Software, hardware, art – a blog of process and findings
Television detector vans in the UK (used to enforce television licenses though there’s some dispute about whether the vans actually worked or were just a deterrent).
From top to bottom: 1950s Hillman Minx detector car and van, 1980s Dodge detector van.
In the mid-80s, the British TV show “Database” would broadcast software via audio over their end credits. Viewers could hold a mic up to the TV to capture it.
An “image dissector tube” from the Farnsworth Pickup Camera, 1936. Via archive.org.
Weird URL on a Post-It note: file://http:spat... – from The Sopranos, season 4, episoe 7.
Waveform showing the NTSC “color burst” used to sync color and monochrome signals in TV broadcast.
What are you looking at? From the final episode (season 20, episode 456).
Having finally finished all 456 episodes of “Law & Order” (totaling approximately 20,520 minutes or 342 hours or 14.25 days) I now have just under 11,000 screenshots of computers and people using them. While watching, I also gathered extra data: I recorded the victim and perpetrator’s gender, as well as the total number of computers per episode. Below are some thoughts on those stats, for those interested such ephemera.
While the Law & Order Database has some great data, surprisingly it is missing the gender of victims and perpetrators. Since the show is “ripped from the headlines”, it is especially interesting to compare those numbers from the show with real murder statistics in the US.
Continue reading “Law & Order Stats: Gender and Computer Counts”
The BBC’s “Test Card F“, featuring an eight-year-old Carole Hersee and her stuffed clown Bubbles. The card was used between July 2, 1967 and sometime in 1998. Most interesting is the card aired for more than 70,000 hours, or nearly 8 years; trapped in this stasis of tribal abstraction and in absolute stillness, Carole and her toy both seem like a paralyzed person, capable of rapid and inquisitive thought but physically unable to move or communicate the fruit of their long meditation.
Via: Wikipedia
So strangely 21st century; a video, found during his assasination, showing him watching news coverage of himself on TV. The stillness is especially uncanny, with the first few seconds just a news ticker scrolling across the bottom of a small television.
Video (there is no sound) embedded below: