I know it's in bad sport to point out a straightforward solution that obviates a clever one, but...
I find it's more effective simply to not watch TV. Ditch your cable, stop imbibing mind poison, and torrent/purchase/stream specific, worthwhile content according to your ethical predispositions. Our population grows ever dumber, ever more apathetic. Mainstream content is optimized around this. Better to opt out of most of it.
That said: boy, nothing beats Arduino for rekindling my boyhood sense of magic and imagination. Well, perhaps with the exception of seeing the world through the eyes of David Attenborough.
While I concur that not watching TV is a decent solution, please don't insult the population. Is mainstream content dumbed down? Certainly. Should people find a way to entertain themselves without passive consumption? Absolutely. But let's not get on a high horse.
You don't see the entropy I've described? What, exactly, is "insulting" about the observation?
I didn't grow up around much money. We weren't poor, because my mom worked her ass off. But most people around me were.
They reproduce endlessly, these poor, because poverty, religion and ignorance of birth control are all best friends. Each successive generation ends up just a little more screwed than the last, as pregnancies roll into the mid-teen years, and generations start stacking. Women in their 30's, grandmothers. Financial literacy isn't taught in schools – schools, which, thanks to all this reproduction, are packed to the gills with students who don't focus all that well because they have miserable home lives. They don't learn how to learn.
They grow up, work way more jobs than any human being should have to bear at once, entirely robbed of the time needed to broaden their mind and their skills. And this is if they're lucky, and didn't get sucked into gang violence or drug abuse.
In aggregate? The population gets dumber because what other outcome can there be from this reality? This is nothing to do with being on a high horse. This is observing that most TV is shit because so much of the population that exists to consume it hasn't had the opportunities to desire anything better.
"They reproduce endlessly, these poor, because poverty, religion and ignorance of birth control are all best friends. Each successive generation ends up just a little more screwed than the last, as pregnancies roll into the mid-teen years, and generations start stacking. Women in their 30's, grandmothers."
No I don't see the same trends you do. The birth rate in African Americans has dropped to near replacement levels over the last 15 years. Teen pregnancy rates have falled over the last 15 years. Entropy is not the correct word to describe this and tv has nothing to do with it.
...k? I'm making the case for vapid content on television being symptomatic of declining intelligence/skills. It's not causal.
As to African Americans, well, okay. But my experience surrounds Latinos. In Latino culture, we've got Catholicism encouraging as much reproduction as possible while declaring contraception sinful. There's also a lot of cultural misogyny, which entitles men to take what they want, while robbing women of the agency necessary to assert their own needs. (I was spared all of this because my mom is gay. Who knows how many siblings I'd have otherwise)
I don't really see a way out of that for several more generations at least. And I'm not terribly surprised you don't see those trends – statistically, if you're on Hacker News, you're very unlikely to have had an upbringing where you got to see any of this firsthand. And that's the point.
I don't think mainstream tv content is" dumbed-down" because the poor are getting more ignorant, and the only thing they'll understand is American Idol. It's 1) consuming content passively is the most enjoyable thing to do after long hours of soul-sucking work(escapism),2) Living vicariously through others via a rags-to-riches story(American Idol) gives a misguided and fleeting sense of hope(like lotto tickets), and 3)Learning about other people's problems(eg international news) is depressing when you can't see passed your own troubles. If it helps my point, I alsilo grew up around this environment.
Most TV is shit because most of all content is shit. Most movies are shit. Most novels are shit. Most one act plays are shit. Most music is shit. Most websites are shit. Most HN submissions are shit and let's not even get into comments.
OTOH there's a lot of tv that is great, and I say that as someone who cancelled his cable almost 2 years ago. Some of this is available in other formats. "Saving" people $50 a month telling them to cancel cable tv and torrent everything they want isn't going to save the underclass.
Even "bad" storytelling can require historical context or reasonable attention span to consume.
On the other hand, celebrity reporting and the rise of reality TV require absolutely no mental commitment or understanding of anything outside of what is immediately presented. I assert that, as the number of people whose economic circumstances prevent any sort of useful education grows, demand for empty content grows accordingly. There just won't be enough people with enough mental furniture to make use of anything more sophisticated.
Who are we to say that people who want to watch Celebrity Apprentice or some celebrity reporting are watching the wrong type of programming and you are watching the right type of programming? Or even saying that no programming at all is what we should strive for?
This indeed is a "high horse" attitude. I guarantee you that whatever you do in your leisure time I can find fault with also. Of course, you won't agree with my opinions at all, but it still doesn't take away from my point. Which is that it's easy to point the finger and say someone is wrong for doing something. And make not mistake, you are saying that people that watch "empty" television are wrong.
And in the long run, what does it matter? We'll all on a path to oblivion anyway. If everyone stopped doing what they're doing at the very second and followed your way of thinking, it still won't stave off the inevitable. Time will devour us all, so it really doesn't matter if someone wishes to watch Jersey Shore instead of...well...instead of whatever it is you do personally.
Of course not. That's the whole point: it's an ongoing, cascading issue. The longer humanity exists, the better our medicine, the more effective our agriculture, the more poverty allows the population to boom without solving the larger problems of what to do for all these new humans once they arrive in much less than ideal circumstances. As time goes on, more and more people exist with fewer and fewer opportunities to access and leverage useful skills, decreasing the average effectiveness of the population overall.
It's all terribly Malthusian, I know – I look forward to a Dwarf Wheat-esque event that's beyond our ability to see right now.
Then you got carried away with your rhetoric earlier:
>Each successive generation ends up just a little more screwed than the last, as pregnancies roll into the mid-teen years, and generations start stacking. Women in their 30's, grandmothers.
Never mind that "passive" is a rather vague term here and that we're posting this on a news aggregator site. There's certainly no destrier in the room.
Ditto. I am happy to say that I'm only vaguely aware of any of the celebs/scandals mentioned, because I don't watch TV. I can't avoid seeing celeb mags in the grocery store checkout line, but I recognize fewer and fewer of the names.
Also: although I've seen posters of Bieber, I've never heard him sing.
In television, like in life, you have to look for the gems that make up quality programming. I recently ran across a show where Stephen Hawking talked about the existence of God and black holes. Awesome program. After the show finished, it was immediately followed by "Axe Men" (or something). Does that mean Discovery channel sucks? Nope. You win some, you lose some.
Likewise, I accidentally flipped to a channel with Spanish Flamenco dancing on a public channel, which was so far outside of my normal routine and culturally enriching that I couldn't help but watch.
Where people get in trouble is when they use TV as a crutch to live life vicariously instead of using it to enrich their view of the world (or universe).
Eleanor Roosevelt once said "Great minds discuss ideas, average minds discuss events, and simple minds discuss people." It's amazing how much more you can get out of television (or life) when you categorize a show into one of those three boxes and select the first one.
Maybe so, but I'm not willing to sift through whatever happens to be playing at any given time, hoping to find something good and likely wasting my time.
If all of TV's content were on something like Youtube, I might watch. "Whatever I want, whenever I want" should be the default mode of entertainment in the internet age.
I think you're missing the point here. He isn't actually suggesting this is the best possible solution to the problem. He's just showing off a cool hack and giving it a little backstory for fun.
I think this is a clever hack, and good clean fun. +1
In the way back times, at a place called Sun Labs, there was a very bright engineer whose name escapes me (he lurks here so perhaps he will fess up) who built a system which would record the full CNN feed and then 'decorate' that feed with the text from the closed caption decoder.
He would store both the text and the SMPTE time codes for the video into a simple round robin database (RRD).
You could then sit down and say "What news stories mentioned X over the last 24 hrs?" and it could cue up video snippets around the places where the CC data had that key word in it. As a bonus (because back then a big disk was 500MB) if the closed captioning was identical it could 'de-dupe' the video (basically it wouldn't store story repeats. I thought it was quite clever at the time. I'm surprised its not part of the DirecTV product or TiVO today.
On a related note, this engineer discovered that generally advertisements were not closed captioned, so he could have the mute follow the close captioning stream and the commercials would automatically be muted. Nice eh? Actually one could probably do that with the Arduino hack too...
Nowadays advertisements are generally CC'ed. However, since most commercials have music, they have the music symbol in the CC stream, you may want to hunt for cues like that.
Since the caption text is always the same, you could set it up so you could push a button when a commercial came on and push it again when the commercial was over. Then it could scan backward to the previous black transition before each button press to find the actual beginning and end of the commercial, and store the caption text in between. The next time it sees that caption text, automute. :-) At least this way you'd only have to see a specific commercial once.
You'd probably need to do some tuning of the number of keywords it sees before going to mute -- it'd be a tradeoff between false alarms and having to listen to more of the commercials.
I wonder how well this works. The closed captions I look at on TV from time to time are so regularly garbled and misspelled that it might miss most of the proper nouns I am filtering for.
Add some sort of edit-distance metric? Might need a bit of tuning for your specific interference and the nature of the words you're matching for, I suspect.
Never mind that this specific example isn't that practical (assuming you're not one of those people who has their TV on in the background all the time), it is a nice example of arduino-ing your TV…
IIRC, close captioning isn't transmitted in this manner with systems other than NTSC (PAL -> Teletext?).
There was an open source app that used sphinx to filter for the word twitter and mute it called twitterkiller. Shame it disappeared but it was listed at:
This is awesome. You could probably take the same type of concept to create some sort of recommendation app that brings up current news results, or links to items for sale, based on the closed captions.
Detection of TV commercials using video analysis is now considered an almost solved problem, which systems having a high rate accuracy. However, you won't be able to such a thing using an Arduino (the BeagleBoard may be an option).
If you want a simpler solution, a better way to detect commercials than trying to analyze CC info, I think, would be to check the average loudness. See this article: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/17229281/ns/business-consumer_ne..., basically what it says is that commercials seem louder but are actually not (because they are not allowed to). The peak level is the same as normal programs but the average audio level is way higher. This should be easy top detect.
>commercials seem louder but are actually not (because they are not allowed to) //
The UK Advertising Standards Authority recently took action saying they had proven that TV ads were being amplified above general volume levels - http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1251583/ITV-fin... (not the best source but good enough here).
You could modify MythTV's commercial detection to reduce the audio instead of skipping commercials entirely. Unfortunately commercial detection in MythTV is a non-realtime post-processing step.
Uh, I don't get this. Why is he watching television (or having it turned on) if there's nothing interesting on? How about turning off the television? :-o
I prefer to just use my http://tvbgone.com that I put in a hollowed out old cellphone. Great for those sports bar moments when I just want to stop hearing...
I actually haven't used it - it's just for fun. Full disclosure - I live in Pittsburgh where sports are annoying everywhere: bar, doctor's office, etc. That's what I hate - having everything be covered with TV glow - especially sports fetishism...
Just to add to what carbonica said: nobody is forcing you to go to sports bars, if you don't want to be there then go find a quiet bar, don't come in and turn off what we're watching.
I find it's more effective simply to not watch TV. Ditch your cable, stop imbibing mind poison, and torrent/purchase/stream specific, worthwhile content according to your ethical predispositions. Our population grows ever dumber, ever more apathetic. Mainstream content is optimized around this. Better to opt out of most of it.
That said: boy, nothing beats Arduino for rekindling my boyhood sense of magic and imagination. Well, perhaps with the exception of seeing the world through the eyes of David Attenborough.