Big TV ratings? Not like in my day, whippersnapper!

Mystery voices
Drowned out by too much choice
Not to mention
The sad waste of this wonderful invention
Maintaining radio silence from now on.

Elvis Costello, Radio Silence

Mr. Costello, who is about a year and a half older than I am, writes this lyric about radio being a wonderful invention, but I want to say the same about television, the medium that replaced it as the mass entertainment source. I grew up with TV always existing, while my parents could remember the time before it was mass culture. The TV industry now worries about being eclipsed by the Internet, and of course I'm old enough to tell the young folks about a time before the Internet.

I don't currently watch TV, at least not on my TV, which is connected to a DVD player but not a cable or dish or even an antenna. As I have said before, I'm a broke-ass mofo, but I'm not poverty stricken. I could find the money in my monthly budget to spring for cable TV, whether that's $70 or $100 or whatever, I just don't see that it produces value equal to that cost. I pay about $70 a month total to be connected to the Internet and to have a phone. That cost is easily justified. That's a friggin' bargain.


There are some things I might like to watch live, but very few, and watching them free on the web or paying for a show on iTunes if necessary makes sense to me. I made a habit of watching Keith Olbermann when I had a TV, and sometimes I'd also watch Rachel Maddow. I don't make a habit of them anymore. I like both of them, but Keith lives on a mix of snark and high dudgeon that gets to be too much for me sometimes. Rachel tends towards being smarter and nicer than Keith and it doesn't always play well on TV. That said, if there is going to be a point made on TV that is almost exactly the argument I would make, it's going to be made by Jon Stewart, a decoded Stephen Colbert or Rachel Maddow.

Rachel is currently in a pissing contest with Bill O'Reilly. Let me correct that. BillO thinks it's a pissing contest, Rachel thinks it's a debate. He's winning the pissing contest, she's winning the debate. She says that Fox News has a consistent pattern of race baiting, more pronounced now since Obama was elected, and that the Shirley Sherrod incident was just the latest example. O'Reilly actually responded, which is notable because he pointedly ignores Keith Olbermann who snarks at him regularly. His response was to call her a "loon" and point out that Fox News has much higher ratings than MSNBC, the cable news outfit where Rachel works. Her counter-argument to his "look at my massive ratings" posture is to note that in that particular pissing contest, both his show and Rachel's show are getting rained on by SpongeBob SquarePants.

Bringing facts to a pissing contest. Isn't that just like a girl?


It's a very different world from the one of my youth. We still talk about ratings because there is still a major industry that cares about ratings, but it's like talking about boxing or horse racing. Some people still kind of care about those sports, but when I was a kid, those sports were big damn deals, not fading memories.

Consider the Beatles on Sullivan. I am just old enough to remember it vividly, since I turned eight years old about a month and a half before. 23 million TV sets tuned in that night, which translates to over 70 million viewers in a nation of 190 million people. Not a majority, but a very sizable minority, roughly three out of every eight people. The Beatles made a return appearance the next week and a similar number of sets tuned in, only slightly less.


The thing is, in 1964 this wasn't all that remarkable. The Beverly Hillbillies was the number one rated show for the entire season. In 1964, the most watched episode of the show titled The Giant Jack Rabbit got more viewers than the second appearance of the Beatles on Sullivan but slightly less than the first. Nine times in 1964, more than 20 million sets tuned into The Beverly Hillbillies. These records only go back to 1961, but no other show has nine spots from a single season in the top 100 of all time. In 1977, a very special TV event, the eight part mini-series Roots, put all eight of its episodes in the top 100 shows of the last fifty years. It's possible I Love Lucy had greater saturation in its day, but the Nielsen records only go back to 1961 and there were less TV sets in the 1950s than in the 1960s.

It was a much less fragmented nation when I was a kid, and not just politically. There was less choice than there is today because there were less choices. TV had three major commercial networks in theory, but in terms of ratings there was one leader, CBS. They dominated the Top Twenty shows year in and year out in the 1960s. NBC trailed, sometimes badly, and ABC was a distant third. In a cosmopolitan place like the San Francisco Bay Area, we also had a local independent station, Channel 2 KTVU, and the educational station, KQED Channel 9, which was not yet called PBS. But until UHF came along in the mid-sixties, that was it.


The ratings giant of today is American Idol. No other show comes close to its dominance of the past decade. It is fading from its peak viewership, when about 37 million people would tune in. That's 37 million out of a population of about 300 million, which is roughly one in every eight people in the country at its highest, now down to about one in ten. In the 1960s, the highest rated show could expect about one third of the public would be watching.

More than that, American Idol might be better titled Confederate Idol. Hicks like it better than city slickers, which explains why so many winners are from the South, including the aptly named non-entity Taylor Hicks. On my other blog, it's obvious that supermarket rags think Carrie Underwood, the most country tinged winner in the show's history, is the right fit for their older and unsophisticated demographic, while recording stars who can sell many more times records like Lady Gaga or Fergie are barely noticed at all by the supermarket rags, though they are popular in the Internet gossip pages.

Part of the reason I write this is because I'm really noticing not being the target market anymore for a lot of popular culture, TV, movies and music. There were times in the past when I did watch the most popular TV show or listen to the most popular music. I have seen several of the biggest grossing movies of the year over the past decade, but not all of them. The market has fragmented seriously.

When it comes to the news, I like stuff that teaches me something, discussed by people who know more than I do and reach interesting conclusions. I find that on the Internet from time to time, but on TV, not so much. If I may be allowed a moment with no false modesty, catering to an audience of people as smart or smarter than Matty Boy is not a mass market, and there just isn't that much money in it.

Random 12+1, 8/6/10: Summer Dance Party

Waterloo (English Version) ABBA
Ranking Full Stop The English Beat
American Squirm Nick Lowe
Get Up Offa That Thing James Brown
Ignition (Remix) R. Kelly
Doo Wop (That Thing) Lauryn Hill
Knickerbocker Fujiya & Miyagi
Reet Petite Jackie Wilson
One Mint Julep Ray Charles
Only You Yaz
Red Red Wine UB40
Little Floater NRBQ
Bonus track:
Sign of the Times The Belle Stars

For a little change of pace, I put together a dance mix on my iTunes this week, about 100 songs out of the 1,200 stored on my computer. Then I set the shuffle on this subset and here we go!

I could have invoked the Padre Mickey rule after Mister James Brown does Get Up Offa That Thing, but this is a party, not a critic's session. Pull up another tune and keep the dance floor full. Besides, as little as I might think of R. Kelly as a human being, you gotta love the remix to Ignition. The dozen songs bounce all over the place, but since it seemed intent to end on a note of drinking (Red Red Wine) and driving (Little Floater), I decided to put in one more track, which happened to be from the great New Wave girl group The Belle Stars, who recorded for the wonderful Stiff Records. It is therefore only appropriate to remember one of the many slogans of Stiff.

F*%k art, let's dance!

I believe in education, despite massive evidence to the contrary.

Over on the Huffington Thing, as my blogging hero Princess Sparkle Pony calls it, there's an opinion piece railing against VitaminWater, which is currently being sued over misleading advertising. I know next to nothing about the stuff, so I decided to snoop around the Interwebs for a while.

It is bottled by a company called Glaceau, now owned by Coca-Cola. The advertising includes a lot of basketball players (Steve Nash, Kobe Bryant and others) and a few years ago had ads featuring the rapper 50 Cent, who is known for his physique as well as his rhyming skills. Besides vitamins and water, it also has plenty of sugar, though only about half as much as Coke, so it could be seen as baby steps towards a healthier lifestyle.

I found this article over at ScienceLine written by Christopher Intagliata, a website maintained by New York University with the stated purpose of science more accessible. The major point made is that several of the vitamins in VitaminWater are completely pointless in a fat-free drink because they are fat soluble instead of water soluble. For example, putting Vitamin D in milk makes some sense because milk has fat content and D is one of the fat soluble vitamins, along with A, E and K. So unless you are drinking VitaminWater to wash down a burger or potato chips (not a recommended meal, by the way), many of the vitamins in the drink for which you paid good money are going to take the quick trip through your body and into your municipal sewer system without stopping over in any of the places in your body where it might have had some nutritional value.

So far, so good. Useful scientific information without a lot of difficult jargon.

Then I read the comments.

Where's teh stupid? You're soaking in it. People love to drink it or somebody told them it gives you cancer. Not one comment in fifty deals with water soluble vs. fat soluble. Just when you think you've read the stupidest comment possible, along comes another comment even more deeply stupid.

In the words of my professor Victor Manjarrez, we don't deserve to survive as a species.

Wednesday Math, Vol. 123: Metric spaces

What is the distance from Point 1 to Point 2? As word problems go, this is one of the most basic, and luckily for us, there's usually a picture to go along with it. In this picture, we aren't told what unit of measurement is being used, but the drawing makes it clear that we are in three dimensions. The red line is a hypotenuse of a right triangle and the blue line is as well, so if we call Point 1 (0, 0, 0) and Point 2 (x, y, z), using the Pythagorean Theorem twice gives us the distance is the square root of x² + y² + z².

Distance problems are sometimes not so straightforward. Back two years ago, I wrote a post about distance on the sphere, which involves arcs on a great circle instead of the Pythagorean Theorem. There are plenty more examples and new methods and formulas to use to determine what we mean by distance.


Consider a grid of train lines like the one on the left. Now, we are limited to just a finite number of points, the different train stations, but if the entire system has two way travel, it can be a metric space, the generalized version of the idea of distance defined on a set of points.

A metric space is defined by a very general set of rules, which I list here.

1. For any two different points A and B in our metric space, there is a positive number d(A, B) which we will call the distance.

2. d(A, B) = d(B, A), which is to say the return trip is the same length as the original trip. This is why I brought up that two-way travel on all paths is required. If there are one way streets, the distance from A to B might be a single city block, but from B to A might take a trip around the block.

3. For every point A, d(A, A) = 0. Combined with rule 2, this says that if d(A, B) = 0, then A and B must be the same point.

4. The triangle inequality. This says there are no "shortcuts". If I travel from A to B to C, the distance traveled must be greater than the distance from A to C, which means B forced me to take a detour, or it can be equal to the distance from A to C, which means B was on the path from A to C.

Ways of measuring distance in some systems can become very convoluted or very strangely unintuitive, but if the system follows these four simple rules, it's a metric space.

One of my favorite metric spaces is the discrete metric. It follows two simple guidelines for defining a distance.

1. d(A, A) = 0 for all points A in our set.
2. d(A, B) = 1 for any two distinct points A and B in our set.

It's like saying there are two distances, "right here" being distance 0 and "not right here" being distance 1. The first three rules of a metric space are satisfied by the definition from the guidelines. Proving the Triangle Inequality is fairly straightforward if you understand the rules, and will be left as an exercise for the reader.

There's a lot of theorems dealing with metric spaces and how they arise in math. If you have two different ways of measuring distance on the same set of points, there are ways to combine metric spaces to create new metric spaces. For example, the maximum distance between any two points using two different distance systems must also be a metric space, but not the minimum distance of two systems. When I was an undergrad, I proved that the minimum of the discrete metric and any other metric was in fact a metric, and I gave this new metric the name the Provincial Metric. One way to think of it is that anyone at point A knows exact distances to nearby points, but past a certain distance, all other points are just "not particularly close". I was kind of proud of figuring this out on my own when I was younger. I've seen examples of it in textbooks printed after I got my undergraduate degree, but none of them call it the Provincial Metric, which I will say with no modesty is the best name for the idea.

Correcting a misconception.

Blog buddy Karen Zipdrive is the dearest friend of my Other Blog. Today, she speculated that I have a crush on an actress that was on a TV show I hated from the 1990's. I won't even name her, though she is mentioned nearly every week in the tabloids. She is very pretty, but she means nothing to me.

Let me repeat. Nothing.

Who am I mad for? I've made no secret of it.


I am mad for Indira Varma. Anyone who has read my blog for any period of time knows this.

My very first blog post, I had nothing to say. I posted a picture of Indira Varma.

Should the day arrive when I stand in front of her, if she should smile, or even grin, and snap her fingers, I would be on my knees.

I'm old. My knees are crap. That doesn't matter.

I'm mad, I tell you. MAD! MAD!!!!!



Then there's Melissa Theuriau.

And her golden eyes.

I know words. I bet I know... like a hundred. Maybe two hundred.

I look in a picture of her eyes... no words.

I know words in French.

Je n'ai pas des paroles.

Je ne sais rien.

I LOOKED IN A PICTURE OF HER EYES!

I'M LOST!

J'AI BESOIN DE L'AIDE!

She's... purdy.


Julie Newmar.

Words. Wuuuuuuuuuurds.

Carpet.

Rug.

T-t-t-towel.

Liiiiip... lipstick!

Mmmmmmmmmmmmmm... lipstick.

Feet.

Arms.

Akimbo.

Okay, the vocabulary's coming back.

I hope I have made myself clear. That's the list. That's my team on the court, as Gene Hackman said in Hoosiers. If the list jumps up to four, I'll certainly let you know.

Having another drink at the wake for objective reality

I've seen this short video on several websites, so it may not be new to you. Sharron Angle, Republican candidate for U.S. senator in Nevada described as a Tea Party favorite, says this to Fox News' Carl Cameron.

Angle: We needed to have the press be our friend.

Cameron: Wait a minute. Hold on a second. To be your friend? That sounds naive.

Angle: Well, no. We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported... and when I get on a show, and I say, 'Send money to SharronAngle.com,' so that your listeners will know that if they want to support me they need to go to SharronAngle.com.

The video is a half minute. The context and facial expressions augment the story quite a bit.




Over at Talking Points Memo, several commenters hit it right on the head. Sharron has been truly clueless with the media so far, and obviously someone from the Republican Party came in and told her what the strategy was. She is just dim enough that she thought she was supposed to repeat what she was told, not unlike Sarah Palin's quote during the vice-presidential debate, "And I may not answer the questions the way that either the moderator or you (Biden) want to hear, but I'm going to talk straight to the American people and let them know my track record also."

I left the "And" at the beginning and the "also" at the end to give it that dull clang of Palin authenticity.

Sharron Angle is not a good candidate, and the numbers are starting to show this. In June, all but one poll showed her with a lead over Harry Reid. In July, the situation reversed, and all but one poll shows Reid with a small lead.

The operative word in that last sentence is "small". A candidate this bad should be getting poleaxed, but we have such a polarized political landscape, I expect she will get at least 40% of the vote based nearly entirely on an anti-Harry Reid vote.


(Photo by Gary Reyes/ San Jose Mercury News)
A wave of fairness and balance sweeping over me for unknown reasons, I'd like to point out the race for governor here in California. The Democrats have put up Jerry Brown to run against Meg Whitman, and he has been ahead in the polls for most of the past three months except for a short time in early July.

I bring this up because Jerry Brown is an awful candidate. I don't know anyone excited about him being at the top of the ticket. He's only 72, but I thought he was as old as my dad, pushing 80 or so. This may have something to do with the old mean joke that politics is show business for ugly people.

Let's be clear. Jerry Brown is no Sharron Angle. He's a tired old war horse and she's a clueless n00b, but both of their numbers can be credited to how much the public hates their opponent, not to how much the public loves the prospect of either of them being in office.

And so it continues, a political system that does not even pretend to put forward the best candidates, hoping they can get more people to hate the opponent than the crowd that hates their candidate. No one reaches out or listens to the other side because in truth, the other side isn't listening.

N.C.A.A.: No Care for Athletes Absolutely

At Laney College, the football program has expanded from sixty players to one hundred players in the past few years, a time that has seen major cutbacks in classes across the board and an act of blatant theft by management against the part-time professors by taking $400,000 owed to about 600 workers and using it for Odin knows what.

It's galling to see this increase in funding for sports when budgets are getting slashed for teachers and facilities, but that is not the worst of it. In the past, only student-athletes who wanted to go to certain schools were forced to pass Introduction to Statistics. For example, all the state schools in California required that, both in the state schools, where Fresno State, San Jose State and San Diego State have programs that have sent a few players to the NFL, and the University of California schools, where Cal and UCLA have several alum who turned pro and UC Davis is starting to see some success along those lines. What this meant for me in the past was I had some students from the football team in my classes and most of them were serious about passing the class, as well as having a reasonable shot at passing. Those whose math skills weren't strong enough did not have to attend.

In steps the NCAA. They now require statistics for all student-athletes. This summer, this meant fourteen football players trying to pass a six week summer session course. The six week courses cram the same amount of material designed to be taught in a full semester into classes taught four days a week. It requires commitment and punishes people who have weak math skills. There's very little time for extra studying to catch up. The vast majority of the football players weren't ready and the attendance record was very bad. Worse than that, many were caught cheating on tests and got zero when that happened.

I don't think of statistics as a "hard" class. Technology has changed the nature of the course completely in the last fifty years. Back in the sixties, John Tukey came up with some very clever workarounds to avoid having to find the standard deviation for sets of data with many entries. Over the past few years, I practiced several times taking the average and standard deviation of sets of 40 numbers, and without a calculator or spreadsheet it took me between an hour and an hour and a half to find those values, and I sometimes got the answers wrong. With a cheap calculator, it takes less than five minutes and maybe a minute to double check that I input the numbers correctly. If the numbers come from some website, it takes less than a minute with Excel and I don't have to double check for entry mistakes.

Even with technology making the class easier, the class takes someone to be fluent with numbers and a lot of students leave high school without that fluency. Many people who whine about our educational system are equally incompetent with numbers, but that is equal parts problems with education in the past and people long out of school letting their brains go to seed.

I don't expect the NCAA to rescind this silly policy, and Laney gets publicity by having a good football team, so both the factors helping to make my life a living hell probably aren't going away. I just wanted to vent a little bit.

Good thing I have a blog.