PAL typically just speeds everything up to 25 FPS, rather than duplicate frames which NTSC does. Thus, a PAL conversion actually has more words-equivalent-per-second than NTSC (but over a slightly shorter time and in higher pitch).

It's not that simple, though, when you are talking about papers with multiple authors. It doesn't take into consideration to what level of involvement any particular author was. It's not uncommon for authors to be listed due to small contributions, or insight, or internal politics. At what point do you say their contribution was significant enough to warrant exclusion from impact factor calculations because of self-citation? And how do you even quantify that level of contribution?

A principal supervisor of a group may not have much involvement on a particular paper, and yet expect and receive an authorship of it. Do you reject self-citation in that case, when the authors who actually did the work are not directly affiliated with the other papers their supervisor was previously a part of?

Of course, that's going into subtleties regarding free-will vs. determinism beyond the point I was trying to make in my comment.

I personally don't always (only sometimes) feel angry at people for "choosing" to believe in ancient fairy tales, but I often feel pity for them for being so thoroughly indoctrinated as to make it difficult if not impossible for them to realise what has happened. This indoctrination is typically forced upon them as innocent children, which they cannot reasonably be expected to bear full blame for. Religion is a memetic disease that cripples those who are unwilling (the choice argument) or too young (the indoctrination argument) to have sufficiently developed mental immunity.

Hmm. Is being brainwashed as a child a choice?

Careful now. Evolution doesn't make any prediction of the (subjective) complexity of biology as time progresses. It's quite possible that something may evolve towards something more "simple" if there is a naturally selectable advantage in doing so (e.g. conserving resources, or improving camouflage).

Point is, it's not impossible, within the theory, to find a simpler descendant. But it's not as likely, since the natural environment seems to have a habit of encouraging biological complexity.

Standard film is typically 24fps (slow and jerky and part of why I don't much care for cinema these days, but I digress). When played on PAL TV it's simply sped up slightly to make it fit the 25fps PAL standard (audio also increases in pitch a little; for those with perfect pitch the music changes noticeably). For NTSC, I believe they use a scheme (3:2 pulldown IIRC) that displays film frames for alternating durations. I would imagine that would make things look unnaturally jerky, but I've never seen it in practice. Of course, they might do something a bit better for conversion to HD.

There was a joke, you missed it.

Damn it, how am I supposed to know I'm meant to laugh if it isn't modded +5 Funny? Do you job, mods!!