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| Monday, August 17, 2009 06:50 PM |
| Random Thoughts |
 by Fëanor |
- I think I'm bad at buying gifts for people for the same reason that I'm bad at Scattergories. Scattergories, if you don't know, is a game where you're given a letter and a series of categories and you have a limited amount of time to come up with a word that starts with that letter in each of the categories. My problem is, I don't have words sorted in my head by their first letter. So the way I end up playing this game is thinking of every single thing that fits the category and then checking to see if it starts with the correct letter. It's definitely not the way to win.
Similarly, when purchasing a gift for someone, I find myself wandering stores looking at every possible gift and considering for each one whether it would be good for the person in question.
- I was just watching a show about how early color TV worked, and also about how they made the camera that filmed the moon landing, and how the signal was transmitted back to Earth, received, converted, and retransmitted to everyone in the world. Television still seems like magic to me - the images of people and things transmitted instantaneously in a life-like manner. And the moon landing was just such an astounding feat. Every single part of it was a nearly insoluble engineering problem, and every one of those problems was solved. Even the camera was a huge and ridiculous problem - it had to be handheld, it had to be easy to use by an astronaut in a spacesuit, it had to withstand the extreme conditions on the moon, and it had to run on just 7 watts. And then that signal had to be transmitted all the way back to the Earth and received by three separate gigantic satellite dishes set up at three points around the planet. Insane.
- There are commercials for mortgages and health insurance companies on TV now that are set up to look like news reports or official announcements from the federal government. It's despicable and, as far as I'm concerned, criminal. Not only do these ads prey on the gullible, the mortgage ones could very likely be contributing to the poor state of the economy. I want the people who make these deceptive commercials to be put in jail for a long, long time.
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