For your sake, I hope your wife does not have mod points. Actually either way you are sleeping on the couch

If you have a "normal" DVR then you are part of a sort of stealth nielsen household. Obviously they know how you use your DVR or they wouldn't know that it accounts for 33% more viewers. My cable company can totally tell what channel I'm currently tuned to and if I have something recording on the DVR. It goes without saying that they store that info and sell it to the upstream providers.

Even if you haven't seen these particular eyecatches I'm sure you've seen the technique of going to commercial just at cliffhanger and then doing a 30 or even 15 second ad and right back. This is the networks messing with you.

It almost seems like the terrible scheduling of Dollhouse on Friday night (when their audience is not home) is part of an experiment. Probably less than half of the people that see it are watching in real time. So flipping through the commercials. Show business a business.

How do you make money? Eureka uses aggressive product placement and tries to smirk at itself about it (this sort of works). Have you noticed the Dollhouse eyecatches (do they call them that here?) they come right out and say "dollhouse will return in xx seconds". At least with my DVR a 60-90 second break isn't really worth zipping though, you overshoot and spend more time rewinding back than it's worth. So I watch the ad. When they don't do the eyecatch you know you are in for a local station break of ~7 minutes of crap about shamwow and restless legs that you can zap at will.

Not *all* the people at these networks are stupid. Hell, Rupert Murdoch is far from stupid himself.

FWIW, Dushku is not the Summer Glau equivalent. She's a fairly known actress. She's "Mal". The Glau effect is someone you've never seen before that looks like nobody you've ever seen before. Someone that causes brain lock when she first shows on screen. IS she pretty? Is she too wierd looking to be pretty? Is she an alien or some sort of android from the future? Does she have an interocitor in her dressing room?

That's clearly Dichen Lachman.

Ah, but you want those resonance frequencies, or formants. Both for a particular sound color and also to cut through other sounds. The well known "singer's formant" centers around the highest F# on the piano. Opera singers train and train to punch up this harmonic across the actual range of sung notes. There is a hole in the sound frequencies of the entire orchestra that will allow the singer to be heard even while other "louder" instruments are playing.

Also the varnish may be as important as the source wood in trating the wood to get this evenness of density.