television

Champagne OK


This is a random clip taken from “The Boy in the Plastic Bubble” (1976). Whether it’s the botched editing job between “oooo-owwww”, the palpable sense of self-satisfaction Robert Reed exhibits after he’s contained the chaos of bubbly eruption, or the final announcement that the disaster has been averted, this tiny element of film makes me feel ok…Champagne OK! After all, having had your child banished to the purgatory of a giant bubble, wouldn’t you-yourself feel that same sense of ‘victory’ having single-handedly contained an outright onslaught of smaller bubbles?

When I was a very young kid, I remember sitting on the couch next to my mom and loving this movie, yet probably not understanding it at all. I just added this to my netflix queue and can’t wait to see it again for the first time.

Every Episode Of Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood

It’s a beautiful day in the neighborhood. Twitch is running a Mister Roger’s Neighborhood marathon that will be showing all 886 episodes of the exceptional children’s program. The marathon is a fundraising effort to celebrate the positive influences of PBS. Feel free to use the donation panel on the linked page to donate to your local PBS station.

The Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood Marathon features the most comprehensive collection of episodes available, including many that only aired once and are unavailable elsewhere online. We will be playing the episodes back to back starting at 12PM Pacific on May 15th.

The marathon is expected to take about 17 days to run all the way through. PBS has more information on the Twitch-PBS partnership here.

Zoom In. Now… Enhance! (For Real, Kinda)

The Zoom And Enhance trope has long been the ultimate criminal identification solution and a staple for crime drama television. Its use on screen is often lauded as an example of how Hollywood doesn’t understand technology. The Enhance Button trope simply ignores that the blurry focus and big blocky pixels you get when you zoom in close on an image are the only information that the picture actually contains, and attempting to extract more detail from the image alone is essentially impossible.

Enhance Old Station

Enhance Bank Lobby

However, as a proof of concept, Alex J. Champandard’s Neural Enhance coding project uses deep learning to enhance the details of images. As seen from the gifs above, if the neural networks are well trained, the enhancements are quite effective.

Thanks to deep learning and #NeuralEnhance, it’s now possible to train a neural network to zoom into your images at 2x or even 4x. You’ll get even better results by increasing the number of neurons or training with a dataset similar to your low-resolution image. The catch? The neural network is hallucinating details based on its training from example images. It’s not reconstructing your photo exactly as it would have been if it was HD. That’s only possible in Holywood — but using deep learning as “Creative AI” works and it’s just as cool!

Now let’s vector in and enlarge the z-axis.

via prosthetic knowledge

iChildren

The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has just announced new policy recommendations and resources related to children’s media use and screen time. The recommendations include the following:

  • Children younger than 18 months should not use screen media except for video-chatting. These guidelines are different from previously established guidelines recommending that children under 24 months avoid all screen media.
  • Children ages 18-24 months should only be exposed to high-quality, educational programming, such as content by Sesame Street and PBS KIDS. Media exposure for children this age should always be accompanied by an adult who can help them understand the content.
  • Children ages 2 to 5 years should be limited to an hour of screen time involving high-quality programs. Parents should also co-view media with children to help them understand what they are seeing and apply it to their own lives.
  • Children ages 6 and older should have clear limits about both the amount of media time and the type of media content they are allowed to use.
    Families should establish “media-free” times and locations, such as during dinner, driving, and in children’s bedrooms.
  • Regardless of children’s age, families should have regular conversations about online safety and etiquette.

It comes as no surprise to me that the key ingredient to the right media diet for our kids hinges on parental involvement. A parents’ role in managing the media diets of our children has never been greater because problems can begin when media use displaces physical activity, hands-on exploration and face-to-face social interaction in the real world. At our house, we have a pretty strict media rules. However, I need to work on ways to teach my children to use media in a more positive way.

If you have a children age zero to five years of age, you may want to check out the AAP policy statement which focuses on infants, toddlers and pre-school children called “Media and Young Minds”. If you have school aged children you can get more helpful information from the AAP policy statement “Media Use in School-Aged Children and Adolescents”.

In addition to these new media use guidelines, the AAP launched an online “Family Media Use Plan” tool that could help parents establish a healthy media diet that is appropriate to your family’s unique needs.

Good luck parents, we all need it!

via ChildrenAndMediaMan

As Crocheted On TV

Crocheted On TV

The Crochet Time blog has an entire category that discusses crocheted blankets seen on TV. The blog’s author figures out the patterns and yarn types used in all kinds of throws and blankets from tv shows like Roseanne, Mad Men, Taxi (as seen above), and It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia. Most of the afghans use a variation of the basic granny square but there is great variation in color, style and stitch.

If you google around you’ll find all kinds of people replicating blankets from their favorite tv shows. Things like this are why I love the internet.

25,000 Foot Freefall Is Nothing But Net


This past Saturday Luke Aikins became the first person to accomplish a planned freefall (and landing) out of a plane without a parachute or wingsuit from an altitude of 25,000 feet. Aikins fell for about two minutes above the California desert, appearing to soar effortlessly, arms extended, face downward. And as he neared the ground, with a mere second to go, he expertly flipped onto his back and landed in the 100-square-foot net without incident.

The jump was aired live on television during an hour-long special. I remember when I was a child Evil Knievel did a bunch of the publicized live stunts – it that time to return once more?

John Oliver Forgives Nearly $15 Million In Medical Debt


John Oliver incorporated the Central Asset Recovery Professionals (CARP, named for the bottom-feeders) debt collection firm for $50 and purchased $60,000 in medical debt. He then promptly forgave the debt allowing 9,000 people to walk away from nearly $15 Million in zombie medical debt. Debt collection is a grimy and under-regulated business and John Oliver does a great job of lambasting their predatory practices.

It should be noted that back in 2012, Occupy Wall Street did a similar thing called a Rolling Jubilee

The Entire Cast For The Twin Peaks Reboot

Twin Peaks

Earlier this week, David Lynch and his production crew wrapped principal shooting on the new Twin Peaks. In celebration, Showtime has announced all 217 cast members for the upcoming Twin Peaks revival. There are a bunch of the original cast members returning (noted in the list below in bold), along with some notable newbies. Interestingly, some of the returning actors played characters who are long dead. Standout new cast members include Ashley Judd, Michael Cera, Eddie Vedder, Laura Dern, Trent Reznor and Jim Belushi

I’m torn about whether this reboot will be any good. Lynch will definitely show us something we didn’t ask for, and it will probably unmoor us. Whether that qualifies as “good” or “not good” will depend almost strictly on the individual viewing it. The owls are not what they seem.

Aaseng, Jay
Aboutboul, Alon
Adams, Jane
Adler, Joe
Alden, Kate
Allynne, Stephanie
Amick, Mädchen
Anderson, Eric Ray
Andrews, Finn
Anweis, Elizabeth
Ashbrook, Dana
Auger, Joe
Augustine, Phoebe
Bailey, Melissa
Baird, Tammie
Battaglia, Matt
Bell, Chrysta
Bellucci, Monica
Belushi, Jim
Berger, Leslie
Beymer, Richard
Billingsley, John
Bisping, Michael
Blevins, Ronnie Gene
Bohlen, Kelsey
Bolger, Sean
Bower, Rachael
Briscoe, Brent
Broski, Robert
Brown, Wes
Bucher, Richard
Burkum, Page
Cameron, Scott
Cantu, Juan Carlos
Carides, Gia
Castellanos, Vincent
Cera, Michael
Chamberlain, Richard
Chase, Bailey
Chavez, Johnny
Clark, Candy
Clarke, Larry
Coffey, Scott
Collison, Frank
Coronado, Lisa
Coulson, Catherine E.
Cox, Grace Victoria
Coyne, Jonny
Croak, James
Cruise, Julee
D’Angelo, Heather
D’Arcy, Jan
Dastmalchian, David
Davies, Jeremy
Davies, Owain Rhys
de la Reguera, Ana
Del Rio, Rebekah
Dern, Laura
Dickson, Neil
Dillon, Hugh
Douglas, Cullen
Dowlin, Edward “Ted”
Drake, Judith
Duchovny, David
Durbin, Christopher
Eastwood, Francesca
Edelstein, Eric
Ennis, John
Fadem, Josh
Faircrest, Tikaeni
Farren, Eamon
Fenn, Sherilyn
Ferguson, Jay R.
Ferreira, Sky
Ferrer, Miguel
Field, Rebecca
Finck, Robin
Finney, Brian
Fischler, Patrick
Forster, Erika
Forster, Robert
Foster, Meg
Frost, Travis
Frost, Warren
Gagnon, Pierce
Galli, Allem
Gates, Hailey
Gelman, Brett
George, Ivy
Getty, Balthazar
Giordano, James
Goaz, Harry
Goodeve, Grant
Griffith, George
Griffith, Tad
Grixoni, James
Guest, Cornelia
Hammer, Travis
Harris, Hank
Hart, Annie
Hays, Andrea
Heath, Stephen
Hensley, Heath
Hershberger, Gary
Horse, Michael
Hudson, Ernie
Jee, Jay
Johnson, Jesse
Jones, Caleb Landry
Judd, Ashley
Judy, Luke
Kearin, Stephen
Kelly, David Patrick
Kenny, Laura
Kirkland, Dep
Knepper, Robert
Koechner, David
Kull, Virginia
LaLiberte, Nicole
Larson, Jay
Lee, Sheryl
Leigh, Jennifer Jason
Levy, Jane
Lillard, Matthew
Lindholm, Jeremy
Lipton, Peggy
Logan, Bellina Martin
Long, Sarah Jean
Lynch, David
Lynch, Riley
Lynch, Shane
MacLachlan, Kyle
Mahoney, Mark
Makinen, Karl
Malone
Maridueña, Xolo
Marlohe, Berenice
Mars, Rob
Marshall, James
Maurus, Elisabeth
McDermitt, Josh
McGill, Everett
McLane, Zoe
Mears, Derek
Middleton, Clark
Mills, Greg
Morrison, James
Murray, Christopher
Murray, Don
Nash, Joy
Niehaus, Priya Diane
O’Dell, Bill
O’Neill, Casey
Ochsner, Johnny
Olkewicz, Walter
Parenzini, Charity
Parenzini, Elias Nelson
Paulsen, John
Paxton, Sara
Perlich, Max
Phillips, Linas
Phillips, Tracy
Pirruccello, John
Porter, Linda
Quinn, Jelani
Radelet, Ruth
Reber, Mary
René, Adele
Reznor, Mariqueen
Reznor, Trent
Riggs, Carolyn P.
Robertson, Kimmy
Robie, Wendy
Rondell, Erik L.
Rosand, Marv
Rosenfield, Ben
Roth, Tim
Rowland, Rod
Russell, Carlton Lee
Satine, Elena
Savage, John
Seyfried, Amanda
Shiels, Amy
Shipman, Sawyer
Sizemore, Tom
Sohn, Sara
Sreenan, Malachy
Stanton, Harry Dean
Starr, J.R.
Stephenson, Bob
Stewart, Charlotte
Stofle, Emily
Strobel, Al
Struycken, Carel
Suplee, Ethan
Sutherland, Sabrina S.
Szohr, Jessica
Tamblyn, Russ
Tangradi, Bill
Tewes, Cynthia Lauren
Thelen, Jodee
Torrey, Jack
Van Etten, Sharon
Vedder, Eddie
Vrotsos, Greg
Wardle, Jake
Watts, Naomi
Williams, Nafessa
Wise, Ray
Witt, Alicia
Wydra, Karolina
Yi, Chariyne
Yuuki, Nae
Zabriskie, Grace
Zajac-Denek, Christophe
Zima, Madeline
Zingale, Blake

The Legacy Of Prince And Saturday Night Live

I didn’t have the privilege of seeing Prince perform live before his untimely death yesterday. But I have seen him perform a handful of times on television. You’re going to hear a lot about his blistering performance during the half-time show during Super Bowl XLI (2007). And rightfully so, this standout performance took place in a rainstorm and included “We Will Rock You”, “Let’s Go Crazy”, “Baby I’m a Star”, “Proud Mary”, “All Along the Watchtower”, “Best of You”, and “Purple Rain”.

However, my favorite televised performances were from his appearances on Saturday Night Live. On November 1, 2014, Prince bucked Saturday Night Live tradition by playing a single, eight minute, four-song medley (instead of the standard of multiple songs sprinkled throughout the show). The unbroken set consisted of pieces of “Clouds,” “Plectrum Electrum,” “Marz,” and “Another Love”. One of my favorite parts is when Prince attempted up turn up his guitar’s volume only to smile as he realized it was unplugged.


My very favorite Prince performance was his commanding execution of “Fury” for the February 4, 2006 Saturday Night Live. It had been over 24 years since Prince had last played on SNL and “Fury” had not been heard live or as studio recording up until this point. Prince’s guitar work for this performance was amazing. He effortlessly shredded the song up and down. My favorite part is the end, when he throws his mic stand on the floor while exiting the stage. He does this with a sly grin, letting his audience know he is fully aware that he was on fire.


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