Go to a friends house and turn on their flat-panel TV. 99% of the time, it will have frame-rate interpolation turned on; which basically means that any content they see on that TV will be at 60 or 120 Hz. Even movies shot at 24.

More and more often as I do presentations to executives, they don't understand why my TVs look so "juddery" compared to what they expect -- it's because at home they're watching everything at 120Hz.

So no -- most people are happy with high frame rate most of the time, and that percentage is getting larger quickly. I am a big 24fps fan, but I believe the days are numbered.

No, we are not doing things that are artificial at all -- we are making things that could be far more real.

The Dolby Vision TVs will have reasonable controls to set brightness and contrast, but one of the selling points to the studios is that we will strive to maintain the artistic intent of the original. The blacks will be black, the whites will be white, and there will be an unprecedented (but realistic) amount of contrast.

It turns out that in high dynamic range content creation, the most important thing is not that the picture be brighter overall; but that there is an increased range between midtones and highlights. In current production, skin tones are set to about half the maximum brightness in the scene. This means that the brightest things in the image (say, a glint off of a chrome bumper) can only be twice that bright; where in real life it's more that 100 times that bright. So, leaving the midtones about where they are, and giving brighter highlights makes the image look better in a way that you have to see to understand. Or, you can just look out the window.

As the article states, two of the most important changes in this standard are high dynamic range (HDR) and wider color gamut (Rec. 2020) images. I have been working on this with Dolby Laboratories for the last few years, and whenever we bring in movie directors, cinematographers, colorists, or studio executives to see our ridiculously HDR wide-color-gamut display, their jaws hit the floor. The ability to reproduce the dynamic range and color gamut of real life is breathtaking. One of the studio executives, when asked if she could see the difference said "Do I look like a potted palm?"

You will see the difference, and you'll be able to see it from across the room. HDR and wide color gamut combined with UHD resolution is a revolution.

I know this sounds like a sales pitch (ok, it is!) but I've been working in the film business for 30 years before I started working on this; I know what creatives want, and this is it. I spent that time working on CG visual effects, and I think that HDR will have a comparable impact on filmmaking that VFX did.

The Dolby Cinema theaters opening in the next few months will have similar extreme dynamic range and wide color gamut. They look astonishingly better as well.

Wait and see. It's coming, and it's not far away.

The denialists will still come up with an alternate interpretation of cherry-picked data from some crackpot blog, to prove you wrong.

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The same data has been used to claim men landed on the moon, and that the moon landing was a hoax. Therefore all data related to the moon landing should then be ignored. As it's proven flawed on both counts.

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Gaia is living, breathing, self stabilizing organism. Gaia actively maintains optimum conditions for live to thrive. If the sun fluctuates hotter, Gaia will keep us cool. If the sun fluctuates cooler, Gaia will keep us warm. We have released two quadrillion pounds (2,000,000,000,000,000) of CO2 into the atmosphere and the laws of physics say that will trap heat.... and Gaia will.... umm I dunno... but Gaia will do it's super-smart-Gaia-thing to to actively counter it and keep us in a loving protective embrace of shielded stability. If we have a nuclear war, Gaia will cleanse the environment and protect us from that nasty radiation-stuff. Gaia loves all life, gaia loves us and protects us. Gaia loves broadway shows and long walks on the beach. Gaia has profiles on eHarmony.com and JDate.com.

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That is the point, of course. We're going to see more dramatic climate changes in the future, probably, and we'll be able to go back and point to these votes. Politicians can deny a lot of things, but the votes are on the record forever.

Bruce,

Do you think it's possible in this 'big data' age to come up with an absolute, reasonably accurate, energy budget for the planet? We have storms, and shifting ocean currents, and a number of things that affect the temperatures that are easy to measure; but the net energy is surely growing as inexorably and smoothly as the CO2 concentration.

Now, of course, those kind of facts won't matter to people whose bread is buttered with oil money. Still, it could be useful for tracking our progress or lack thereof.

I mean, how could a cube invented during a presentation by Heisenberg on his uncertainty principle not be on the list?

Funny to see somebody complaining about the lack of a good encrypted email program.

"Geez, there's this billion dollar opportunity here that nobody is taking. Oh well, I'll just go back to reading Facebook." Come on man! Do it!

18 year graph, yes temperatures have risen over the last 18 years.

What you were trying to cite was the was this. If you look at that graph you'll see that the earth has been on a cooling trend line (the straight lines), every year since 1965. Obviously the graph is rising, and obviously all of the cooling trend-lines are completely fictional. That's exactly how denialist websites try to quote that warming has "stopped", when it obviously hasn't. The genuine long term warming trend always breaks the fictional short-term trend lines after a few years.

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Google Maps show Rightscorp's address as Santa Monica Airport: https://goo.gl/maps/IFgj5

At first I thought this was a mistake. However, upon further consideration, this may also be an obvious choice location for any fly-by-night operation.

I've done some research into hypersonic technology, and it's not strictly true that hypersonic flights are necessarily less efficient per passenger mile. Sure, up to this point it has been the case, but we haven't explored in detail.

The US currently has tested a hypersonic glider that goes a heck of a long way, with a surprisingly good glide ratio, above Mach 20. Apparently it was to glide for thousands of miles, while only descending maybe 20 miles, implying a tremendously high glide ratio, over 100:1. If that's true, then you could have extremely efficient flight at Mach 20.

These "waverider" planes use radically different aerodynamics, so the old rules don't apply. They're nothing like the Concorde.

Yep, American decadence is why the Soviet Union won the cold war.

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