Comments on: You Tube http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/ Random samplings from a universe of ideas. Sun, 22 Nov 2009 16:52:54 -0600 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8.4 hourly 1 By: adam http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/comment-page-1/#comment-12540 adam Wed, 22 Mar 2006 20:05:01 +0000 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/#comment-12540 I seem to recall seeing some cool parkour on youtube. And a lot of really sucky parkour. Such is the nature of this internerd of Gore's. I seem to recall seeing some cool parkour on youtube. And a lot of really sucky parkour. Such is the nature of this internerd of Gore’s.

]]> By: ALAN http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/comment-page-1/#comment-12539 ALAN Tue, 21 Mar 2006 21:45:40 +0000 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/#comment-12539 liked the rerence to ZAPPA one of the innovators of the base of all music ps wish cheney would take tony blair out for the day lol liked the rerence to ZAPPA one of the innovators of the base of all music ps wish cheney would take tony blair out for the day lol

]]> By: robert http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/comment-page-1/#comment-12538 robert Fri, 24 Feb 2006 06:55:55 +0000 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/#comment-12538 Whatever the technical failings of YouTube, it has made my day by throwing up three absolute gems - Prince playing like a demon on a tribute version of 'while my guitar gently weeps', with George Harrison's son on rhythm guitar, Frank Zappa, young and besuited, on the Steve Allen Show in1963, demonstrating the musical potential of the bicycle and an amazing drum solo (really) by Terry Bozzio at Montreaux - all in the space of a few minutes. To an illiberal non-cosmologist, with a soft spot for virtuoso rock musicians, perhaps the best thing yet to come out of Cosmic Variance. And the Kate Bush RocketMan video was quite as sweet as I remember its being. Whatever the technical failings of YouTube, it has made my day by throwing up three absolute gems – Prince playing like a demon on a tribute version of ‘while my guitar gently weeps’, with George Harrison’s son on rhythm guitar, Frank Zappa, young and besuited, on the Steve Allen Show in1963, demonstrating the musical potential of the bicycle and an amazing drum solo (really) by Terry Bozzio at Montreaux – all in the space of a few minutes. To an illiberal non-cosmologist, with a soft spot for virtuoso rock musicians, perhaps the best thing yet to come out of Cosmic Variance. And the Kate Bush RocketMan video was quite as sweet as I remember its being.

]]> By: Bob http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/comment-page-1/#comment-12537 Bob Fri, 24 Feb 2006 04:14:56 +0000 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/#comment-12537 Spyder, Sakura-chan, and Clifford, Thanks. I bookmarked each of those. Spyder, Sakura-chan, and Clifford,

Thanks. I bookmarked each of those.

]]> By: On the Plus Side… | Cosmic Variance http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/comment-page-1/#comment-12524 On the Plus Side… | Cosmic Variance Thu, 23 Feb 2006 02:54:34 +0000 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/#comment-12524 [...] …. I gave the midterm for my Electromagnetism class today. Stayed up until 1:30am putting the finishing touches on it, and then up again four and a half hours later to go in early and get it and its accompanying formula sheet (yeah, yeah, I’m getting soft, I know) photocopied, and ready to give to them at 8:45am in class. They had one hour of furious computing -and a bit of thinking- to do. These ones are hard to get right since you’ve got to gauge their ability to do enough in the short time allowed. Get it wrong (like I did with the equivalent mid term last year) and they just can require way longer to do it than they have time for. It is really important to recall that they are still young and don’t take all the same computational shortcuts that one does later in life. And recall that for upper-level courses I like to have a bit of fun new stuff in there too, so I had to think carefully about how to do that in one hour too. (The plan was to do this all with the aid of the atmostphere at the Cat and Fiddle, like last week’s midterm prep session, but in the end I got sucked in by tons of incredibly campy Queen videos -how come we never saw that aspect so clearly as kids?- on You Tube…., which made for a background which is more relevant than you think… more on that later.) [...] [...] …. I gave the midterm for my Electromagnetism class today. Stayed up until 1:30am putting the finishing touches on it, and then up again four and a half hours later to go in early and get it and its accompanying formula sheet (yeah, yeah, I’m getting soft, I know) photocopied, and ready to give to them at 8:45am in class. They had one hour of furious computing -and a bit of thinking- to do. These ones are hard to get right since you’ve got to gauge their ability to do enough in the short time allowed. Get it wrong (like I did with the equivalent mid term last year) and they just can require way longer to do it than they have time for. It is really important to recall that they are still young and don’t take all the same computational shortcuts that one does later in life. And recall that for upper-level courses I like to have a bit of fun new stuff in there too, so I had to think carefully about how to do that in one hour too. (The plan was to do this all with the aid of the atmostphere at the Cat and Fiddle, like last week’s midterm prep session, but in the end I got sucked in by tons of incredibly campy Queen videos -how come we never saw that aspect so clearly as kids?- on You Tube…., which made for a background which is more relevant than you think… more on that later.) [...]

]]> By: Clifford http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/comment-page-1/#comment-12536 Clifford Wed, 22 Feb 2006 23:47:12 +0000 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/#comment-12536 You're looking into this very wisely and deeply. I just think of it as a fun site where people upload all sorts of random bits of video that everyone can look at using a live stream. It is not ideal, but it is simply fun! I don't think you're stupid. Things only change when people go "that's fine, but....", to some extent. Yes, you have every right to complain and ask for it to be improved to suit your needs, and I am sure that everyone will benefit from the pressure you put on them. Thanks! In the meantime, I've just been having fun occasionally looking into it and finding some lost bit of video treasure and going "wow".... but then I'm just a big wide-eyed kid, really. Cheers, -cvj You’re looking into this very wisely and deeply. I just think of it as a fun site where people upload all sorts of random bits of video that everyone can look at using a live stream. It is not ideal, but it is simply fun!

I don’t think you’re stupid. Things only change when people go “that’s fine, but….”, to some extent. Yes, you have every right to complain and ask for it to be improved to suit your needs, and I am sure that everyone will benefit from the pressure you put on them. Thanks! In the meantime, I’ve just been having fun occasionally looking into it and finding some lost bit of video treasure and going “wow”…. but then I’m just a big wide-eyed kid, really.

Cheers,

-cvj

]]> By: Maynard Handley http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/comment-page-1/#comment-12535 Maynard Handley Wed, 22 Feb 2006 22:35:32 +0000 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/#comment-12535 Clifford, A wise man once said "The medium is the message". A medium that severely (and artificially) limits what you can do is something we should all be aware of and should protest. You may think I'm stupid. People thought it was stupid to worry much about TV supplying news, and televised presidential debates in the late 50's. I think, with 50 yrs of history behind, we can see that they were wrong, there was real cause for concern. The hope, of course, is that the medium will improve, that competition between Google video, YouTube, iTunes music store and so on will correct things. Maybe so, but it won't happen if people don't complain. (I'm not much convinced things will change in the appropriate direction even if we do complain, but we can at least try.) Clifford,
A wise man once said “The medium is the message”. A medium that severely (and artificially) limits what you can do is something we should all be aware of and should protest.

You may think I’m stupid. People thought it was stupid to worry much about TV supplying news, and televised presidential debates in the late 50’s. I think, with 50 yrs of history behind, we can see that they were wrong, there was real cause for concern.

The hope, of course, is that the medium will improve, that competition between Google video, YouTube, iTunes music store and so on will correct things.
Maybe so, but it won’t happen if people don’t complain.
(I’m not much convinced things will change in the appropriate direction even if we do complain, but we can at least try.)

]]> By: Clifford http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/comment-page-1/#comment-12534 Clifford Wed, 22 Feb 2006 18:03:05 +0000 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/#comment-12534 People love it because of the content, and are not so bothered by the software issues. Hurrah for content! -cvj People love it because of the content, and are not so bothered by the software issues. Hurrah for content!

-cvj

]]> By: Maynard Handley http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/comment-page-1/#comment-12533 Maynard Handley Wed, 22 Feb 2006 16:16:08 +0000 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/#comment-12533 Are people really so in love with TV that they think a site as pathetic as YouTube is worth praising? Here are people providing an extraordinarily lame search interface to an even lamer playback technology using a proprietary playback engine that provides performance inferior to QuickTime 1.0. (The audio/video sync is bad under the best of conditions and can easily get 30 second seconds to a minute out of sync because the video engine seems to have no awareness of the need to drop frames if either the network or the CPU cannot keep up.) To top it all, they refuse to provide a download ability so that you can use a better playback engine on your desktop. (Yeah, yeah, you can jump through various hoops to rig a download by typing in a special URL. At the end of that you then have a .flv file which is still useless unless you have an flv converter app, and those are all pretty pathetic.) I though (and still think) Google video was pretty lame (and likewise completely clueless about modern computer video technology), but compared to the competion they are absolute geniuses. And don't get me started on that PoC Democracy released in 0.8 version yesterday. This thing deserves to be shown to everyone as the dumb blomb of software --- gorgeous looking and completely idiotic. One of the reasons I left the computer video business after ten years working on QuickTime was because it appeared that no matter what one tried to do, sooner or later the stupidity of the people who populate TV land would infect what you were doing, and it seems that this rule is now holding up for TV on the web. Are people really so in love with TV that they think a site as pathetic as YouTube is worth praising? Here are people providing an extraordinarily lame search interface to an even lamer playback technology using a proprietary playback engine that provides performance inferior to QuickTime 1.0. (The audio/video sync is bad under the best of conditions and can easily get 30 second seconds to a minute out of sync because the video engine seems to have no awareness of the need to drop frames if either the network or the CPU cannot keep up.)
To top it all, they refuse to provide a download ability so that you can use a better playback engine on your desktop.

(Yeah, yeah, you can jump through various hoops to rig a download by typing in a special URL. At the end of that you then have a .flv file which is still useless unless you have an flv converter app, and those are all pretty pathetic.)

I though (and still think) Google video was pretty lame (and likewise completely clueless about modern computer video technology), but compared to the competion they are absolute geniuses.

And don’t get me started on that PoC Democracy released in 0.8 version yesterday. This thing deserves to be shown to everyone as the dumb blomb of software — gorgeous looking and completely idiotic.

One of the reasons I left the computer video business after ten years working on QuickTime was because it appeared that no matter what one tried to do, sooner or later the stupidity of the people who populate TV land would infect what you were doing, and it seems that this rule is now holding up for TV on the web.

]]> By: Clifford http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/comment-page-1/#comment-12532 Clifford Wed, 22 Feb 2006 01:54:45 +0000 http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/cosmicvariance/2006/02/21/you-tube/#comment-12532 Sean.... the hat's fine. Just fine. ;-) -cvj Sean…. the hat’s fine. Just fine. ;-)

-cvj

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