Digital TV Transition – What are we losing?
Hello Readers,
Today marks the day all national television stations stop broadcasting analog signals. Just over an hour ago analog signals that have been broadcast as the standard for over sixty years have been switched off and replaced by a digital broadcast signal. Like the vinyl record, cassette tape, and vacuum tube amplifier, the move to digital is not without cost. What is the significance of this change? Aren’t digital recordings more sharp, crisp, and interference free?
First, let’s touch on some basic electronic terminology to help me explain to you what this difference is all about. An analog signal can be represented by a sine wave that continual changes it’s amplitude, or voltage, as the signal moves through time. The signal starts at zero then rises to a positive peak where it then falls in voltage back down to zero. Once at zero the voltage swings negative and continues to a negative peak, usually at the same voltage level as the positive peak. The following diagram illustrates a varying sinusoidal wave. The vertical or Y axis represents voltage, while the horizontal or X axis represents time:
The above picture shows an analog signal that varies in amplitude over time and is typical of the type of signal that TV used to broadcast. The red arrows indicate points in time where the analog signal is to be sampled. The process is known and sample and hold and electronic circuits exist to carry this out. Basically, at each red arrow point, voltage is measured and then stored as a value represented by a digital number. Later these numbers can be reconverted back to analog if needed. In digital TV’s the digital signal is used to turn on and off the picture elements or pixels that make up the picture we see.
The following diagram illustrates sample and hold:
If we look at the red line moving in 90 degree blocks throughout the above signal, we see what is basically a digital signal. This becomes the signal that is now being broadcast by TV stations. The area between the sample points become artifacts that are forever lost.
What gives vacuum tube amplifiers and vinyl records that buzz or hum that people miss from earlier days are just these artifacts that are lost during the sample and hold digitizing process. When the signal is converted back to analog, like in the case of an audio signal, for TV or for an mp3 or CD player, the lost artifacts are unknown and therefore the only option is to
average out the signal and approximate what might have been in the signal at that point in time.
The same is true for video. The video MPEG (Motion Picture Expert Group) standards use a block averaging algorithm to blur neighboring pixels whenever the signal quality degrades or drops out during playback or transmission. The attempt is made to make it seem like everything is normal and we have all seen those times when our digital cable, or satellite video picture becomes blocky and pixelated in large blurry patches. This is the MPEG algorithm trying to approximate what it thinks the picture should have looked like.
Analog signals are more natural and capture more of the nuance found in naturally occurring speech and vision. The human eye needs approximately 24 frames per second in order to overcome persistence of vision. The human ear is only sensitive up to 40KHZ. That’s 40,000 cycles, or an analog signal whose voltage peaks positive and negative 40,000 times a second. CD quality audio, for example uses a sample and hold rate of 44 KHZ so that we hear the highest quality sound possible. But this is a sanitized sound. A sound that has been artificially massaged in order to improve it.
This brings up a point that The Atomic Writer would like to explore. As science improves the reproduction quality of audio and video, how will it change us? What is lost in the electrical artifacts that we remove? What, if anything will take their place? Digital technology makes it very easy to supplant subliminal messages into the extra spaces in digital transmissions. I’ll stop at just the mere mention of this since my point is to not be paranoid, only to call it like it is. We already have high definition TV and radio, that attempts to fill these spaces with extra bandwidth to provide clearer, crisper, cleaner, sharper, more realistic images. But the human senses can only detect a fraction of the full electromagnetic spectrum. What have we’ve been missing in the sights and sounds that impinge us? Or have we missed it?
Perhaps our eyes, ears, and physical bodies do pick up frequencies outside the detectable range? Perhaps the buzz and hum of a classic rock recording or live performance is detected by the human body. An illicit internal response that mimics the natural sound of nature. A sight and sound more attune with the human experience. Not the artificial rendering of a machine.
Ah, I’ve hit the central theme of this post. Should machines render the world we hear and see? Will we change as humans and become more machine like in our thoughts and minds? Aren’t we providing our reality to machines in their natural language? Will reality one day be dictated by machines? And if so, will we know the difference?
Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.
Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer
NASA’s Fermi Mission – Have we detected an unknown close by object?
Since its launch last June, NASA’s Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has discovered a new class of pulsars, probed gamma-ray bursts and watched flaring jets in galaxies billions of light-years away. Today at the American Physical Society meeting in Denver, Colo., Fermi scientists revealed new details about high-energy particles implicated in a nearby cosmic mystery. This from a NASA news release.
The Atomic Writer has probed deeper and found evidence that a close by unknown source of cosmic rays may exist near Earth. For the first time in history we are pulling off the blindfold and witnessing the true state of our environment. Perhaps there has always been a close by object emitting high levels of cosmic rays? Perhaps it has just arrived? With only months of initial data it’s too soon to know for sure.
Also discovered in data released by Nasa is the following:
“Fermi’s Large Area Telescope is a state-of-the-art gamma-ray detector, but it’s also a terrific tool for investigating the high-energy electrons in cosmic rays,” said Alexander Moiseev, who presented the findings. Moiseev is an astrophysicist at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center in Greenbelt, Md.
“Cosmic rays are hyperfast electrons, positrons, and atomic nuclei moving at nearly the speed of light. Astronomers believe that the highest-energy cosmic rays arise from exotic places within our galaxy, such as the wreckage of exploded stars.
“Unlike gamma rays, which travel from their sources in straight lines, cosmic rays wend their way around the galaxy. They can ricochet off of galactic gas atoms or become whipped up and redirected by magnetic fields. These events randomize the particle paths and make it difficult to tell where they originated. In fact, determining cosmic-ray sources is one of Fermi’s key goals.
“What’s most exciting about the Fermi, PAMELA, and H.E.S.S. data is that they may imply the presence of a nearby object that’s beaming cosmic rays our way. “If these particles were emitted far away, they’d have lost a lot of their energy by the time they reached us,” explained Luca Baldini, another Fermi collaborator at INFN.
“If a nearby source is sending electrons and positrons toward us, the likely culprit is a pulsar — the crushed, fast-spinning leftover of an exploded star. A more exotic possibility is on the table, too. The particles could arise from the annihilation of hypothetical particles that make-up so-called dark matter. This mysterious substance neither produces nor impedes light and reveals itself only by its gravitational effects.
“Fermi’s next step is to look for changes in the cosmic-ray electron flux in different parts of the sky,” Latronico said. “If there is a nearby source, that search will help us unravel where to begin looking for it.”
What do these observations mean? The Atomic Writer believes we are witnessing the blindfold being pulled away from our eyes. For the first time in history we are starting to see the true state of our environment.
We now know an object emitting high levels of cosmic rays exists in our neighborhood. Weather it just arrived or has always been with us, perhaps flaring up on occasion is unknown at this point. Could this be a harbinger of our ultimate fate? The FERMI instrument has the ability to look outside of the magnetic shield that surrounds the earth. This gives us the ability to determine a more accurate location of this object. We should be able to pinpoint its location and with this information we can take appropriate measures.
My guess is that we will see no visible light at the source. This will imply a possible link to dark matter which could be from, according to M-Theory, gravity leaking across an adjacent membrane from another universe. For more information on M-Theory, a subset of string theory check out this link: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/M-theory
“M-theory is not yet complete; however it can be applied in many situations (usually by exploiting string theoretic dualities). The theory of electromagnetism was also in such a state in the mid-19th century; there were separate theories for electricity and magnetism and, although they were known to be related, the exact relationship was not clear until James Clerk Maxwell published his equations, in his 1864 paper A Dynamical Theory of the Electromagnetic Field. Witten has suggested that a general formulation of M-theory will probably require the development of new mathematical language. However, some scientists have questioned the tangible successes of M-theory given its current incompleteness, and limited predictive power, even after so many years of intense research.”
As readers of this blog, I know you are very smart and can put two and two together. If it turns out that the located source of this now detected cosmic ray object turns out to not interact with light, have no visible mass, and just be a point in the vacuum of space, can’t we assume the first observational evidence in support of M-Theory? If only a slight gravitational field can be measured, this would support the idea that a parallel universe exists outside of ours where only gravity and, vis-i-vis, cosmic rays leak out. M-Theory predicts multiple bubble universes floating in the fifth dimension, like balloons that sometimes come close to a neighboring balloon and touch. Could another bubble universe be coming our way. How will it affect the local physics of our environment?
More importantly, how will verification of parallel worlds affect the human race. With the popularity of television and movies dealing with plot lines that explore these topics, could mass consciousness be playing a part in what may soon be revealed to us by science? Are writers receiving a signal to prepare the masses for the realization that time travel, alternate realities, other Earth’s may exist out there? As we peel away more and more of the onion of reality, will we begin to regard science fiction as science reality? Will books like The Ninth Cube be read as possible factual stories that are no longer speculative?
I pose many questions in this blog, and I do so to illicit imagination and provoke thought in my readers. Too many writers out there cater to the mainstream masses for only one reason. That reason is money. They write garbage in order to sell more books. Writers like The Atomic Writer write to evoke an emotional response based on current observations in science. I speculate where needed and at times go to the extreme to prove a point. This is the essence of speculate writing. To extend the boundaries of the possible. To think out of the box and come to conclusions by turning mainstream convention on its head. If you, like me, enjoy and thrive in this environment, then this blog is for you. If you want middle of the road, a don’t dare to go there philosophy, then go read another blog. Here you will be challenged to think on your own. Don’t ever let anyone tell you you can’t do something. Always think for yourself.
Remember, never stop looking up at the night sky and asking…what if.
Victor Grippi
The Atomic Writer
