Skip to main content

NPR - How refreshing

I have about a 20 minute commute to work, and like to simply relax and listen to the radio.  Lately, however, I can't find a station that is worth listening to.  It is not the innuendo that bothers me, it is the constant, lowest common denominator, one-track, childish innuendo that I find annoying.  So, I switch from channel to channel trying to avoid the announcers.  In the mornings this is almost impossible; every station (except pure classical music) is like talk radio for middle school boys.

So, I listened to NPR today, and found it refreshing.  A few of the segments actually caused me to think :-)

I also did a little searching, for academic interest, at how close to the line some of the stations are today.  I found this link, which outlines what is "indecent".  The definition is actually quite interesting:

"Because the Supreme Court has determined that obscene speech is not entitled to First Amendment protection, radio and television stations may not broadcast obscene material at any time. Speech is determined to be obscene by applying a three-part test:
  1.  An average person, applying contemporary community standards, must find that the material, as a whole, appeals to the prurient interest;
  2. The material must depict or describe, in a patently offensive way, sexual conduct specifically defined by applicable law; and
  3.  The material, taken as a whole, must lack serious literary, artistic, political or scientific value."
The memo does not actually state if all three of these must be met, or only one.  To me, point three is the most telling, and I feel that most radio stations (in the Bay Area) miss the mark by a long shot.  If only they could add some intelligence, some subtlety, and some non-repetitive material into their shows, I think they could have much better retention rates.  Then, being close to the line would be interesting, as opposed to irritating.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Fourth R.

Reading, wRiting, aRithmetic, and algoRithms.  My wife and I were just brainstorming about this: how coding should be the next "basic" skill.  Of course, someone was ahead of us and posted this .  It is awesome to see Mozilla Hackasaurus referenced in this article.  It is a small world. In the early days of the printing press, scholars wrote the books; the press was simply used for production (see this article ).  As time went on, "average" people became familiar with the medium, and used it for their own messages.  We are at just that point with the Web.  Software Engineers write the code, and the Web distributes it.   Software Engineers are the algoRithm scholars of today.  They won't be for long.  Soon algoRithms will be taught starting in elementary school, along with the other three R's.
Read more

Connectome as a Book

Your Connectome is a map of your brain.  Every neuron, every synapse. I am only a few pages into Connectome, but was intrigued by a sentence: "Human DNA....has three billion letters....would be a million pages long if printed as a book."  The companion question, "How many pages for the Connectome?" might be answered later in the book, but I thought I would take a shot at it here. Here is the punchline: Your Connectome book is 6.7 million times longer than your DNA book. That human DNA is about a million pages is not too surprising, although it probably is not optimized. According to quora there are between 1500 and 1800 letters per page.  I am going to use round numbers, namely 2000.  Then, the 3x10^9 DNA letters would actually be 1.5 million pages.  But this is very wasteful.  Even using just ASCII we can encode four DNA letters per character, so the book should really only be about 400K pages.  And, this book is much more interesting; in...
Post a Comment
Read more