Tea-time Viewing

[poliphilo]

 Ailz is trying to explain the difference between analog and digital. "Look at it this way," she says. "Analog is like this." She traces a wave pattern in the air. "And digital just goes zero-one." she punches a couple of holes in the air with her forefinger. " Analog takes up this much space. " The wave pattern again. "And digital takes up this much." And she pinches her thumb and forefinger together.

No. I still don't get it. I think I'll just fall back on her earlier suggestion that it's all down to the magic box.

Thanks to the magic box we get a huge stockpile of old TV shows we can log into whenever we want- for free. It's great. Lately we've been using this facility at tea-time- when there's nothing going out live except news and cruddy game shows. So first we watched all three seasons of Father Ted- which I sometimes think is the funniest show ever- and then we watched two seasons of Waking the Dead- which is gloriously bonkers- and currently we're working our way through the first season of Cold Case- which is like Waking the Dead with American accents and the bonkers taken out.

Cold Case is growing on me. At first I thought it was a little bland and formulaic, but the precision in the writing, the excellence of the craftsmanship, have won me over. What the show does is explore the recent American past. The cold cases are like Proustian madeleines. They take us back ten, twenty, thirty years.  We see people as they were and as they are. We see what time has done to them: how some it has fucked up and some it has straightened out. The bit at the end where the spirit of the murdered person appears to Rush to smile at her for solving their murder is a touch sentimental- but it gets me every time.

Last night's show was a corker. We went right back to 1958. I don't want to spoil it if you haven't seen it so lets just say it involved a nameless boy, a couple of nuns and an experimental government facility. It was a story entirely of its time- which could hardly happen in the present because of the way attitudes have changed. People did wrong, but they did wrong because they thought they were doing right- or at least their best. As one of the characters said, shrugging off responsibility for unforseen disaster, "We can't help the times in which we live."

There's a debate going on in the British media about why so many of our TV shows are so much worse than their American equivalents- and the consensus comes down to this- that we don't care enough about the writing. British TV can be brilliant; at it's best it takes risks; it's not afraid of being bonkers. But American shows are crafted so much more carefully. Cold Case is a good example. It's not a top-end show; it's not trail-blazing; but it is put together with tremendous care and attention. The characters are believable, the stories are believable, the period detail is thoroughly researched. Nothing comes off the assembly line that hasn't been checked, over and over again, for flaws.  Maybe this happens because the American networks have more money or maybe it's down to a difference in the culture. We Brits value eccentricity, amateurism, improvisation- which means we pull off the occasional blinding masterpiece, but also that, too often, we settle for the half-baked. It's astonishing how a show like Cold Case  maintains its quality over a run of 18 episodes. If this had been a British production there would have been wild ups and downs- the odd episode that made you go "wow", some that were good in parts, and a whole lot that failed to satisfy because of some stupidity in the plotting or inconsistency in characterisation.

We're in the mid-teens with Cold Case- and there aren't any further seasons available. So, OK, magic box-  what else have you got to offer?

Comments

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

I'll take a stab at it.

A classic analog instrument is the old-fashioned mercury thermometer. There's a direct analogy between the temperature and what the fluid's doing inside the glass tube. A digital equivalent would report the temperature by number instead.

In the world of communications, you might think of analog vs digital as rather like the difference between a telephone and a telegraph. In a telephone, the signal coming down the wire is directly analogous to the sound that went in one end and comes out the other. The higher the pitch, the higher the signal's frequency; the louder the sound, the higher the voltage. By contrast, with a telegraph, the message is encoded by the key operator into a series of dots and dashes and then sent down the wire as a series of high and low voltages. These changes in voltage cause the sounder to click on the other end and are interpreted by the receiving operator's ear as dots and dashes again. The operator then decodes these back into the original message. The information transmitted by the two mediums can be the same, but in electrical telegraphy, what's happening in the wire is not directly analogous to the original message itself.

In this example, the analogy seems a little counterintuitive, because the telegraph was a rather slow and cumbersome way of communicating. The telegraph was limited by, among other things, how fast the operator could key the message being sent, but with modern electronics, the rate at which information can be encoded, transmitted as an on-off signal, and then decoded again, is many orders of magnitude faster than any human operator.

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

OK, thanks. That helps. I now understand why analog is called analog- and I didn't before.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Hopefully, with part two, you'll see why digital is faster. Afraid I got lost in explaining the difference between analog and digital and forgot to make my point. My apologies.

[michaleen.livejournal.com]

Oops. Looks like I forgot to tie the ends together.

As you might see from my analogy, a telephone call lasts as long as it lasts. It doesn't matter that electrons are whizzing down the wire at nearly the speed of light. The length of time it takes to transmit a statement is just as long as it takes the caller to say it. A telegraph message is fundamentally different. The length of time it takes to transmit the information, start to finish, is limited only by process, the time spent encoding, transmitting, and decoding. Even an old-style telegrapher could no doubt key a statement much faster than someone could physically speak it.

Analog vs digital television is pretty much the same. The length of time it took to broadcast a half-hour program was one-half hour and no matter how good the equipment, this time could not be changed. With digital, the only limit is how fast the zeroes and ones can be transmitted. What makes the program a half-hour long is the decoding that gets done by the "magick box".

[poliphilo.livejournal.com]

So the magic box is basically a decoding machine- a vastly more sophisticated version of the enigma machine which enabled us to break German military codes during WWII.

It's still way over my head, but I think I've grasped the principle. Thanks.