The cosmic mistake and Digital Television

Goodbye T.V. static. You were a good friend. I’ve spent many hours toying with the rabbit ears on my set, trying to bring a good picture. Digital T.V. will be the end of you. Twenty years from now … people will scarcely have a memory of the fuzzy snow that permeated the first 50 or so years of the idiot box.

So here is my reminder {if this site is still up in the year 2028 … awesome}.

~2.5mb
Double click to play (yes … it’s really just static):
[qt:/blog/movies/static.mov /blog/movies/static_poster.mov 480 270]

But wait … what were you Mr. T.V. Static??

Most of T.V. static comes from local electro magnetic interference – your fridge, air conditioner and other man-made electric devices.

Some of it comes from our sun. Our local star is constantly blasting us with high energy particles, some of which hit our antennas and create random spots of interference on the screen. Cool.

My favorite part of T.V. static comes from the residual photons left over from the Big Bang. When you are standing in front of the T.V., trying to get “Friends” to come in a little clearer, you are actually tuning out the ultimate broadcast.

When astronomers look out into deep space, they are looking back in time as well. The further out they look, the further back in time they go. They always hit the same wall – it’s called Three Cosmic Background Radiation. We can’t see past it. Behind it, is the big Bang itself.

This radiation blankets the universe in an isotropic soup of photons (space isn’t really empty) and accounts for the average temperature of empty space being ~2.75 Kelvin. The fluctuations in this temperature give us some insight in the original configuration, shape and/or density of the universe. Wayward photons have been scooting around space since the beginning. They bump into our antennas and cause us to get up off of the couch and wrestle with our T.V. reception.

So rock on DTV! Turn off the Universe Channel please. Let’s get perfect and clean signals! Perfect and clean … perfect and clean …

We perceive a forward motion in time due to the process of entropy. The universe is cooling … breaking down … things get old and collapse … stars fade out. Depressing.

But life itself may be working counter to that notion. Through extropy, life may be creating order out of our universes decline into chaos. I guess it depends on how much energy we waste in the process. This gets a little envirometaphysical…

It is our natural inclination to create order and attempt perfection. Pitch correction??? Liposuction??? Digital noise reduction???

But let us not forget that the universe, no matter how you look at it … religion … science … the universe started as an unfathomable thing to our minds. A cosmic conundrum. Unknowable.

Let’s tone down the noise reduction and let some mistakes through. You never know what will happen. That’s the good part.

Bye bye static …

(now go watch T.V.)