Maths of the Mind

Comments

• Comment by Stuart Lowe on Apr 02 2009:

  The latest Jodcast video episode is now out. It is different to our previous videos as this one is a public talk given at The University of Manchester so it quite a lot longer than normal. It deals with the mathematics and image processing of the brain; two topics of practical interest to astronomy.

• Comment by EarthUnit on Apr 02 2009:

  Different but GOOD
  Now I can't believe anything I see or hear

  excellent audio levels, with the speaker moving about all the time it can be easy to let the volume go up and down, good job

  PS I will be covering my head in tin foil every time I go near a magnet from now on :-~

• Comment by Stuart Lowe on Apr 08 2009:

  We've had a complaint that the file size of the HD video is too large to play for some people. Unfortunately, there isn't much that we seem to be able to do about that. If anyone knows how to nicely compress HD video using Adobe CS3 (more than simply encoding with H.264) then please let us know. It has been suggested that we compress it with Final Cut Pro 2. Given that we don't have a Mac or, more importantly, any money to buy it with that isn't an option.

• Comment by RapidEye on Apr 10 2009:

  You should be able to tweak the H.264 settings somewhere - change bit rate, screen size, etc.
  Typically, half the resolution of the native format will look fine and cuts bitrate down too.

• Comment by Stuart Lowe on Apr 11 2009:

  RapidEye, providing the HD version with less than HD resolution sort of makes it a bit pointless, doesn't it?

• Comment by RapidEye on Apr 13 2009:

  Yes and no - it depends on what your target monitor is =-)

  If you are trying to trim the download size, then yeah, shrinking the size is a huge help. Players can return it to the regular size by displaying it as %200.

  It sounds silly, but try it yourself - you'll probably not notice a huge difference in the quality for most of our monitors (20" range). Sure, putting it on a 50" Plasma screen will show a difference, but for most PC monitors, its a negligable (and usually an acceptable) way to significantly trim down the file size/bit rate without having a big impact on quality.

• Comment by Stuart Lowe on Apr 13 2009:

  We already do provide Jodcast video at two lower resolutions so I don't really want to provide non-HD video as HD.

• Comment by suitti on May 07 2009:

  My pod catching software couldn't cope. I had to tell it that it'd already downloaded it. Then i did it manually - which worked just fine. Oddly, i'd used the same downloading tool my pod catching software uses... Pretty odd. Then i had some initial trouble with my computer's sound. I had to reboot to get it working. I never reboot. Well, almost never. It was all more than worth it.

  Very cool lecture.

• Comment by suitti on May 07 2009:

  At my astronomy club, we have two talks a month (one per meeting). A couple years ago, there were three in a row that dealt with how the eye and brain work. Despite being an hour each, they were non-overlapping. (There was no coordination needed to make this happen.) One was mostly the physiology of the eye. The second was about magnitudes, color perception in dim light, and so on. Finally, optical illusions.

  So Maths of the Mind was nearly deja vu.

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