2015 — 15 January: Thursday
It was sufficiently quiet1 and seemingly bright when I finally opened my eyes this morning I half-suspected overnight snow. No, I was merely resurfacing at 09:20 or so and my variously noisy neighbours have all departed for work, or whatever else they depart for in their variously noisy and unnecessarily large vehicles. Tea! Where's my cuppa?
Meanwhile...
... I'd better not delay breakfast too much longer, lest I spoil my lunch-date appetite.
Rather funny...
... that I should have picked "Voodoo Science" off my shelves before learning of this. Source and snippet:
"The imprimatur of science should be awarded only to a theory that is testable. Only then can we defend science from attack."
Unger and Smolin have also just gone into print with a monumental book — The Singular Universe and the Reality of Time — which systematically takes apart contemporary physics and exposes much of it as, in Unger's words, "an inferno of
allegorical fabrication." The book says it is time to return to real science which is tested against nature rather than constructed out of mathematics. Physics should no longer be seen as the ultimate science, underwriting all others. The true queen of the
sciences should be history — the biography of the cosmos.
(I have silently corrected a typo.) But there was silly me, all along, thinking that if you didn't start from a testable hypothesis you were just playing in the, erm, primordial ooze. Superstring me up and colour me surprised, baby!
Right. Time for me to extract another batch of sunshine from my cucumbers. No, wait, I mean stew another batch of plums with blueberries and cranberries to liven up the taste of my fibre-filled cereal.
[Pause, for a lunch outing and genial chatter over a cuppa]
Yesterday's anticipated volume...
... changed into this afternoon's doorstep delivery of a nice hardback edition while I was out. I correctly identified the cover artist. Paul Gravett's mother is vastly different from mine, judging by the bit here on his 'Acknowledgements' page:
My mother took me to my first comics shop, Dark They Were And Golden-Eyed in London's seedy Soho, and to my first comics art exhibition, Aargh! at the Institute of Contemporary Arts.
I suspect dear Mama would not have been caught dead in so-called seedy Soho. I loved it. The defence rests.
I've also returned with Len's latest issue of one of his techno-porn magazines — Custom PC — with a view to 'researching' the current feasibility of using a moderately-sized 4K TV as my next desktop PC monitor, in conjunction with a semi-passive graphics card (to retain my preferred 0dB background noise level) of suitable 'oomph' in the resolution and refresh rate departments, and whatever is more appropriate in the HDMI 2 or the DisplayPort connector department.
Watch this (possibly to be expanded) space.
Initial thoughts
How much data does a 24-bit colour, 4K (3,840 x 2,160) resolution, picture at a 60Hz refresh rate soak up per second?
(24 x 3840 x 2160 x 60) bits per second
I make that 11.944 Gbps bandwidth needed in the electric string 'twixt PC graphics card o/p and display screen i/p. This is raw, uncompressed data, of course. I don't doubt Netflix and Amazon Prime boffinry are even now working on super clever ways to compress2 (and, of course, copy-protect and degrade in other ways) such massive data streams in readiness for the exciting new world of Ultra Hi-Def video-streaming to the home.
OK. How much data can one hope to shovel through an HDMI or DisplayPort connection and live to tell the tale?
HDMI 2.0: up to 18.0Gbps DP 1.2: up to 17.28Gbps
So that fixes the input spec on the TV. If it ain't at least HDMI 2.0, forget it. (I'm assuming, though I will hope to be proven wrong, that DisplayPort connections are not yet commonplace on TV sets, though they are obviously a very Good Thing to fit on a 4K screen.)
What about DRM? I have no idea what the equivalent of the dreadful hdcp crap is — or is even going to be — in the whacky world of 4K screens. Given the way present 4K TVs from Sony and Samsung can't feed on each other's 4K video, it appears I'm not alone in my boundless ignorance. [Pause] Turns out the 'answer' is hdcp 2.2 though I forget the question.
Final conclusions
Currently, the smallest 4K TV with an hdmi 2.0 input clocks in at around 40" and a little North of £400 (for a German imported LG model). I found none with a DisplayPort, though I wasn't looking that hard. And the largest 4K PC monitor clocks in at around £1,300 for a 31.5" Dell screen. I forgot to note whether VAT is included in that extortionate price. In either case, I would also have to throw in a graphics adapter (at upwards of £250) and an appropriate cable.
My current PC system has two 27" screens (of 2,560 x 1,440 pixel resolution), side by side, with the Win8.1 desktop sprawled across them. I like this arrangement, so I shall continue to await further developments. Again. (This is, of course, precisely the same conclusion I reached last time I was vaguely scratching this sort of upgrade itch, except that I then 'upgraded' from a pair of 24" Dell screens and threw in an oomphier — but still totally silent — graphics adapter as some form of consolation prize for not moving to 4K.)
Sometimes, progress consists of doing nothing. It's a core skill of mine :-)