Interesting Stuff

This evening, Amanda, Reid, Mac, Ricco, Robert, Rachel, and I went to the Hollywood Bowl and saw John Williams conduct the LA Philharmonic orchestra. In case the name doesn’t sound familiar, John Williams has composed many of the scores for movies over the past few decades. He composed (and this evening conducted) the music for all the Star Wars movies, ET, Indiana Jones, Amistad, Schindler’s List, Robin Hood, Harry Potter, and a bunch I hadn’t heard of. It was pretty cool. We were in the 2nd farthest away section, so we could barely see the stage and had to rely on the screens on the sides of the building to see what was going on, but it sounded wonderful. They performed roughly 5 encores at the end, which was kinda neat. When they played any Star Wars music, about a dozen people in the audience held up their light sabers and waved them around. A wonderful time was had by all.

Here’s something odd about the TV screens in the Rose Bowl – there was a delay between John Williams’ motions and the motions on the 2 screens nearest the center, and then a longer delay between these screens and the ones further out. wtf!? Electricity travels at roughly half the speed of light (in which case the signal could circle the globe 3 times per second), so that shouldn’t cause a delay. The only thing I can think of (and this is already quite improbable) is that the signal from the video cameras takes a long time to encode (causing the delay in the first set of screens), but this same signal should be able to be used in all the screens, so I can’t account for the second delay. Any ideas? I find it hard to believe that the signal would be carried by something other than electricity (accounting for the longer delays to reach the more distant screens), and really hard to imagine that the signal would be decoded for the first screen and then re-encoded to be sent to the second one (accounting for a second delay).