This particular display is 63 feet long and 17 feet high; dividing by that number of pixels means an individual pixel on that display is five hundredths of an inch wide and 2.4 hundredths wide. 1.27 by 0.61 millimeters.
...which is great for a display that is bigger than the profile of a bus; but is it really necessary when your display is the size of a typical wall? Say, 12x8 feet? How small does a pixel have to be when you're talking about a typical display, which (I expect) will be roughly 60" diagonal for some time to come?
60" seems like a good size for the average family room, and most of the TVs I see for sale are around that size, give or take a bit. Much bigger and you're getting into "home theater" territory, which requires a couple of people (usually professionals) to install and configure. A 60" HD screen is 52.3" wide and 29.4" high.
For that display, at HD, each pixel is 0.8x0.7mm. 4k, 0.4x0.3mm 8k, 0.2x0.2mm. 16k, 0.1x0.08mm. At HD, and from a reasonable distance, you already can't really distinguish individual pixels in a typical program unless your nickname approximates "Eagle-Eye" or "Hawkeye". (Or maybe "Hubble Space Telescope".) HD looks great to those of us who grew up in front of 27" analog CRT televisions, where the resolution was about 452x525, or 1.2x0.8mm per pixel.
...though "pixel" is not really the correct term. Analog TV actually works in terms of lines of vertical resolution--split into fields--and doesn't really discuss horizontal resolution at all. You need to infer the horizontal resolution from the number of vertical lines and the screen ratio, which is usually 4:3. The dot that an analog CRT could make was not crisp like an LCD pixel, anyway; it was a round, fuzzy blob about a millimeter across.
I suppose 16k will be necessary if we ever get to the point where the average consumer can afford to cover entire walls with LCD panels; but until then, meh.
* * *
As if we needed any proof, this is enough to convince me it'll be craptastic. So, "Episode 9" will be called The Rise of Skywalker and all the Mary Sues will be in it.
Trailer starts with Luke Skywalker saying, "We've passed on all we know." What? When? Mary Suewalker didn't get any actual training from anyone; she's just automatically an expert at everything she tries. She found Luke Skywalker, lifted a few rocks with the Force, and had a vision; what kind of training is that?
The first half of the two-minute trailer is devoted to showing her jump over a TIE fighter and--presumably--knock it down with her light saber, though the scene cuts before we see what happens. I make that presumption because that's exactly the kind of stupid "grrl power" crap the other two movies pulled. "She's so badass she can knock down an attack fighter with one hit of a hand weapon!" even though that kind of thing is usually considered IMPOSSIBLE in most milieus.*
"The saga comes to an end," vows the slug text. Oh, Lord, I hope so. It's about time they pulled the plug on this brain-dead mishmash.
*Before anyone pipes up with the example of Luke Skywalker knocking down a speeder bike in Return of the Jedi, let me answer that crap: shut up--adults are talking.
A Stormtrooper on a speeder bike is not a fricking attack fighter. Okay: guy on speeder bike equals man riding a Harley Davidson. Guy in TIE fighter equals guy in A-10 Warthog jet fighter.
One is pretty simple to knock down with a hand weapon. The other, not so much. Try it and see.
* * *
Why is it "horrible" to do this?
There are plenty of cities in the US who openly defy federal immigration law. Trump has said that what we should do is to ship illegals--who would otherwise be deported--to those cities.
It makes perfect sense to do this. After all, by declaring themselves to be sanctuaries for illegal aliens, these places have as much as said that they want illegal aliens to go there. So? Let's send 'em on over!
I think it's a lovely idea, to be honest. If that's what they want, give it to 'em...good and hard.
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Removing the "beyond a reasonable doubt" standard makes it easier to send people to jail. It's not so much for burglary and murder, as it is for rape and sedition that she wants this.
Believe me: they want to be able to put, say, Supreme Court Justice Brett Kavanaugh in jail for rape, based on nothing more than the kind of evidence that was presented at his confirmation hearings. Prior to his confirmation, that is. They'd love it if some woman could have gotten up and shrieked, "THAT MAN RAPED ME!" and have that accusation lead to him being put in jail.
The second vignette in that article is also worth reading, because it highlights the result of the "push for $15". Government will force businesses to hire workers, whether they want to or not, whether it makes economic sense or not.
The vignette focuses on anti-Amazon sentiment, but I don't think that's really it.
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Missing: when those reparations come to an end. Students of Georgetown University have voted to tack on a "reparations fee" to their tuitions.
Students at Georgetown University have approved a measure to mandate a $27.20 per semester fee to create a fund that would benefit the descendants of the 272 slaves the college sold in 1838 to pay off the Georgetown Jesuits' debt, a move which saved the university from financial ruin,...The entire idea of reparations is stupid for a huge number of reasons. Accepting that, though, this "reparations" fund does one thing right: it limits it to the descendants of the slaves who were sold by the university.
The part I wonder about, though: when is it enough? How much money must be collected and dispersed to the enumerated beneficiaries before the university has paid its (farcical) debt to them? Certainly these benefits are not meant to endure into perpetuity...are they?
I'll say it again: I would be all for reparations if, in return, we got an end to all the cries of "Raciss!" and Affirmative Action and all the other racial horseshit that's been built up around the issue since the 1960s. If we could end Johnson's so-called "Great Society" and return our welfare system to what it was in 1964. But those reparations would have to be a one-time, lump sum payment, with the acknowledgement that no further payments would be forthcoming EVER, and that they would be paid only to those who could be demostrated to be the descendants of slaves, whose ancestors were slaves here in the USA prior to 1865.
How much? Who cares? Make it $100,000 a head; that's cheap compared to what welfare and the racial spoils system has cost us over the past fifty years. Even $200,000 a head wouldn't be too bad; heck, the welfare system spends $2 trillion a year, and we could write each black person a check for $50,000 per year for four years, after which everything gets cut off and the national budget drops far enough that we stop running a deficit.
Yes, not all black people are on welfare. Yes, there are a lot more white people on welfare than black people. No, I don't care about the difference. I want an end to the government teat for all demographics, because the US is already up to its ass in debt and we can't afford it; but calls to end welfare are usually answered with cries of "you're just a racist!" and that accusation would be ended with the reparations paid.
But let's get back to Georgetown. They have a student population of about 19,000, and there are two semesters in a year; at $45 a pop that's a tidy $1.7 million per year they'll generate for the descendants of the school's slaves.
If it was being paid to the slaves themselves, it'd be about $6,250 a year. Not exactly a living wage--but those people are dead. Presumably they had children; and those children had children, and so on. 1838 is...carry the six...181 years ago. That's around seven generations; and if each of those generations had just two kids--and assuming no interbreeding--we're looking at a total pool of 34,816 people. That's not cumulative; that's the total number of the most recent generation (generation 7) and it assumes that everyone out of the previous generations is dead. No money for dead people.
That's $48 each per year. In the best possible case, that's $48 for each descendant per year. There's a lot of assumptions there, including the notion that each descendant of the original 272 slaves had just two offspring, becase family sizes were a lot bigger before WW2. And of course there would be plenty of survivors from the previous generation, generation 6, and probably some from generation 5. (And a few outliers from generation 4.) So we're not looking at $48 per person, per year, but even less. I mean, there's some 17,000 people in generation 6, and 8,500 in generation 5; the median age of generation 6 is 50, and it's about 75 for generation 5. We can reasonably expect a fairly large number of both generations to be alive. (Median age for generation 4 is 100, so there might be a bare handful of them still around.)
Oh well.
* * *
Gee, leftist hypocrisy, what a fuckin' surprise. I point it out, but I'm kind of getting tired of it.
There are so many examples of "dog bites man" stuff out there, a lot of times I'll have the tab open, but when it comes time to write something about it, I realize, "I have covered this shit time and again."
Anyway, the left loves to play games with semantics. That's how a person who opposes illegal immigration becomes "anti-immigrant", for example. That's why any time the GOP fronts a tax bill they call it a "scheme" or--if they really don't like it--"risky scheme". (And that's why I call Democrat tax ideas "risky schemes".)
It's just another way that the left displays its number-one attribute, which is hypocrisy.
* * *
Was not going to comment on this one until I saw this:
On Tuesday, a Democrat in the Ohio House of Representatives tried to remove protections for black babies in the heartbeat bill currently before the legislature. She argued that allowing black mothers to kill their unborn babies even if their babies have a detectible heartbeat would help America move beyond the dehumanizing legacy of slavery. This argument is painfully ironic, since by making it, the Democrat dehumanized the black babies in the womb — on the basis of race.Gee, a Democrat who wants to make sure black babies aren't given the same protections as white babies. Where have we seen that kind of thing before?
...of course she was trying to do this for three reasons. First, because Democrats are extreme racists. Second, because the unequal protection under the law might be a lever they could use to sue the law out of existence. Third, "Governor so-and-so signed this bill that kills black babies!"
And she's black. What was that canard Democrats pull out when they encounter a right-wing black person? The one about self-hating blacks?
* * *
I have to say, this is actually a good idea. I agree with Nancy Pelosi on this one. The time for self-regulation of online and social media companies is over. It's time for them to be subject to the same regulations that newspapers are.
* * *
Wow, I like that one a lot! "A young bartender, beautiful young woman," he said, stretching the point a little on that last part. "The young bartender" is easily as good as "Representative Horseteeth" or the other variations I've used, so when I'm feeling generous, I'll use it.
* * *
Here is a cogent digest of the stupid FOID card being declared unconstitional. I honestly hope the stupid FOID card goes away. That'd be lovely.
* * *
Here's your "settled science" of global warming.
Three themes are emerging from the newly released emails:"Deliberate manipulation of facts and data" is not science. It's political activism.
(1) prominent scientists central to the global warming debate are taking measures to conceal rather than disseminate underlying data and discussions;
(2) these scientists view global warming as a political "cause" rather than a balanced scientific inquiry and
(3) many of these scientists frankly admit to each other that much of the science is weak and dependent on deliberate manipulation of facts and data.
* * *
Linked rather than embedded as a public service. That's the woman who plays Rose in the latest two Star Wars extrusions. She actually looks less hideous in the movies than she does there. In that image she looks like a drag queen. You could break concrete with that jaw! Yeesh!
* * *
Friday evening. One hour to quitting time.
