Lovely story on Quentin’s Blog:

The general population really doesn’t understand digital technology. And it’s costing them money.

This was brought home to me last weekend while helping a friend choose a new TV. In the local shop, I noticed a variety of HDMI cables for sale. Now HDMI, for those of you not familiar with it, is quite a nice standard. It provides digital video and digital audio down a single compact and convenient connection. Much neater than the bulky DVI, VGA, SCART etc which preceded it.

However, notice that it’s a digital standard. This means that, subject to major failures, what goes in at one end ought to come out at the other. Why, then, does the store sell a variety of cables of different qualities and prices? In the days of analog connections, there was something to be said for low-impedance connections and for careful screening. Who knows, those articles in the hi-fi press extolling the virtues of gold plugs and low-oxygen copper cables might even have had something to them.

But in the digital world, if you put ones and zeros in one end of a cable and don’t get something recognisable as ones and zeros at the other, you don’t get a slightly worse picture or sound. You get complete breakdown, and major image or sound corruption. A cable which does that should not be sold at a cheaper price; it shouldn’t be sold at all. Better-quality cabling will allow things to work over greater distances, but for the average user with a DVD player under his TV, it will make no difference at all.

For example, my (quite expensive) CD player is connected to my (quite expensive) amplifier through a digital COAX connection. I use a single phono-phono cable I bought for about $1 in a Radio Shack sale. And the sound is perfect.

So I asked the nice man in the shop about the fact that they sold a modest-length HDMI cable for over £100 just beside the one for £15 (which, incidentally, probably costs less than a dollar to make).

“Oh yes”, he said, “it does have an effect. We had a customer do a side-by-side test just recently and he could see a difference. He bought the more expensive cable.”

I was working with Stephen Heppell today and he told me about something he had seen in a PC World store. When I expressed disbelief, he produced a photograph and settled the matter there and then!

En passant… 99p seems a lot to pay for Brittanica 2003. That’s — let me see (counts on fingers) — four whole years ago.

… is the headline on GMSV’s report of the forthcoming digital version of Playboy

Playboy magazine, which for more than 50 years has celebrated the pleasures of the analog world in its own special way, is now planning to enshrine that history in digital form. The Wall Street Journal reports that beginning in the fall, Playboy will release what will eventually be a six-DVD set of archives, into which all 115,880 pages from 636 editions will be scanned and text-searchable. Each disc will retail for $100, including a 200-page book. While scanned pages may seem a crude sort of way to present content digitally, magazine founder Hugh Hefner wanted to preserve the zeitgeist of the decades. “Part of the great charm of revisiting the magazine,” said Hefner, “is the combination of the words, the pictures and the advertising, the entire sense of the pop culture of any particular era. People remember these issues at a particular point in time; it’s like a part of coming of age.” Oh, and if the magazine is reproduced in original form, Playboy believes, no additional payments are due the writers and artists. This interpretation, as you might imagine, is subject to some disagreement. Images from the discs will be printable but not transferable, at least for those few days before a hack appears. Playboy hopes the set becomes a collector’s item and adds to what Hefner insists is the brand’s return to hipness. “Something remarkable has happened to the Playboy brand in the past few years,” said Hefner. “It is hot again. We have a hit TV show; we just opened up the Playboy Club casino in Vegas; and the brand is very hot in clothing. … It all connects to the future and the retro-cool phenomenon.”

Er, sure. There’s nothing like old print ads to get one going.

Well, here’s what the Huffington Post claims.

According to multiple sources blabbing to the Harvard Crimson and the Boston Globe, Harvard is expected to appoint its first female president this weekend: Drew Gilpin Faust, current dean of Radcliffe. Faust, 59, a top Civil War historian, would succeed former president Lawrence Summers, who resigned in June after much conflict with the faculty, not to mention his controversial and widely decried comments speculating that innate intellectual disparities between men and women accounted for the dearth of women in high-ranking positions in science, based in part on how his twin daughters played with trucks. Following the outcry sparked by those comments, Faust, who does not have a degree from Harvard, was appointed by Summers to oversee two faculty task forces that examined gender diversity at Harvard…

This is the best piece published today. Boris Johnson rides to the rescue of Bernard Matthews, the firm which has just been obliged to slaughter 160,000 prime turkeys in an attempt to stamp out bird flu.

As soon as I arrived at work this morning I told the troops their duty. This is it, I said. The Russians have banned our turkey. The pathetic Japanese have slapped an embargo on any poultry emanating from this country. South Korea, Hong Kong and South Africa are all equally chicken about our chicken.

We are the second largest poultry exporters in Europe, I reminded them, with a £300 million business at stake. Here we are, in the cockpit of the nation, and the people expect us to show a lead. It is a time for greatness, a time for calm, a time for reassurance – and we are going to show all three.

I reached for my wallet and fished out twenty. “Frances,” I said, “go to the supermarket and buy as many slices of Bernard Matthews as you can find. Someone somewhere has got to show that the great British turkey is safe to eat! And that someone is going to be us.”

In no time she was back, laden with an extraordinary assortment of meat and meat-related produce. As we beheld the bewildering versatility of Mr Matthews’s fowls, I felt a spasm of rage that the people of South Korea – where they eat poodles, for heaven’s sake – should turn their noses up at the favourites of the British people.

It gets better.

We had Bernard Matthews wafer thin turkey ham, 95 per cent fat free. We had a perfectly cylindrical Turkey Breast Roast, serving three or four. Mr Matthews’s chefs had miraculously added water, potato and rice starch (and about 20 nourishing chemicals) to what the front of the packet said was “100 per cent breast meat”. We had delicious golden turkey escalopes, containing as much as 38 per cent turkey.

Not to forget the Matthews product containing

a mixture of turkey skin, pea starch, milk, potassium chloride, sodium nitrite and assorted other life-giving ingredients, boiled up and turned into a sliced roll complete with a beautiful picture of a dinosaur. Look! I held up the Dinosaur, showing how it ran all the way through, like a stick of rock.

Lovely!

Footnote: I have never knowingly eaten anything produced by Bernard Matthews. Indeed, I would cross the street to avoid walking past a shop that stocked his products.