had enough.

Contradancing at NEFFA

Here’s a video clip from last Saturday evening’s dance — it’ll give an idea of how many people were there, dancing and having fun.

Not so big a bang

Friends and acquaintances periodically tell me that, as someone in the science and technology field, I would love The Big Bang Theory, and I should check it out. And now the New York Times has published an article about the show.

The thing is, I have checked it out, and it’s not for me. The article notes that “many of the people who grouse [...] about the show have not seen very much of it,” and that some incorrectly think that it puts forth the stereotype of the “dumb blonde”. That’s not my problem with it; I just don’t find it funny.

I do have a bit of a problem with the other side of the stereotype: that it presents all the scientists as social misfits. Some are, yes, but certainly not all, and I’d say that it’s really a minority. People may get that perception because what such people do with their working lives is beyond the understanding of most others, but they do have lives outside of work. Most of the scientists I know are interesting people, with families and friends, with hobbies and interests, who enjoy art, culture, food, conversation, beer, and sports. They are not socially inept. (And, in fact, I suggest that someone unable to hold a conversation that doesn’t involve football is as much a “misfit” as one who can only talk about lab experiments.)

But, really, that’s a minor point: it’s meant to be silly, and I don’t take it seriously enough to be worried about that. It’s just, as I say, that I haven’t found the show funny, the few times I’ve taken it for a spin

What I really found interesting, though, was the final point in the article:

[Creator/producer/writer Chuck] Lorre said that the whole “challenge and joy” of a series like this is character development. “Maybe at the end of the day this will inspire some kids to go into physics,” he added, “just like ‘Cheers’ inspired countless young people to go into bars.”

It’s a scary thought that “Cheers inspired countless young people to go into bars,” though I suppose it’s true. That never occurred to me; I wonder whether Seinfeld prompted folks to be complete dufuses, and whether Green Acres moved people out of the cities and onto farms. What, I wonder, did Gomer Pyle do for Marine Corps recruitment?

Anyway, I can’t imagine that Mr Lorre really thinks that portrayal of scientists will encourage viewers to follow the characters into scientific fields. But maybe I’ll give the show another try.

Follow-up on TV content

In a recent post, I talked about television content delivery and pricing. What I didn’t mention in that post, particularly when I talked about the lack of choice, is that there is another option for content delivery (besides cable/fiber and satellite): one can get the content online, through a service such as Hulu or Apple TV.

For now, not everything is available through these services, and the limitations on available content might deter some potential users. On the other hand, for people who’re specifically looking in this direction because they don’t want the overblown content circus, getting what’s available online might be just the thing. And you don’t just have to watch it on your computer: there are setups to put it — in 1080p HD — on your television set.

To make this work, we’re really depending upon network neutrality. Because one is receiving television content over the Internet, using the same service provider that would like to provide television content through their own dedicated service at additional cost, it seems clear that the service provider has an incentive to make the experience less than ideal. If service providers are permitted to block, slow down, or otherwise interfere with this kind of Internet usage, they can steer customers away from it, and back to the provider’s television service.

When I was on the Internet Architecture Board, I began setting up a technical plenary session about net neutrality for the Stockholm IETF meeting. IAB member Marcelo Bagnulo took it over when I left the IAB, and he moderated the session. You can see the result as a transcript (search for “4. Network Neutrality”), with the slides here and here (PDFs).

TV: content vs service

As 2009 came to a close, Time Warner Cable narrowly averted the removal of Fox channels (owned by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation) from its channel lineup, and Cablevision failed to do the same for Scripps Networks’ Food Network and HGTV channels. The issue, of course, is money: the content providers want to raise the fees for their channels, and the service providers want to avoid passing on yet another round of higher fees to their subscribers. (See also here, and here.)

These sorts of disputes amount to a form of extortion, where the consumer winds up as the victim. We could say that it’s a free market, and we should let free-market economics decide the matter, but that would be ignoring the monopoly situations that exist here. Whether you like Fox News or not, it’s clear that it’s a unique service, and that lovers of Bill O’Reilly, Glenn Beck, and their ilk can find that programming from no other source. The Fox channels also carry popular programs such as The Simpsons and American Idol. Similarly, if one wants to watch Rachael Ray, Bobby Flay, Mario Batali, and Emeril, one finds them on The Food Network... or not.

The content providers know that, and use the power they get from the popularity of their programming to make demands of the service providers, knowing they have them over a barrel, but the service providers are not innocent either. There’s little choice of service providers even in large markets, and no choice at all in the smaller markets. Where I live, I choose between Cablevision and Verizon... or I can switch to satellite, which is not an appealing option.

The result is that the service providers can charge pretty much what they want to, and can set up their packages as they please... and we, the consumers, are stuck with what they offer, or nothing.

And what they offer is designed to have us pay dearly for what we don’t want, in order to get what we do. A few years ago, the New York Yankees demanded that Cablevision carry their YES channels on the basic cable service, ostensibly “making them available to all subscribers,” rather than having only subscribers who wanted those channels pay the extra fee. The Yankees won, and the result was that all subscribers had to pay $2 more per month, whether we wanted the YES channels or not (I do not).

The same is true with many of the other price hikes that go on: ESPN, Fox, the Scripps channels... increased rates on these force rates up for all subscribers, because we don’t have the option to choose to take one, but not the others. And that is dictated by the service providers (and by the contracts that they agree to for the content). The content providers feel they have to hike up their charges to make up for lost advertising revenue, which has been on the wane for a while.

I can’t tell you how many channels I get on my Cablevision system now — the number has gone up from “a bunch”, to “a boatload”, to “more than one can imagine”, over time. But I can tell you how many I ever watch: sixteen. There are eight I use regularly, and eight more occasionally. And that’s it. I am paying for Fox, for sports (at least a dozen sports channels, and maybe more), for children’s programming, for old sitcoms, for music videos, and for the credulous garbage aired by “Discovery” and its sisters, all without wanting to.

And it’s no small amount. When I first got cable TV, I paid $30 a month for it, and even that seemed like a lot when I compared it to getting free TV over the airwaves, paid for by advertising. I’m now paying over $80 a month, when you add everything up — the basic fee, the rental on the cable box, the rental on the remote control for the cable box, the taxes and extra charges, and so on — and the next price hike comes at the whim of Scripps (or Fox, or ESPN, or the New York Yankees).

Scripps, of course, for its part, says that they’re not being paid what their content is worth, and they have to take a stand and demand proper compensation for it. It’s hard to argue with that, particularly since the subscribers (the customers, us) can’t weigh in, at least not in a meaningful way. Not with our wallets.

Here’s where regulation needs to step in... but not to force accommodation one way or another, as the courts did with the YES situation. The service providers should be required to offer channel selections à la carte. Subscribers should be able to pay for exactly the channels we want, and not to pay for those we don’t want. The service providers may certainly offer discounted packages for channel groupings, as they do today. But unlike today, customers should have a choice, channel by channel.

And then if Scripps wants to make Cablevision customers pay a few dollars per month more, we will have the option of saying “No,” by simply dropping those channels from our subscriptions, no longer forced to keep them in order to be able to watch PBS and CNN.

There are dire warnings going around that setting up channel selection that way will kill all the small channels, aimed a specific markets — that channels such as BET and Lifetime will disappear because not enough households will pay for them, when they have to pay directly. I don’t agree with that assessment, and neither does Consumers Union, which has been pushing for this for years.

À la carte pricing won’t happen unless we demand it, loudly, both to our service providers and to our regulators. So let’s go!

The Junior league

I recently watched the movie MASH — one of the best movies of the 1970s — for the gazillionth time, and noted something that had never caught my eye before: the screenplay was by Ring Lardner. Surprised, I pulled out my borrowed copy of Shut Up, He Explained, a collection of Ring Lardner rarities — I suspect that my friends from whom I borrowed it have long forgotten the loan; with luck, they’re not reading these pages — and had a look. Indeed, Mr Lardner died in 1933, long before the penning of the Korean War story (and, for that matter, long before the Korean War).

Ah, right: Ring Lardner, Jr. That last bit’s important. The younger Mr Lardner, son of the elder one, was a noted screenwriter who was imprisoned for refusing to answer questions posed by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, and had been fired and blacklisted by the studios as a result. As it turned out, his script was actually barely used in the movie, director Robert Altman preferring to have the actors improvise their parts. According to the extras on the DVD, Mr Lardner (Junior) was very much upset by that turn. He was, nonetheless, given sole credit for the screenplay, and, ironically, amid five nominations, the only Academy Award the movie won was for Mr Lardner’s work.

Junior.

I started thinking about other “Junior” folks in the entertainment industry — not the children of stars with different names (Liza Minnelli, Keifer Sutherland, Kate Hudson, Angelina Jolie, Michael Douglas, Mariska Hargitay, and many, many others), but ones who actually wear the “Junior” vest. In many cases, it’s the Juniors we know better than the fathers, at least as my generation sees it.

I grew up with Efrem Zimbalist, Jr, playing an FBI agent, and before that, in 77 Sunset Strip. Efrem, Senior, was a world renowned violinist, who retired from playing before I was born.

Sammy Davis, Jr, was one my my parents’ favourite performers, and I enjoyed his singing, dancing, and acting when I was a child. His father was a dancer who taught his son and got Junior’s career started. The younger Sammy’s star shone much brighter than the elder’s.

Ed Begley was a well known actor, who appeared in another of my favourite films, 12 Angry Men, and who won an Academy Award a few years later. He guest starred on a number of television shows that I watched as a child. Years later, I watched Ed Begley, Jr, in St Elsewhere, and he’s long been an environmental activist.

It’s easy to drop the “Junior”, and forget where the Senior was, in his day. And it’s funny how that seems less likely when the two generations don’t share one name.