Since I have a lot of time on my hands, with my pneumonia and all, I started looking at TV series I hadn’t seen yet. I borrowed the Sopranos DVDs, but I also tried out some ‘alternative distribution’ series. Supernatural is not really my thing, Jericho is OK, Weeds seems not bad at all, but my current favourite is definitely “Californication“.

David Duchovny heads up the cast in this comedy about a novelist with sex and drug addictions who is struggling to raise his daughter half the time, while having problems with his ex-girlfriend.

Duchovny jumps from one bed to the next, not bothered by any set of morals. Meanwhile he delivers some kick-ass one-liners. The ex is played by Natascha McElhone, who looks a lot like a girl I was once in love with, so that adds to the attraction. If you know how to get these things onto your hard disk: try out the first episodes and see if you like them!

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‘Look who’s talking’ meets ‘The Matrix’ meets ‘Chucky’: a funny spot for Wilkinson Quattro.

Responsables annonceur : Eric Oriot, Catherine Brandenberger et Stéphane Rosen
Responsables agence : Florent Sallard, Chloé Larmurier et Cyrine Boussena
Responsable innovation : Olivier Sebag
Directeur artistique : Xavier Beauregard
Concepteur rédacteur : Vincent Pedrocchi
TV Producer : Elisabeth Boitte
Réalisateur : Akama
Maison de production : Wanda
Production son: THE
Musique: midnight run / Xavier Berthelot

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Way too many useless channels

I could now watch channels like Nile TV, Qatar TV and Al Jazeera for Kids. But no Discovery Channel or National Geographic. On the good side: I now have Vijf TV and Vitaya, which was not the case with analog TV.

Bandwidth issues
At first you don’t really see a difference in image quality. But every now and then the channel you are watching can get really jerky. Switching to another channel and back might help, but sometimes you are forced to watch Tv like this:

No more TV capture?
Since the digital TV decoder is also the tuner (with a separate remore control), I guess it’s not possible to it hook up to a PC and TV capture card so that these can act as a digital video recorder. The set-top box itself (a Motorola DVi1000) does not have a hard disk nor can it be fitted with one: no chance of a Telenet Digicorder alternative. So recording becomes kind of hard.

All in all, not that big a step forward.

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Wat kunnen we afleiden uit de trailer?

• de sfeer wordt grimmiger
• er wordt redelijk wat afgebleit
• ze gaan de kelder onderzoeken
• iemand stuurt een sms dat ie afkomt

We wachten vol spanning af!

Mijn theorie:
De abortus van An was in feite geen abortus, de foetus is overgeplant in Steffie en gaat nu als Ramses door het leven. Lucas was een latente homo en is verliefd op Jan. Hij is via Sophie te weten gekomen van de abortus. De drie musketiers Xavier, Guido en Dick willen De Parelvissers verkopen maar Jan ligt dwars. Ze huren dus iemand in om hem te kidnappen en vermoorden. De 100 miljoen losgeld worden door Xavier, Guido en Dick van de bank gehaald, maar Jan kan de gangster overmeesteren en vlucht. Jan klopt aan bij Lucas, die hem vertelt van de abortus van An. Achternagezeten door de kidnapper, vlucht Jan naar het Midden-Oosten. De drie besluiten het geld dan maar te houden en investeren het in TV-2000 van Roland Lomme. Jan zint op wraak in de woestijn van Afghanistan, terwijl hij meevecht in de burgeroorlog. 6 jaar later besluit hij zijn broer in te schakelen om alle ex-Parelvissers samen te brengen en ze allemaal kapot te maken. Hij brengt daarvoor een M60 mee en een hoofdbandje.

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In this role, you will provide leadership on product vision and execution of projects that enable using Google’s search and advertising technologies to enhance users’ Television viewing experience.
(…)
These (trends) include but are not limited to the intersection of internet and Television technologies, video-on-demand, personal video recorders and emergence of next generation set-top-boxes with IP connectivity. You will then identify areas where use of Google’s search and advertising technology can enhance this user experience and define appropriate products to deliver these user benefits
from Google jobs

Fewer people will be channel surfing, and more people will want to sit down and literally search for something to watch.
radioactiveyak via CNN Money

Will they provide a Tivo-like service, but free and with contextual advertising? Will they rent air-time inside regular TV programs and put ads in there? Will they provide collaborative filtering like “You watch ‘Sex In The City’ all the time, how about ‘Bridget Jones’ and some chocolate?“? Will they store the world’s TV content and sell it pay-per-view? Will they create a TV series “Don’t be evil” about two geeks that hang out with hot girls all the time?

Interesting times ahead!

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• Big Brother: some ‘grown-ups’ were fishing rubber ducks out of a pool with forced enthusiasm
• De Pfaffs: 2 ‘grown-up’ men couldn’t work out how to install a game console and resorted to drinking half a dozen beers out of a home tap, in glasses featuring the face of their father-in-law (Jean-Marie Pfaff, Belgium’s best example of ‘brains don’t matter’)

Ironically, the excellent ‘Parelvissers’ show is about the decay of a formerly successful TV production company that falls apart because they produce more and more shitty stuff. I wonder how many of the people in Endemol (Big Brother) or Eyeworks (de Pfaffs) have a déjà-vu feeling when watching the series. “A show that features old people reading their will on TV and explaining why cousin X doesn’t get anything, hey, we had that idea too!“.

Watching Big Brother for 5 minutes was bad enough, but the Pfaffs episode was really embarrassing. Two guys in their late twenties fruitlessly struggling with a game console and a huge flat screen, a pregnant daughter talking to her doctor about her stool inconsistency, a 50-year ex-goalie talking about the importance of friendship while wearing sponsored shirts, … there’s just that much a sensible person can take. This is Reality television when the genre has outstayed its welcome, when they’re just trying to milk a dead cow. Reality TV is dead. Let’s see what’s on the other channels …

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But then my rational side took over. I started worrying about the damage this must do to her personality. Admit: she has been on the coverpage of Humo a couple of dozen times in various states of undress (the most famous one where she only holds 2 coconuts as an improvised bra) and she has just be chosen for X-th time in Humo’s Pop Poll in the category ‘Who do you want to see naked?” (”Wie wilt u uit de kleren zien gaan“). Thousands of men screaming to see your breasts, that can’t be beneficial for a girl’s self-esteem. We should really stop, guys, before it’s too late. Chances are that in 5 to 10 years, there will be no crowds cheering for her to drop her top and we don’t want her to fall into a depression and stuff herself with chocolate.

So here’s my plea:

” Dear Roos, I am no longer interested in your curves or what you look like without clothes. I’m eager to know what happens in that brain of yours. What you think about culture, religion, politics and modern feminism. What you have experienced and observed in your career. The strain of being a blonde in the entertainment industry. How civilisation is different in Asia. The psychology of men and women. Group dynamics when shooting a show on an island. Stand-up comedy evolution in Belgium.
Leave the bikini-shoots for the Veronique Decocks and Tanja Dexters. We know you have breasts, and that they’re probably very nice, but that’s a detail. You’re gonna be 30 this year, flash some wisdom. ”

Somebody had to say it.

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One of Flanders’ fine actors, Peter Van Asbroeck, has let his hair grow. Way too long. And to make sure he doesn’t get any between his teeth, he has resorted to wearing a head band. Not a macho type of hair band – as far as that is possible – but the most sissy of hairbands: the stretching ‘diadem’ (we call them ‘diadeem’). For a guy that puts ‘Miami Vice’-like pictures on his website, takes pride in showing of his muscles – and as of more recently, his beer bulge – that is a surprising decision.

The newspaper “Het Volk” – hardly an authority in the ’style’ department – claims that, while it might be oldfashioned for a girl to wear a diadem nowadays, it’s really trendy for men:

It started with top footballers like Beckham, Totti and Ronaldinho, and got picked by other stars and now also by ‘the common man’. On Belgian soil we already spotted Bosko Balaban, Patrick Nijs and Daniel Van Buyten on the football court and in showbizz Werner Desmedt and Peter Van Asbroeck.

OK, let’s take a look:

Well, footballers and hairdressers, what can I say. These are the people that brought us the mullet, which -over here- has for years been the best indicator of football aspirations. Even better than walking round in a training suit 24/7 and driving a Manta.

So Mr. Van Asbroeck, I don’t know who told you you looked cool or cute with the headband, but it makes my skin crawl every time I see you on Thuis or Swingpaleis. Get it over with: Cut the hair, get a belly piercing or a brazilian wax, whatever rocks your boat. Just as long as I don’t have to see it.

Some other Belgian bloggers that don’t like the hairband: wezzzel – svends – laurenx

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P$ = [N * (I% * S% * W% * B% * M$)] – (N * E$) – (L% * C% * R$)
where
P$ = profit, bottom-line

N = number of emails sent (can be millions!)
I% = % of addresses that are valid/correct
S% = % of addresses that are not intercepted by anti-spam software
W% = % of emails to cause the receiver to go visit the website
B% = % of site visitors that actually buy the product
M$ = margin per product sold

E$ = cost of sending 1 email

L% = risk of having legal action taken against you
C% = risk of getting convicted when you’re in court
R$ = average fine you would have to pay

What I often ask wonder about is the B%: people that actually buy the product. People actually order blue pills upon receiving emails like the one above? People believe they have been chosen to transfer millions of dollars out of some banana-republic?

So I have 2 questions (presuming the audience on this blog is clever enough not to buy through spam sollicitations themselves):

• who knows someone who has bought spam-advertised stuff?
• who knows someone who knows someone who has bought …?

There really is a task there for public television:

“And today we visit … Kevin! Kevin, you are now live on TV. You ordered something through the Internet, didn’t you, Kevin. You thought I was just the mailman delivering, but no, I am not. I am Tom Van Dyke, and you’re on “Spam Pigeon of the Week” ! Now, let’s see what you just ordered, let’s open the package. What did the spam mail say, Kevin? Hours of guaranteed pleasure? Make your girlfriend ask for more? Ha-ha-ha! Ok, it’s a box, and the box has a label that says … “Golden Enhancement Package”? Now what would we want to enhance, Kevin? Oh look, it’s a … (gets hit in the face with box)

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Het kan aan mij liggen, maar ik denk dat er in aflevering 4 veel uit de kast gaan komen:

Mr Y: Guido, da is toch nen homo, he?
…
An: Hebde gulle da nooit meegemaakt dat iets nie kan of nie mag en dat ge het toch niet kunt laten?
…
Piet: Ik kan dat perfect uitleggen. Kom sebiet naar mijn kamer en ik zal u alles vertellen, ok?
Lucas: Binnen 5 minuten, ja?
Piet: En hou het tussen ons, he.

Nu wordt alles dus duidelijk: een driehoeksverhouding tussen Piet, Guido en Lucas. Maar An had ook iets met Guido, of misschien ook met Sofie? Zondag op uw beeldscherm!

(Wie is wie in “De Parelvissers”: check mijn geheugensteuntje)

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If it were weight/length you can attach a mental image to that: if you took horizontal slices of the body, how much would a 1m high slice weigh? For weight/length³ you can have an image too: kg/m³ or density of the body. But BMI is kg/m² or something like ‘pressure’ (multiply it with gravity 9.81 m/s² and you get the unit of pressure: Newton/m² or ‘Pascal’).

So I started playing with an estimate function for the weight of a person: I modeled a body as a rectangular 3D box.

• The length L is the person’s length.
• The ‘equivalent width’ EW of a body is dependent on the average width (e.g. ear-to-ear, shoulder-to-shoulder, hip-to-hip).
• The ‘equivalent depth’ ED of a body is dependent on the average depth (e.g. tip of the nose-to-back of the head, chest-to-back, tip of the toes to heel).
• The definition of EW and ED is such that L x EW x EW = volume of the body = the actual volume of the body.
• One could calculate that for an ‘ideal’ adult body, e.g. the dimensions of the guy with the arms and legs spread that Leonardo Da Vinci created, EW will be a fraction of the total length, EW = SW x L (SW = scaling of width). One could argue that this SW is dependent on gender, age and race. Let’s ignore that for now.
• Every real person will be less or more wide by a ratio α (if α is < 100% you're thinner, if it is > 100% you’re wider). Each person will also be less or more ‘deep’ by a ratio β. (if β < 100% you're thinner, if β > 100% you’re fatter).
• The body has a certain average density (kg/m³), but this will depend on the composition of the body: muscles have a density DM of 1080 kg/m³, fat has DF of only 700-900kg/m³ (less than water: it floats!), bones are more like 2000kg/m³ and lungs will have a totally different density whether they are filled with air or not. I only take into account the % body fat. Let’s call that … λ!

One can expect an obese person to have: a high α (broad hips, thick legs), a high β (fat belly, 4 chins) and a high λ. Since fat weighs less than muscle, one might argue that a high body fat % makes you lighter, but let’s keep in mind that this is mostly excess fat: you still need a minimum of muscles in order to function.

The formula is then:
Weight (kg) = L x (α x EW) x (β x ED) x (λ x DF + (1-λ) x DM) or
Weight (kg) = L x (α x SW x L) x (β x SD x L) x (λ x DF + (1-λ) x DM)
So the BMI is something like:
BMI(kg/m²) = L x (α x SW) x (β x SD) x (λ x DF + (1-λ) x DM) which still contains a factor L.

Geometric approach
I discovered in a mailing list dating back to 1996 that I was not the first one to ask this question. It appears that the L² was chosen for empirical reasons: the main puropose of the BMI was to detect risk for obesity and anorexia, and the square happened to match best with clinical statistics.
Dividing the weight by the more intuitive cube of the length L³ can be called the geometric approach. In the formula this gives:
GEO(kg/m³) = ( SW x SD ) x (α x β) x (λ x DF + (1 - λ) x DM)
with SW and SD being constants (be it maybe for a particular gender, race or age). This makes total sense.

Allometric approach
A Michael Raymond Pierrynowski actually argues that to have a more meaningful index, you need to divide by L ^4. This compensates for allometric effects: larger persons/mammals need stronger bones to support all that mass:

One way to observe that geometric similarity is NOT correct is to note that some animals are not scaled up versions of others (i.e. the lion and the cat). The lion has much thicker legs than the cat to support its trunk. These larger legs must have extra mass, therefore doubling the size of the cat does not 8 fold increase the mass of the lion but increases the mass by 16 times.

I took the data I had of the candidates for the Top Model show, and also added statistics for US baseball players (the team from the LA Lakers), who are at the other end of the spectrum. A common criticism on BMI is that it often qualifies athletes of heavy sports like baseball as potentially obese, whil they rather have way more muscles than average people and are often very healthy individuals.
I’ve put 3 lines on the graph for each system: a bottom line, under which you are considered rather light, an average line, and a top line, above which you are ‘too heavy’. You can see that the allometric curves are more lenient on the baseball players. Almost all models as well as all athletes fall within the norm.

Conclusion: BMI is just ‘a’ way of measuring relative weight, maybe not the best. The usage aof the square of the length is contra-intuitive, but seems to give acceptable results.

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