Articles of doom!

[conuly]

One on binge viewing of TV

Here's an article on the sequencing of the banana genome. There's a picture of a wild-type banana!

Here's a brief piece on schools that are struggling because they're neither poor enough for special subsidies nor rich enough for million dollar PTAs. I find the million dollar PTAs obscene, frankly.

There's an article on an engineered variety of apple that resists browning. Comments note that cultivated varieties that do just that already exist. The nationwide association of apple growers is resisting this variety. Their bigger problem is the fact that the most easily obtained apples have had the flavor bred out of them. They're also ridiculously huge.

Comments

[crystalpyramid]

The link to the NY Times article is missing an http://.

I don't understand why people keep designing systems that punish schools for doing well. That makes no sense. And why couldn't aid to schools be handled progressively — you're doing a little better, so have a little less money, but you don't lose all of it.

[elenbarathi.livejournal.com]

ROFL, 'Binge Viewing' - that's really the only kind of TV-watching I can stand. Television is maddeningly slow; a story that takes 15 minutes to read takes an hour to watch, with half of it left out - and THEN, every time it starts to get interesting, there's a long interruption for a repetitive series of brain-dead commercials for junk food and flashy cars. Usually I've wandered off or disappeared into my book before the first commercial segment ends.

Having the whole series on a DVD means no damn commercials, but more than that, it means not having to break the continuity of the story. The first time I ever saw HBO's Rome (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rome_(TV_series)), I watched the first seven episodes back-to-back, then went through the rest of the series, four to six episodes at a time, in less than a week.

Why not? That's only the equivalent of a movie or two per night, and lots of people watch three or four movies per night. I do suspect that many of them are, like me, 'watching with their eyes closed' much of the time.

[conuly]

Although I dislike commercials, what I like about being able to watch on my own time is I can pause the thing, take a walk for a few minutes, and then come back and be able to concentrate again. I *can* manage concentration in 15 minute bursts, I just prefer not to.

[eofs.livejournal.com]

Binge-viewing article is interesting, but what I found most interesting was the slideshow in which they explained how long it would take to marathon various popular series.

'24' (FOX) | 8 seasons, 192 episodes = 5 days, 21 hours, 2 minutes

Because of course 24, by its very nature, ought to take exactly 8 days to watch. Except that there's more than 3 days worth of ad-breaks!

It was also interesting because it gave us guidance for how long we'll need for our BSG and Lost marathons. Though they'll both be on DVD, streaming's all well and good but when you've only got a 10GB a month download limit you can't exactly marathon!