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Showing posts with the label oshin

Some things cut across boundaries

My Turkish friend and I have a ritual. He sends me a link of something from Turkey. It usually involves music (My favourite thus far is still moustache man ibrahim tatlıses playing the baglama). I find the Indian analogue. It is kind of scary. You see and hear the same sorts of instruments. But the music is different. Yet familiar. The other day, I was listening to a Malayalam song. I do that from time to time... to ensure I still understand it (that's a joke by the way). It mentioned Omar Khayyam. I asked the Turkish fellow about Omar Khayyam. And he knew who he was. With a slightly different name but still, the same Omar Khayyam. Bonus points to anyone who points out which Malayalam song that came from. I am still at a bit of a loss as to how it made it into the song. The only place I can find is that the Rubáiyát was translated in the 1930s by G. Sankara Kurup. But for whatever reason, there it is.  Nevermind that Omar Khayyam, by all measures, is a polymath and genius and ...

The wonders of NHK

Some of you may know that I have a recently acquired an LCD HDTV. It is a thing of beauty. I have no cable service yet because Comcast is somehow screwing me over. But that axe will be ground another day. Today, I am here to talk about NHK. How did I get to NHK? Well, lets leave that aside for a minute. What is NHK is perhaps the first question to ask. NHK is Japan's public broadcaster, a sort of BBC or CBC of Japan. So now that the what has been resolved, lets get to the why . UHDV. Ultra High Definition Video. What's that? You've heard of 1080p by now. Blu-Ray DVDs can be encoded at that resolution. 1080p is it , right? Hmm, maybe. You see, the standard 1080p on NTSC has a resolution of 1920×1080 pixels. That's pretty cool. Well UDHV is 7,680 × 4,320 pixels. It is 4 times taller and wider. NHK is the force behind UHDV. That's how I was led to NHK. They are hoping to start broadcasting in UHDV by 2015. By the way, they switched to digital broadcasting in 2000....